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Spring
2000 Joint Consultation:
Commonweal Foundation
Faith & Reason Institute
June 2-4, 2000
David
Leege / University of Notre Dame
The senior author’s former secretary described some rough times early in her married life. She was raised in a German Catholic community in Cincinnati. Her young husband was a Catholic from a Croatian community. She was ostracized for marrying “outside the faith.”
South Bend is no Lower East Side of Manhattan. Yet, on its near West Side sits St. Patrick’s church, and not fifty yards from its Mary chapel sits St. Hedwig’s church. For the better part of a century it would have seemed odd for well off Irish Catholics and Polish factory workers to pray together at the same church. The next thing you know one of the Polish ward heelers would want to be slated for mayor!
Six blocks away sits St. Stephen’s. In the 1960s it celebrated three Hungarian masses and one English mass on a Sunday. Now it celebrates two Spanish, one English, and one Hungarian mass on a weekend. Priests from Notre Dame often celebrate the Spanish masses, since the diocese was not ready for the new migrations. Three congregations share one church, but the parishioners do not interact much socially across the congregational divides. Careful studies of the church as a political context have shown that such interaction is necessary to inculcate values and mobilize in elections (Wald, Owen, and Hill 1988, 1990; Huckfeldt, Plutzer, and Sprague 1993; Gilbert 1993) .
About a mile away sits St. Augustine’s. It celebrates African-American Catholic masses. At a gathering not long ago the senior author asked a St. Hedwig’s lay leader if he had ever gone to church at St. Augustine’s. His response: “Why would I_ I am a Catholic.”
And yet politicians and pundits speak of the Catholic vote. They have treated Democratic identification, economic liberalism, and cultural conservatism as normative for Catholics. More recently they have noted, and Republicans celebrated, the erosion of Democratic loyalties. Despite a veritable cottage industry of scholars who have studied religion and politics among American Catholics, a single theory that explains the dynamics of Catholic political behavior has eluded their grhtml. And well it should.
Depending on how measured, Catholics constitute twenty-five to thirty percent of the U.S. adult population. They compose a mosaic that is difficult to capture. They cover the most diverse ethnic groups with the most different histories of separatism, persecution or acceptance, and assimilation imaginable. Often they do not like each other; for example, the dominance of Italian, nominally Catholic men in the leadership of Eastern Republican party machines has its roots a century ago in disdain for the Irish priests who told devout Italian women that Catholics should be Democrats. Catholic groups occupy different rungs on the economic and social status ladders, and sometimes those have shifted radically over a short span of three generations.
Given the greatly decentralized structure of the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S., even well after Vatican II into the Laghi period of appointing bishops, laity were led by shepherds who shared the central faith but had rather different perspectives on its implications for life. Some church-watchers mourn the passing of diversity and local autonomy as the Jadot generation retires or dies. If U.S. church history is any guide, however, decentralized control will reassert itself as changes occur in the Vatican. Regardless of what happens in ecclesiastical politics, the diverse collectivity of Catholic Americans knows that they will follow their own individual consciences, sometimes informed by Church social teaching, sometimes not.
Finally, approximately thirty percent of those who call themselves “Catholic” on surveys have only a tenuous historical relationship to the Church. Contrary to the arguments of some scholars, as we will see later, their political behavior and attitudes have more in common with seculars than with Catholics.
In passing, this paper reviews and critiques the dominant interpretations of Catholic political behavior, particularly the social class explanation, the ethnoreligious explanation, and the cultural attitudes explanation. It argues that Catholics are not a unitary or even a unique group in American political history, but respond, sometimes similarly, sometimes differently, to the social, economic, political and cultural forces that impact other religious groups. This includes important changes in patterns of religiosity that affect political solidarity. Perhaps the principal contribution of this paper is its examination of the strategies political elites have used to contest for Catholic voters during the post-New Deal period, and analysis of the issue and group themes to which Catholics responded in partisan ways. Because politicians maintained the myth of the Catholic vote, they expended considerable effort targeting politically vulnerable sectors of the Catholic electorate. Still the story of the last two decades is not the “Catholicization” of American politics but the contrasting “evangelical Protestantization” and “secularization” of American politics.
Despite the prominence of Catholics in Maryland in late colonial times, little attention was paid to the politics of Catholics until the heavy Irish and German migrations in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. Layman Charles Carroll was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and Daniel Carroll signed the Constitution, but John Carroll, the first bishop, strove to keep the clergy at some distance from politics (Ellis 1956, 73) . Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in the 1830s, was skeptical that Catholic communitarian and egalitarian values would fit well into a democracy based on freedom and individualism. As usual, however, the precipitating events for a religious group’s organized involvement in politics would be the deep sense of persecution and social injustices faced by its adherents. For Catholics in New England and Middle Atlantic cities in the two decades following 1830, not only were jobs foreclosed, but church institutions were pillaged. First the American Protestant Association and then the Know Nothing party organized mass bigotry and gave political representation to anti-Catholic sentiments (Billington 1938) . In like manner, Irish politicians rose to prominence in the big-city machines; they advised solidarity with the Democratic party, an anti-government party which showed greater respect for minority rights and traditionalistic social organizations. Since nativists (i.e., anti-Catholics) were anchored in the Know-Nothing party and the established Protestant elites dominated the Whigs, this decision made good sense. It ignored the historical fact that both the Federalists and Whigs had included prominent Catholics in public office (Prendergast 1999, 24) .
Still, Catholics were growing as a proportion of the electorate in the cities of the important electoral college states. In 1852, according to Prendergast (1999, 41-45) , the Whig Party made conscious appeals to Catholic voters across the country, charging their Democratic opponent with nativism. Once elected, however, the victorious Democratic President Franklin Pierce selected James Campbell, a Catholic from Pennsylvania, to his Cabinet as postmaster general. The willingness of the fledgling Republican party to incorporate nativist voters into the party and its subtle and more blatant uses of anti-Catholic appeals continued to convince Catholic politicians and journalists that they should remain in the Democratic party.
