parishes of the women’s youth were close-knit ethnic communities that functioned as much as cultural and social institutions as religious ones—where an emphasis on the San Gennaro Festival in Phyllis Graham’s Italian Catholic corner of Brooklyn might give way to heightened celebrations of St. Patrick’s Day in parishes serving Irish Catholics like Jane Gilroy and Margie Fitton.7
In bustling northern cities like New York, neighborhood parishes further incurred loyalty by offering a range of services (often run by nuns) that people could rely on from cradle to grave. Many Catholics attended weekly or sometimes daily mass, turned to priests for personal advice, raised money for the church, and looked to parishes to care for the elderly, educate children, and provide recreation for the entire family. In New York City by 1940, there were roughly 1.8 million Catholics, and in Brooklyn alone—where Jane Gilroy and Phyllis Graham grew up in Irish and Italian Catholic parishes, respectively—there were 129 parishes, nearly all with their own elementary schools. Nuns played a pivotal role in managing these services. In New York City, they oversaw twenty-five Catholic hospitals, more than one hundred high schools, and elementary schools that educated roughly 214,000 children.8
With the parish system so central to Catholic life in New York City, the church tried to retain its importance in the surrounding suburbs after World War II as these women and countless others relocated to places like Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, and Rockland Counties. From 1940 to 1970, 72 percent (thirty-two of forty-five) of the new parishes in the Archdiocese of New York—which covers parts of the city and several outlying counties including Rockland and Westchester—were in the suburbs. Westchester County, just north of the Bronx, for example, gained 323,129 new Catholics from 1940 through 1970. Enrollment in Catholic primary schools in Westchester and nearby Rockland County more than tripled to over 60,000 students by 1970. An astonishing eighty-four parish schools were opened in these counties as young families like Margie Fitton’s moved there.9
On Long Island, the Catholic population exploded so rapidly that a separate diocese needed to be created in 1957 (previously Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island had been part of the Brooklyn Diocese). Between 1957 and 1963, twelve million Catholics arrived on Long Island, with anywhere from 42 to 46 percent of Nassau County identifying as Catholic at various points in the sixties. Nearly all the Catholics moving to Nassau and the surrounding suburban counties were white transplants from New York City, while the urban parishes they left behind remained stagnant or saw an influx of Hispanics from places like Puerto Rico. The bishop of the new Diocese of Rockville Centre on Long Island, the Reverend Walter Kellenberg, joked that he should be called “Kick-off Kellenberg.” In the diocese’s first three years, the bishop’s schedule was filled with a never-ending stream of fundraisers as he worked to defray the $65 million cost of building twenty-eight elementary schools, twenty-seven additions to existing schools, three more high schools, eleven churches, a hospital, eighteen convents for nuns, and a day camp for children. Despite these strides, it was hard to keep pace with suburban transplants who, often with greater financial comfort and an adherence to the church’s ban on artificial forms of birth control, had large families.10
Lay Catholic women, more so than men, confronted the church’s suburban growing pains—something that was perhaps most obvious to them in parochial schools. Upon moving to the suburbs, parents typically looked into parochial education for their children, as generations before them had done in the city. Many children, however, ended up in the public system because of limited space in suburban Catholic schools. In an era when mothers were held almost solely responsible for their children’s welfare, it was clear to many women, even before Vatican II, that family life might not be as idyllic in the suburbs as they had envisioned. When Phyllis Graham and her family moved to Port Jefferson in Suffolk County in 1965, for example, she immediately tried enrolling her children at the local Infant Jesus elementary school. But the parish had more than quadrupled in size, from 400 families in 1951 to 1,700 by 1964, and there was a long waiting list to be admitted into the school. Graham was determined to give her children a Catholic education like she had in Brooklyn, so she devised a workaround. As a newcomer, she began volunteering at the church to make herself better known. Graham did what she knew best as a homemaker: she gave up what little discretionary time she had to benefit her children. Her tactic worked, and Infant Jesus eventually secured spots for her four children. Overcrowding, though, was only part of the problem in the sixties. Catholic leaders and everyday parishioners like these women also had to contend with the vast changes adopted at Vatican II.11
At a time when people were joining social justice movements worldwide, Vatican II tried to redirect some of that participatory energy toward the Catholic Church. The church leaders from across the globe who met in Rome from 1962 to 1965 at the Second Vatican Council were concerned that Catholic life and traditions, such as devotional ceremonies to various saints, had become too scripted and passive. They worried that even devout parishioners who attended mass regularly were repeating rote phrases in Latin that were not well understood. Church leaders instead hoped to engage parishioners more actively and foster thoughtful reflection about Catholic ideas. To do so, the Vatican II reforms recommended, for instance: fewer days of fasting and eliminating other dietary restrictions; creating parish councils to give the laity a greater stake in governance; and, perhaps most dramatically, having clergy face participants (instead of having their backs to them) while reciting the mass in English (or the official language of the country in which the service was being held) instead of Latin, which few people understood. Better comprehension and greater participation, they hoped, would make Catholicism more relevant in the sixties.12
Implementing these vast changes was a major challenge for the church and lay Catholics, in particular women. Phyllis Graham’s pastor at Infant Jesus on Long Island, the Rev. Matthew LePage, wrote a long letter to parishioners that included a very thorough description of what people were supposed to do and say in the radically new mass. Priests like LePage convened countless meetings to explain the reforms and devoted many hours to setting up parish councils and other social and religious groups Vatican II encouraged. Confusion and dissatisfaction predictably followed. Many Catholics like Phyllis Graham loved the rituals that leaders sought to eradicate; to her, there was great beauty in symmetry. Even if she did not fully understand the Latin mass, she knew all its parts, and it comforted her to know that it was always the same—whether recited in Brooklyn, suburban Long Island, or even on a U.S. military base in West Germany, where she and her husband had lived briefly after getting married. But despite how they felt, the church needed homemakers like Graham. Women prepared meals for their families as restrictions like the ban on meat on Fridays were lifted. They had more flexibility to attend meetings convened by LePage and other priests. In turn, the women educated their husbands and children on how to behave at mass, suggested groups that they could now join, and otherwise ensured that their families complied with the reforms.13
Catholic leaders pressed on through this difficult transition because they hoped that a more active laity would promote causes that they cared about, including the church’s historical commitment to social and economic justice. An encyclical letter by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 (Rerum Novarum, or On the Condition of Labor) set the church on this course by commenting on the large income gap and rampant poverty created by the second industrial revolution. The pope sided with poor unskilled workers in Europe and the United States, who he felt were forced to work in exploitative conditions in order to generate surplus profits for industrial oligarchs. In 1931, amid a global economic depression, Pope Pius XI reiterated much of the same in a fortieth-anniversary encyclical (Quadragesimo Anno) that criticized the excesses of capitalism, which he blamed for the market’s crash, as well as communism and socialism, which, despite promising more equitable work conditions, were shunned because of their effective atheism. In 1961, Pope John XXIII issued a related encyclical, Christianity and Social Progress (Mater et Magistra). In a nod to contemporary decolonization and civil rights movements around the world, as well as to the deeply entrenched Cold War context, the pope committed the church to liberating people from unjust social, racial, political, and economic conditions, including communism and socialism—especially in former colonies that were not yet fully industrial, and therefore thought to be more vulnerable