By the turn of the century, it was another matter. The tide of immigration was disproportionately Catholic. While many became economically established along the Eastern seaboard, earlier generations also had pushed west to the growing cities rimming the Great Lakes and, the German Catholics especially, to the rich farmlands. Catholics were increasingly thrust into conflict with the core leadership of the Democratic party from the South and West. By the 1890s Kleppner (1981) describes the two parties as “political churches” with a partisan cleavage “that arrayed pietist against antipietist religious group.” Each side sought the power of the state to impose its position on prohibition, Sunday-closing, foreign-language instruction, and parochial schools. Both Kleppner and Jensen (1981) show how the religious war within the Democratic party reached explosive proportions in the first run of pietist orator William Jennings Bryan for the Presidency in 1896. Mark Hanna, the Republican leader, and William McKinley, his candidate, saw great opportunity among Catholics, especially in the cities. Their version of corporate capitalism with government as the engine of economic progress gave respect to workers and embraced the bread-and-butter interests of organized labor, reeling after the economic downturn of 1893. Their denunciation of the American Protective Association said that nativism was no longer welcome in the Republican party.
Contrary to the dictum of Bishop Carroll a century before, prominent Archbishop John Ireland, a Republican loyalist with considerable political involvement, publicly denounced the Democratic convention and its ascendant coalition. A substantial electoral realignment followed these events, with many urban Catholics embracing the Republican party of their corporate managers. Simultaneous to this realignment, Progressive reforms had taken away the franchise from the most recent immigrants and crippled the patronage bases of many urban Democratic machines (Petrocik 1981) . Electoral participation, particularly by Catholic immigrants, plummeted. Save for the schism in the Republican party that led to Woodrow Wilson’s two terms (1912-20), a period of Republican normalcy ensued. Even rural and small-town German and Irish Catholics were driven into the Republican camp by the anti-German and pro-British bigotry spawned through “Wilson’s war on the side of the British,” and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the upper Midwest—with some ties to the Democratic party. Realignment, defection, and depressed turnout among Catholics were characteristic of the early twentieth century.
Change once again bubbled up from state and local sources. New York Governor Al Smith, a product of the tenements, urban wage slavery, anti-Prohibition, anti-Catholic persecution, and Tammany Hall, collected the htmlirations of Catholics in the Eastern cities. In his run for Albany he had shown that he could mobilize dormant Catholics (Andersen 1979) . His nomination for President on the Democratic ticket symbolized for Catholics which party really cared about them. No matter the disastrous defeat against Hoover. The largest and second most reliable (to Jews) component of the New Deal coalition was in place for Franklin Delano Roosevelt; parts of this coalition have lasted to this day. In gripping ways, Freedman (1996) captures the meaning of this homecoming for urban and unionized Catholic poor. Through depression and war, this was to be the party of Catholic htmlirations, incorporating group respect, economic justice and security as rewards for hard work, and firm challenges to totalitarian states who threatened the homeland, Catholicism, and American interests. No one could again challenge their loyalty as their sons fought and some died for this kind of a country, and their daughters kept the economic recovery alive.
When the sons returned home, they went to college on the GI Bill, left the ethnic ghetto, populated the new suburbs, and voted their supreme commander into the White House. It was just a short rift; no one knew whether Ike was a Democrat or Republican, or really cared. He wasn’t a silk stocking egghead.
The coronation of this generation of Catholics came when one of its own, John F. Kennedy, was elected to the Presidency in 1960. While many are inclined to point to the reception of Vatican II as the source of great change in the American church, we prefer to attribute much of it to the war, the GI bill and its consequences for personal autonomy and for economic and family life, and the Kennedy election. These actions changed forever the strategies of the two parties (Leege 1988) . Democrats would have to fight to retain the loyalties of autonomous Catholics, and Republicans would find no electoral advantage in anti-Catholic nativist appeals. In fact, one Republican President, Ronald Reagan, could appoint more Catholics to his Cabinet than had any Democratic Administration before or since.
Most analysts point to the fact that Kennedy received the votes of over 80% of Catholics who cast a ballot, despite the fact that barely 60% of the Catholic electorate identified as Democrats during the late Eisenhower years. Also interesting to note are the Catholics who voted Republican in that election. Converse (1966) has shown that regular mass attendance was a weaker predictor of Republican defections to Kennedy than was a sense of “closeness” to other Catholics. Furthermore, Irish Catholic Republicans were more likely to defect than Catholics of other ethnic backgrounds. Thus, even when this remarkable opportunity to affirm the social worth of Catholics presented itself, party loyalty and ethnic differences loomed larger to many Catholics.
The primary purpose of this short history is to suggest that the “vibrant imaginative worlds” of Catholic ethnic subcultures did not yield solidarity in a single party coalition. It left bases in both political parties, with different expectations about the treatment of newer ethnic groups and the poor, with different designs for the role of government, conflicting feelings about each other, and perhaps most important, each wanting to claim the Church for its positions. Fee (1976) has traced enduring political alignments to how each American Catholic ethnic group formed and its degree of assimilation. On a continuum from black Catholics and more recent ethnic concentrations such as Latinos, to Polish, Italian, Irish, to other Eastern European and German, finally to Scandinavian, Canadian and British Catholics, Leege and Welch (1989) found that the degree of assimilation not only powerfully affected party preference, but political ideology (conservatism/liberalism), and a whole host of political attitudes and issue positions. In short, a recipe for culture wars among Catholics was found already in early ethnic assimilation patterns. Regional and local ethnic histories were compounded within these patterns. Few other predictor variables —including current social class—could match the power of ethnic assimilation among Catholics.
The other reason for this short history is to provide a baseline for interpreting the political behavior of Catholics in the post-New Deal period. Even Prendergast (1999) , a former director of research for the Republican National Committee, has pulled back from the optimistic future of Catholics in the Republican party, based on trend data from the 1970s and 1980s. The 1980s did indeed show alignment and realignment advantaging the Republican party, but the 1990s showed a contrary movement to the Democratic party, along with uncharacteristic disloyalty by Catholic Republicans.
For purposes of analysis, we are going to follow white non-Latino Catholics through four decades of recent political history. In no way is this meant to slight African-American Catholics or Latino Catholics. While the former, at approximately two million people, are a small fraction of the sixty million Catholics in the U.S., they would still be larger than any single African-American Protestant denomination. Yet their politics differ little from other African-Americans. From 1968 onward they are overwhelmingly and reliably Democratic. They vote even more regularly than black Protestants. They support Federal efforts to assure equality of opportunity, welfare economics, an active role for government, and they show compassion for the poor and for criminals. They are more conservative than seculars or mainline Protestants on family, sexuality, and related cultural issues. Even the proportionately few Republicans among them either fail to vote at the Federal level or they defect to Democratic candidates. Thus, there is little unique in the story about African-American Catholics.
Latino Catholics are another matter. First, although a variety of reports sets their population over 25% of the U.S. Catholic church, using survey data collected by different houses, we have never been able to find more than 13-15% of national adult samples who fit a Hispanic or Latino category. Further, of these, as low as 55% and as high as 75% report their religious identification as Catholic. Even among “Catholics,” varying but not inconsequential portions actually worship at evangelical or mainline Protestant facilities but still call themselves Catholic. These findings do not add up to 25% of all Catholics in the U.S. The political side is even more difficult: Mexican-Americans are the largest group, are the most Democratic (about two-thirds), but least likely to vote. Puerto Ricans are slightly less Democratic (about sixty percent), and more likely to vote, largely because citizenship is automatic. Current population surveys, however, are showing them eclipsed in size by Dominicans in Eastern cities; we know nothing beyond anecdotal evidence about the politics of Dominicans. Cubans are the smallest of these groups, are overwhelmingly (75%) Republican (even before Elian), and have the highest turnout. Yet they are the most concentrated of these population groups and are, thus, a political force only in Florida. Further, a smaller proportion of Cubans are Catholic than of the other large Latino groups. Because the emerging mosaic among Latino Catholics is more recent, we do not have the time-series data to follow them with precision.
Furthermore, their styles of Catholic religiosity diverge substantially from assimilated Catholics, and most of our measures of religiosity are culturally biased. Therefore, their story—and it is a vitally important one—will have to be told from the Pew-supported project “Hispanic Churches in American Public Life.” From this point forward then, all data are for white, non-Latino Catholics or for designated comparison groups.
First, there has not been a general realignment of Catholics to the Republican party. With the exclusion of the early 1960s, white non-Latino Catholics and Protestants have followed similar paths in the party they advantaged, but Catholics have always been about eight to twelve points more Democratic than have Protestants. The partisan advantage measure used in this figure differs from a straight party identification measure or a partisan vote-choice measure in that it includes turnout. We call it a politician’s calculus of the vote (Leege 1993; Leege, Wald, Krueger, Mueller n.d.) because not only the direction of the vote but the size of the vote determines the outcome. The measure will be described in detail later when we present Table 1. The figure shows only one instance, 1988, where both choice and turnout-level among Catholics slipped enough to advantage the Republicans. Even half a century after the New Deal and two decades after the Administration of the highly popular “apostate Irish Catholic politician” Reagan, white non-Latino Catholics are still delivering for the Democrats, and similar Protestants are delivering for the Republicans. But, like God, the real story is in the details.
Table 1 itself is filled with the details that show changing party loyalties, turnout failures, and defections. These are the important products of political campaigns. When refined even further to certain target groups in the Catholic population, they tell us where the movement is occurring. They also permit us to isolate precisely which kinds of campaign themes have resonated with Catholic targets. In short, by the time we are done, we will know whether “faithful” or “unfaithful” Catholics have moved about politically, whether Catholics are attracted by political positions consistent with church teaching or whether they ignore these inducements.
Table 1 is based on data from the cumulative file of the American National Election Studies. ANES is the “survey of record” for the scholarly community to understand not only each biennial or quadrennial election but also the dynamics of change in the American electorate. They are supported with continuing grants from the National Science Foundation and conducted for the most part through face-to-face interviews of a nationwide probability sample by the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan. ANES samples are generally accurate within two or three percentage points of the true value on most variables, with higher margins of error for subsample analyses. They yield Catholic samples usually in the 300-400 person range.
The measure of party loyalty in Table 1 and succeeding analyses compounds three pieces of information – party identification, turnout, and the party of Presidential candidate choice. The product of the percentage identifying with a party and party loyalty generates what we have called a measure of partisan yield. This is a politician’s calculus of the vote. It matters not a great deal to the campaigner what proportion of the population or of a given group identifies as a Democrat or Republican. The campaigner needs to know through time what proportion identifies with the party, goes to the polls, and actually votes for that party’s candidate. Furthermore, with partisan yield measures for both Democrats and Republicans, we can calculate a measure of partisan advantage, by subtracting one from the other. This measure allows us to see at what point in time the relative measures of partisan yield shift to the advantage of one or another party. It is not uncommon for a group—for example, white Southern Democrats—to shift their basic party identification through time to the Republican side. Assuming high party loyalty to the new party, the partisan advantage measure will now favor the Republicans. Also not uncommon is that a group—for example, white non-Latino Catholics—may maintain Democratic identification but either fail to vote or to vote, but to defect to the Republican candidate. The measure of partisan advantage may show a similar outcome in each case, but the underlying reasons are different.
Thus, Table 1 is the map of Catholic voting behavior from 1952 to 1996 and includes the following measures:
Democratic Party Identification—the proportion of the group reporting strong Democrat, not so strong Democrat, and Independent leaning Democrat.
Proportion Loyal to Democratic Party—the proportion of Democrats who turnout and select the Democratic candidate for President.
Proportion not voting—the proportion of Democrats who fail to vote for President.
Proportion defecting to opposition candidates(s)—the proportion of Democrats who turnout and select the Republican or other candidate.
Democratic Partisan Yield—the proportion of the electorate that is both Democratic and loyal to the party, i.e., Democrats who turned out and voted Democratic.
(The same sets of measures for Republicans)
Democratic Partisan Advantage—the difference between the Democratic partisan yield and the Republican partisan yield. (A positive number favors Democrats, negative Republicans.)
“True” Independent—the proportion of the group who claim to be Independents and lean to neither party.
Apolitical—the proportion of the group who claim not to be Democrats, Republicans, or Independents.
The utility of this set of measures is that it allows us to take any designated group in the electorate such as Catholics and (1) see its basic patterns of partisanship and loyalty, (2) measure precisely when it stays stable and when it shifts, and (3) diagnose whether the shift is the result of low turnout, defection, or a change in the group’s party loyalties. Such information will yield clues as to when a campaign appeal is operating on the group. Furthermore, by breaking all Catholics into political generations for our later analyses —(1) pre-New Deal, i.e., entering the electorate before 1932, (2) New Deal—entering the electorate between 1932 and 1964, (3) older post-New Deal (the original Baby Boom generation)—entering the electorate between 1968 and 1976, and (4) the John Paul II generation of young Catholics—entering the electorate in 1980 or thereafter—we are able to see whether changing patterns of basic partisanship in the group are the result of the entry and exit of generations (the stork and the grim reaper), or are the result of actual partisan realignment by individuals (see Miller and Shanks 1996; Abramson and Aldrich 1982 for arguments about the utility of the first three generational cut points). In 1952 and moreso 1956, Catholics found Eisenhower quite attractive, resulting in depressed Democratic partisan advantages when contrasted with the next decade. It was not until the disastrous McGovern race is 1972 and the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years that the Democratic partisan yield figures dropped even below the level of the Eisenhower re-election. Already by 1968, however, the warning signs were clear: Catholics would not be permanently anchored in the Democratic party after the Kennedy election. This pattern seems to repeat what historians told us had happened about a decade after Al Smith had mobilized so many Catholics as Democrats in 1928.
In 1960 with two Cold Warriors contesting the White House at the peak of the Cold War consensus, Catholic voters selected the Catholic candidate by an enormous margin. The Democratic party identification figure is impressive but what is astounding are the huge turnout (94%) and low defection figures (6%) among Catholic Democrats and the high turnout (87%) and high defection (28%) rates for Catholic Republicans. There was gradual decay during the Johnson and Humphrey elections on all measures—modestly dropping Democratic party identification, lower turnout, increasing defection, and a modest rise in Republican party identification. By 1968 already the turnout and defection figures signaled trouble for the Democrats. But defections by Catholics in both parties were nearly equal (20% and 18%), and favored third-party candidate George Wallace. With Wallace out of the picture in 1972, the bottom dropped out among Catholic Democrats. Faced with the opportunity to embrace the McGovern anti-war, socially liberal party, 42% of all Catholic Democrats crossed over to vote for Nixon and 19% failed to vote. The gap between Democratic party identification (62%) and vote yield (24%) was the greatest of any election in the time series. Our later analyses will show whether these voters were casting their ballots on Cold War issues, race, gender, class values, or religiously-based cultural differences. What is clear is that they had not yet realigned because of the Nixon cultural strategy. Democratic and Republican identifications remained basically stable through 1976, and Carter cut the backdoor losses in half.
In the first Reagan race of 1980, realignment of Catholic voters was finally evident. Democratic identification dropped by 7% and Republican identification grew by 5%. But now it continued to be accompanied by low turnout among Catholic Democrats, 24% reporting not voting, and 31% defecting to Reagan. Thus an initial Democratic advantage of 23 points in party identification was reduced to 4 points in vote yield. The realignment—and alignment—of Catholics continued throughout the Reagan-Bush era. By 1988, Democratic identification dropped to a new low of 45% and Republican identification grew another 14 points since 1980 to reach 45%, virtually even in a group that had begun the era heavily Democratic. Alignment of younger generations with the Republican party is indicated by the decline in the percent Independent.
This latter point suggests that the real story among Catholics is in the generations. We have also noted increasingly greater differences between the sexes. Younger Catholics differ from older Catholics, and younger women differ even more from younger men. It is possible to map the changing partisanship of pre-New Deal, New Deal, Baby Boomer, and John Paul II generations of Catholics; the first entered the electorate before 1932; the second between 1932 and1964; the third entered between 1968 and 1976; and the last came of political age in 1980 or thereafter. We do not map a generation cohort by gender until it has a minimum of twenty people in the subsample.
Pre-New
Deal Catholic men, unlike other age/gender groups grew increasingly more
Democratic and less Republican with age, so that by the Carter-Ford election
80% of them were Democratic and only 8% were Republican. Just the opposite, pre-New Deal Catholic
women declined from 76% Democratic at the time of Kennedy to 48% at the
time of Carter; their Republican identification grew from 17% to 44%. After 1976, mortality renders this
generation an inconsequential force in the electorate. We cannot say whether these changing
figures represent realignment in divergent
directions for this older Catholic cohort. It may be simply a matter of Democratic men and Republican women surviving longer.
The New Deal generation of Catholics is the only one we can follow throughout the period. Both sexes enter the Kennedy election with virtually identical levels of Democratic partisanship (74% to 73%) while the women have slightly higher levels of Republican partisanship (19% to 13%). From there, the men plummet quickly to 54% Democratic and rise as rapidly to 23% Republican by 1968 (Nixon-Humphrey-Wallace). The remainder of the time-series, the men fluctuate within a range of 5-6 points, never dropping below 50% Democratic (1988 and 1996). In these same two elections their Republican identification rises to 41%, but usually it is in the low 30s. New Deal-generation Catholic women, on the other hand, hardly decline in Democratic partisanship until 1972 (8 points in that year) and then stay steady in a range around the lower 60s until 1996, when the bottom drops out for the Democrats at 47%. Republican party identification ascends slowly until it reaches the low 30s in the Reagan years and climbs steeply to 42% after four years of the Clintons. Obviously Catholic men and women who came of age during the Depression and Second World War responded differently to the forces operating on the electorate. The men became disillusioned with the Democrats already by the time of Nixon, but still over half of them remained with the party. The women simply never lost their Democratic partisanship until the end of the period. Nevertheless as we shall see in a moment, when turnout and defection are included in the equation, the men still gave the Republicans a net partisan advantage in 1972 (7 points), while the women gave the Republicans a slight advantage in 1980 (1 point) and 1996 (3 points).
The next generation of Catholics were the Baby Boomers. Although they entered the electorate in 1968, not enough men were available for analysis until 1972. The men entered the Nixon-McGovern election with virtually the same Democratic partisanship as their fathers’ generation, and with slightly depressed Republican identification. However, the Reagan phenomenon altered their partisanship from there on. In one quadrennium (1976-1980) Democratic partisanship dropped twenty points and Republican identification gained ten. Democratic identification recovered slightly to the low 40s, but Republican identification grew to the mid and high 40s, with the exception of 1992. Baby Boom Catholic males, then, realigned during the Reagan years; one of the reasons the Clintons are two-termers in the White House is that Catholic Republican Boomer males failed to support their party in the 90s (note the Republican defection rates of 52% and 31%). We should note that many Boomer men were middle managers who experienced the economic effects of corporate downsizing late in the 1980s. Boomer females were even more Democratic and less Republican than their mothers’ generation in 1976. From there they declined swiftly in their Democratic partisanship, while their mothers’ decline was slow. By the Bush-Dukakis election of 1988, the Boomer women shifted wildly (only 29% Democratic and an amazing 57% Republican). But just as suddenly they shifted back to previous patterns; by 1996 they joined the John Paul II generation of young Catholic women as the most Democratic group, 63%, to 29% Republican. What explains the volatility of this generation of women in 1988 is hard to say; Gov. Dukakis, dubbed the “Ice Man” had done poorly with the hypothetical question about rape in the debate, and never registered well with younger women (Germond and Witcover 1989) . We can see a vast gulf widening between Boomer Catholic males and females throughout the 1990s, with the gap in party identification being fully twenty points.
The same gender difference among Catholics is repeated in the youngest generation. By 1984 when there are enough men in the sample to permit reliable generalizations, this cohort enters the electorate strongly with Reagan’s party (55% Republican to 35% Democratic), and they continue within six points of that level throughout their political life. Only in 1996 is there a spurt of Democratic strength (45%). The youngest Catholic women are just the opposite. There partisanship starts with volatility, shifting from 46% Democratic in 1984 to 56% Republican in the disastrous Dukakis year. Then, like the next closest generation of Catholic women, they shift abruptly to the Democratic side, where nearly two-thirds held Democratic partisanship in Clinton’s reelection. Furthermore, in data not shown, these young Catholic women reversed their earlier apathy of the 80s and were more likely to vote in the 1990s. The upshot is that the sharpest cleavage in the Catholic electorate is now between the young women who have grown enormously as part of the Democratic coalition and the young men who have remained fairly reliably in the Republican camp. In data not shown here, the steady decline in the number of Catholic women as homemakers, the remarkable increase in those completing higher education, and the equally large growth of young women in business and professional occupations has created a sea change in political behavior. Each succeeding generation of men has grown more Republican, but each succeeding generation of women has grown more Democratic after the Reagan flirtation. After standing stolidly Democratic while the men moved the other direction, only the oldest Catholic women have moved toward the Republican party in the 1990s.
Partisanship is only part of the story. It is also possible to map the differences in partisan advantage. Recall that this is the measure that accounts for turnout failures and defections, in addition to party identification. It captures the net product of each political campaign. A visual review of the upper figure shows that Catholic men from the New Deal generation moved out of the Democratic camp only in 1972. Otherwise, both they and the oldest generation of Catholic men always remained voting Democrats. The Republican strength came from the two younger generations; only in 1972, 1992, and 1996 did the Boomer males visit the Democratic camp. The youngest Catholic men have always advantaged the Republican party. The gaps between generations of males are wide. The gaps among the generations of females are quite constrained, growing slightly wider in the1970s, but becoming even larger than the male gaps in 1988. Although there is a trend toward the Republicans, the oldest generation of Catholic women never leave the Democratic camp, and the New Deal generation tiptoes into it only in 1980 and 1996. The Boomers start the time series somewhat similar to their elders, then plunge deeply into Republican territory in 1988, and return solidly to Democratic advantage in the 90s. Finally, the youngest generation of Catholic women is almost a carbon copy of the Boomers, except that they are slightly more Democratic in their vote yield in the last three elections. This period of American electoral history ends with the generations and sexes as almost mirror opposites: younger women solidly Democratic and older women trending Republican, while the youngest men are solidly Republican and their elders, who had shifted slightly Democratic, again are moving in a Republican direction.
With these
baselines established, we can now turn to the political forces that moved
Catholics from one camp to another.
That is largely a story of Republican campaign strategies designed
to disable the majority Democratic party’s winning coalition. Since Catholics were a major part of
that coalition well into the 60s, they became the target of a wide variety
of Republican campaign themes.
The
customary story for the increased appearance of Catholics in the Republican
party emphasizes cultural politics, particularly concerns over appropriate
human sexuality and abortion. A
subtheme is that Catholics, as cultural conservatives in
a male-dominated hierarchical church, would be slow to accept change
in gender roles, equality of opportunity for women, and the resultant
restructuring of the family. The
story often stresses realignment,
that individual Catholics actually moved
permanently from one party to another.
The data we have already presented minimize the last point. The data we are about to present will
revise our understanding of the former, so that we will see that concerns
about race dominated negative feelings toward the government and the
contemporary party of government, the Democrats.
First, there was not a great deal of realignment among white, non-Latino Catholics, although it was more pronounced among men. There was substantial defection among the New Deal generation, especially the men, but most of the defectors remained Democrats. Most of the lasting realignment actually occurred among the Baby Boom men during the Reagan years. In this respect, the “Reagan Democrats “ were misnamed all along; these were “Nixon Democrats.” By the time Reagan arrived, a new generation had crowded into the electorate and they had become Republican. The most pronounced instance of Republicanism is not the result of realignment but alignment of the youngest Catholic men as they enter the electorate in the mid 80s and 90s. The older women never moved very far in the Republican direction although they too had momentary problems with the McGovern party. The younger women initially thought they belonged with the Republicans in the 1980s but quickly made a wholesale shift to the Democrats in the 1990s. There is too much volatility in their electoral history to call this a lasting realignment to the Democratic party.
Was the movement based primarily on cultural conservatism_ Was it informed by Church social teaching, particularly on the human life agenda and the preferential option for the poor_
To get at
the reasons for movement we need to examine the special appeals Republicans
and Democrats made to Catholics, and measure what were the best predictors
of partisan movement. To do this,
we tap into data assembled by Leege, Wald, Krueger, and Mueller for their
forthcoming book on The Politics of
Cultural Differences (n.d.).
They have conducted a content analysis of Presidential campaign
themes in speeches and advertisements from 1960 to 1996. Then, they have used the ANES cumulative
file to factor analyze issue positions and feelings toward groups held by
the Catholic electorate in each of these campaigns. Factor analysis allows the scholar to
reduce a welter of issue and group feelings into underlying cognitive
structures. It sees what kinds of feelings
cohere with each other in the minds of American voters. Finally, Leege, et al., have used a
procedure called multinomial logit analysis to explain which factors best
explain partisan defections and turnout failures.
The factors that bundled together feelings and accounted for most of the defections among Catholics during the post-New Deal period are described in Appendix 1; only statistically significant factors are detailed. The results are shown in Appendix 2 for the entire Catholic sample. We could not analyze every generational and gender group with these factors because the subsample sizes would have been too small to meet the statistical requirements of this procedure.
The evidence is very compelling that what moved Catholics most from their political moorings from 1968 to 1992 were negative feelings on race and the role of government as an engine for change and equality. In 1960, few Catholic Democrats defected to Nixon; the primary reason for defection, however, was the feeling that the government should not be doing so much for social welfare. In 1964, defections were also limited but the Goldwater party gave coherence to feelings that the government should be less active in assuring equality of opportunity, that government could not be trusted, that conservatives and Republicans were more attractive than Democrats, and that the U.S. was declining as a military power in a world imperiled by the communist threat. By 1968, negative feelings about African-Americans were added to this bundle, and this comprehensive factor became far and away the primary reason why Catholic Democrats would come to embrace Republican presidential candidates for the next two decades.
Race-based party ideology generally includes lukewarm feelings toward African-Americans (although people generally deny that they are racists), later poor people and welfare recipients are added to the list, negative feelings toward several welfare state programs that are perceived to benefit blacks, and opposition toward various regulatory initiatives intended to equalize opportunities for blacks and whites. These become attached in the voters’ minds with positive feelings toward Republicans and even moreso with negative feelings toward the Democratic party. In election year after election year from 1968 to 1992, this cluster of feelings best explains why Catholic Democrats defected to the Republicans. In the 1980s another factor first surfaces as a possible explanation for partisan defection—moral restorationism. This factor includes opposition to the availability of abortion, hesitance about changing roles for women, and negative feelings toward assurances of civil rights for homosexuals. Contrary to arguments by Wagner (1998) , however, moral restorationism never becomes a statistically significant factor accounting for defections by Catholic Democrats until 1996. In 1992 it had begun to take on a party base, so that Catholic Democrats who defected for reasons of cultural threat felt positive about Republicans, conservatives, and the police, and negative about Democrats, liberals, and labor. Curiously, in 1996 this factor grew even more to pick up negative feelings toward government programs that help anyone who is less-well-off. Lukewarm feelings toward racial minorities, however, became a separate factor in that most recent election.
Untangling what exactly was in Catholics’ minds in these post-New Deal elections is a tricky business. Campaign appeals may articulate a quite principled theme. Voters may react according to these principles. At the same time, some voters may be responding to less principled subthemes articulated by politicians to take advantage of fear and racial or gender stereotypes. For example, Sen Goldwater’s appeal to “states’ rights” could mean democratic responsiveness from a unit of government closer to the people; yet, for some whites in the 1960s it could mean that no Federal court order would force my child to go to a predominantly black school. Currently “local control of schools” carries both principled and opportunistic content. For the many who felt that the growth of big government threatened America’s unique blend of democracy and republicanism, the reduction of taxes was the way to reduce government programs, but to others it was the way to keep my hard-earned money from undeserving black hands (Edsall and Edsall 1991) . The reduction of regulations might mean both less paperwork that stifles economic growth and greater freedom from the long reach of government, but it might also entail less civil rights enforcement and a diminished role for liberal intellectuals, many of whom were perceived to be Eastern establishment Jews. Affirmative action might be a way to open opportunity to minorities seeking to support themselves through work, but to some it sounded too much like reparations for the racial sins of the distant past. Harsh penalties on criminals might be a wise idea to reduce crime, yet to some this was a way of removing black criminals, who typically received harsher penalties (Hurwitz and Peffley 1997) , from the streets longer. “Abolishing welfare as we know it” was a principled way of reducing inter-generational dependence on government, but in the perceptions of most it was removing a financial incentive for black mothers to have babies out of wedlock (Katz 1989; Gilens 1999) . In short, negative stereotyping and racially-charged appeals did not need to be as blatant as the Willie Horton advertisement in 1988. A system of racial code words sufficed (Leege et al. n.d.) .
Catholics have generally been more compassionate toward the poor and the “other,” and to have been more accepting (than other religious groups) of government action to assure equal opportunity for minorities (Gallup and Castelli 1987; Greeley 1989; Wagner 1998) . Yet, the jeering and violent mobs of whites in Gage Park (Chicago) and Cicero during Martin Luther King’s Northern marches suggest some Catholics were not immune to racial antagonisms. The fascinating study Canarsie (Rieder 1985) indicates a long history of Catholic racial ambivalence going back to the draft riots in New York City following the Emancipation Proclamation. Freedman’s gripping inter-generational narrative of three Catholic families (1996) indicates that, while the first and second generations loved what the New Deal did to create economic opportunities and social acceptance for ethnic white Catholics, the second and third generations resented Great Society programs and Federal intervention to assure equal opportunities for African-Americans. The second generation defected or stayed at home, but the third generation entered the local leadership of the Republican party. In particular Kevin Phillips’ “Southern strategy” for Republican victory was also directed to urban and inner-rim suburban Catholic men who feared big government and resented tax transfers and racial/gender favoritism. Phillips (1970) thought the big issues—civil rights backlash, taxation, ERA and the women’s movement—could dissemble Catholic men from the Democratic party.
The data presented above suggest that there is some reason to believe that Phillips was right. While Catholics as a group may be more compassionate toward the poor and blacks, those white Catholic Democrats who were mobilized to defect to the Republican party showed less warmth toward blacks and black political activity, disliked government programs that were intended to increase opportunity for blacks, and reacted negatively to the directions their party had taken and positively to the Republicans. In elections from 1972 to 1984, this constellation of racial factors also modestly depressed turnout, but heavily depressed it in 1972. Generally, however, Catholic Democrats upset over race actually voted for the Republican candidate. While race receded in salience by 1996—moral restorationism replaced it—no other cultural factor had the same staying power throughout the post-New Deal.
It is
difficult to discern whether white Catholic Democrats were hearing
principled appeals or were reacting from visceral dislikes or a sense of
relative deprivation. Certainly
those ethnic Catholics who were at the lower to middle rungs of the
employment ladder were in competition with African-Americans for some of
the same jobs, homes, and neighborhoods.
Whatever the reason, Republican campaigners were more successful
among Catholics with the racial symbols and codewords than they were with
the patriotic and moral restorationist packages.
Some may argue that this evidence about the attitudinal sources for Catholic partisan mobility does not give proper due to the role of the Church in forming Catholics’ political outlooks. The Catholic Church had offered its people a century of social encyclicals that culminated in the Pueblo and Medallin conferences, where the preferential option for the poor was articulated. In the US in the 1970s and 1980s, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops promulgated a series of pastoral letters on human life, race relations, economic justice, and war and peace. There is little question that Catholics see the world through more communitarian lenses than do Protestants.
Therefore, we have selected a variety of political issues from ANES 1988, 1992, and 1996. These are issues where one might expect the Church’s teaching on social justice, human dignity and minority relations, and the sanctity of human life to condition the laity’s attitudes. Then we have selected a variety of predictor variables: generational cohort, sex, education, income, region (South, non-South), political party affiliation, and four types of religious variables: (1) frequency of mass attendance, (2) importance of religion in one’s daily life, (3) feeling close to other Catholics, and (4) the interaction of church attendance and the importance of religion. The third is an attempt to tap the Catholic communal dimension, which scholars have claimed is so important in shaping Catholic social and political outlooks (Lenski 1963; Converse 1966; Greeley 1976, 1989) . The fourth is an attempt to isolate Catholics who not only receive regular cues about faith and life in church, but consider it important to apply those values in daily life (Leege and Kellstedt 1993) . Republican party affiliation is included because the current maxim states that the higher the level of religiosity—regardless of denomination—the more likely that a voter will be Republican and espouse religiously-formed political values (Green 1996) . If Catholic religiosity is shaping political values, we should expect that one or more of these “religious” measures should show statistically significant relationships with each attitudinal variable.
The dependent variables are scored so
that a positive coefficient would indicate a position consistent with one
that might be inferred from Church social teaching and pastoral
letters. Ordinary least squares
techniques are used for the regression equations. The more the score diverges from zero, the more the
demographic, political, or religious factor accounts for the attitude. Only results significant at least at the
.05 level are noted on Table 2.
From the perspectives of a Church committed to social teaching, some positives are evident in Table 2. The principal religiosity variables appear with some regularity on the human life issues. In 1988 the strongest combination—regular attendance, with its concomitant exposure to religious cues, and recognition that religious values provide a powerful guide for daily life—is highly related to opposition to abortion. A similar relationship appears with the desire to decrease military spending in 1988. Finally, in 1996 this combination is strongly related to opposition to the death penalty. However, it is never a powerful predictor of our measures of social justice or of warmth toward people not like oneself or of lower status than oneself. In 1996, attendance alone of the religiosity variables predicts opposition to abortion. In 1988, religious guidance is strongly related to an increase in military spending, the opposite of what the Bishops’ pastoral letter would have encouraged. In seven of nine opportunities, warm feelings toward other Catholics are related to warm feelings toward Blacks, Chicanos, poor people, welfare recipients, and women. At least these might suggest a basis for empathy toward the needs of others. Nevertheless, this measure of Catholic communalism is related in significant ways to human life or social justices measures only on the abortion issue in 1988—missing eight other opportunities.
The most frequent predictor variable in the table is Republican party identification, appearing nineteen times out of thirty-three opportunities. In the politically supercharged environment of the American culture wars, some have claimed that to be a Republican is the only way to be consistent with Christian teachings. For Catholic Republicans, however, it does not appear to work that way. In only one instance—abortion in 1992—is Republican identification consistent with our scoring of Church teachings on human life and social justice issues. White Republican Catholics are less empathic to people of color or lower status, are less willing to respect human life except for that of the unborn, and less willing to use government as an engine for increasing opportunity for those of color or lower estate.
Another frequent predictor is level of education. While a higher level of education often predicts greater support for equality of opportunity, empathy for the poor and people of color, decreasing military expenditures, and opposition to the death penalty, it is also implicated in pro-choice sentiment. Being female often predicts this same set of attitudes—supportive on issues of social justice and peace, but pro-choice on abortion. Older Catholics are consistently warmer toward people of color and the poor, but are decidedly cool toward women as a category, perhaps because of their traditionalism on gender roles and opposition to the pro-choice objectives of the women’s movement.
The message
of Table 2, in summary, is that deepened religious involvement and
commitment among Catholics seems to condition attitudes on some human life
issues, but it has little impact at all on social justice issues and even
human empathy. The second lesson is
that if political parties are indeed “political churches,” the church that
has increasingly attracted younger Catholics, particularly men, is
decidedly stronger in its influence over their social justice and peace
attitudes than is the Catholic Church.
The same could be said of the younger Catholic women on
abortion. A third lesson is that
older Catholics, either by values or by life experience, are more warmly
inclined toward the poor and the outsider.
Perhaps the most pervasive
image from the table is how seldom a central religious variable has
political consequences for Catholics.
The tone of this paper has been “half-empty” rather than “half-full.” We think there has been a tendency among Catholic interpreters of religion and civic engagement to compare the present with a Garden of Eden of the past, found in the ethnic parish, Al Smith dinners, etc., that had its dying ghtml in Cardinal Spellman, Boss Daley’s Chicago, and so forth. In this vision, there was always a sense that being a Catholic was different; not only was there unity and solidarity, but it courageously went against the grain of the country. Perhaps our judgments of the present are unduly harsh because we do not have a realistic picture of what was religiously Catholic in the past.
The ethnic Catholic Church, we argue, was the ethnic Catholic Church. The church of ethnic enclave was highly successful in activating Catholics who had been for the most part inactive in the homeland. Finke and Stark (1992) document the competitive growth of the Catholic Church in the U.S. and contrast it with the levels of public religious activity back in the Catholic country or state of origin. The ethnic parish transmitted a sense of commonality. The question is whether it was a Catholic commonality, or an Irish Catholic commonality, a Polish Catholic commonality, a German Catholic commonality, or Italian, or Slovak. The mysteries of the Latin rites may have given a sense of unity to a church headquartered in distant Rome, but the interactions, the friendships, the social support, the economic and political protective associations were with one’s own kind. Perhaps the civic and political lessons Catholics in America learned were of a particularistic, not universalistic nature. Perhaps the Church—read the hierarchy, or more recently, the Magisterium—never had the universal teaching authority in the minds of parishioners that it attributed to itself. Rite, ritual, catechesis, and piety—yes. But how to live one’s political life, other than to be a responsible citizen—no.
My Father’s house had too many rooms for that. A universal church in faith, private life, and public life may have been outside the scope of many Catholics growing up in America.
Perhaps
church watchers did not really notice the cracks in the structure until a
decade or so after Vatican II, when a more unified national structure and
national voice was to emerge. It
did take shape at the level of the bishops and clergy, although vigorous
conflicts remain, but it was never very evident at the level of the
laity. Were the laity unfaithful or
was normatively binding social teaching outside the legitimate scope of the
American clergy_
We certainly have evidence that succeeding generations of Catholics are less likely to expose themselves to religious cues about faith and life. Leege (1993) mapped the church attendance patterns of all those who called themselves Catholics on ANES surveys from 1960 to 1992. For this paper we have expanded this mapping to include the last presidential election. The entries for white non-Latino Catholics that appear in Appendix III are divided by eight-year age cohorts. It follows each cohort from the time of adulthood or their age in 1960 until 1996. Each cell in the table subtracts the proportion of that age group who reported regular attendance at mass from the proportion of Catholics in that age cohort who never attend mass. The entries in the bottom rows across the table are the average index score for a given election year, and the proportion of the total white Catholic sample that was in the regular/never categories.
One can see that (1) attendance in all age cohorts of the population in the 1990s is less than it was in the 1960s; (2) younger people are less likely to be regular attenders and more likely never to attend (except for weddings, funerals, or other family events); (3) the index dropped precipitously in the early 1970s—the anti-institutional period—for virtually all age groups, but made a modest recovery in the 1980s for New Deal-generation Catholics; and (4) the last generation of Catholics to connect or reconnect with the Church was in its 30s at the time of the Kennedy election; for example the 33-40 year olds in 1960 came in with an index of 79 that year; it dropped to 33 in 1976, but recovered to 48 by 1992.
Younger Catholics in 1960 or age groups that entered the electorate after that time have successively lower indexes of attendance; from 1968 onward, Catholics entering the electorate not only have lower attendance indexes but they have for the most part never moved in the positive direction. There simply is far less exposure to the Church’s teaching at mass and far less group reinforcement in church settings among the generations that moved so heavily in conservative directions on social issues (males) or became pro-choice on abortion (females especially). Moving into the new millenium, these Catholics now constitute the majority of the electorate. Ironic indeed that these last two decades of the Twentieth Century were trumpeted as “the Catholic moment” (Neuhaus 1987) .
It was once believed that infrequent or never-attending Catholics thought politically like other Catholics (Greeley 1976; Leege and Welch 1989). No more. Leege (1993) contrasted regular-attending and never-attending subsamples across religious traditions—seculars, Jews, mainline Protestants, Catholics, evangelical Protestants, Hispanic Christians, and Black Christians. He assessed evidence across nineteen political measures such as party identification, political ideology, and candidate preference, positions on political issues such as abortion, the economy, affirmative action, underlying attitudes such as moral traditionalism, egalitarianism, authoritarianism, religiosity, and demographic characteristics. The conclusion is that never-attending Catholics, about thirty percent of the sample, are highly distinct from regular attenders and that they are most like seculars in their political thinking. Further of the never-attenders within each religious tradition, the Catholics were least like their regular attenders. As church attendance declines among Catholics, not only is exposure to cues lost, but they are less distinct from secular citizens. Curiously, the younger men who never attend are more conservative on social justice issues, whereas the younger women who more regularly attend are more like the never-attenders in their rejection of Church teaching on abortion, but are also more like the older regular-attending women in their support of social justice and peace positions (Leege 1996). The mosaic is complicated.
Further, active church-going Catholics are declining as a proportion of the total electorate. Table 3, updated from Leege (1993), gives several assessments of the size and composition of the “religious vote.” The first row for each of the major religious traditions is the proportion of the U.S. adult population in a church body within that tradition. The second row is the proportion of the U.S. adult population within the tradition who claim regular (weekly) attendance. The third row is the one of greatest interest here: the proportion of actual voters (self-report) in the U.S. who are regular (weekly) attenders within this religious tradition shifted in the 1990s: among the churched population, evangelical Protestants, not Catholics, have been having their “moment.” But there are a lot of votes among the seculars of late.
The final item for discussion is the attitudes of Catholics toward political information and direction by the clergy. Analyzing data from the Notre Dame Study of Catholic Parish Life (2667 parish-connected Catholics in a multistage mixed probability design), Leege (1988) found that most parishioners (83% to 56% depending on the issue) expected some level of the hierarchy to speak out on aid to poor countries, eliminating poverty in the U.S., world disarmament, racial integration, sex and violence on TV, and equal opportunities for women on the job. Still between 10 and 38% felt this was solely a matter of the individual Catholic’s conscience. According to data from the 1989 ANES Pilot Study (Welch et al. 1993) , Catholics are accustomed to hearing their priest or homilist speak out on issues: 83% on abortion, 70% on homelessness, 67% on proper sexual behavior, on down to 39% on a just economy, 32% on public school prayer, 28% on nuclear disarmament. Only 9% reported hearing the priest speak out about political candidates. Yet slightly over half (51%) of Catholics felt it was not legitimate for the clergy to speak out on such issues. This legitimacy figure is slightly lower than evangelicals but higher than mainline Protestants. Further when a variety of analyses were attempted to determine the actual impact of the messages, among Catholics only abortion cues from clergy seemed to affect political activities. Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (1995) reported that the only issue area stimulating increased political activity by Catholics was abortion. For Black evangelicals, however, political activity was stimulated by a wide range of social welfare and social justice issues.
Apparently the differential relationship between teaching and political activity has been noticed by leadership elites. Jelen and Wilcox (Jelen and Wilcox 1995, 47) report that about a quarter of the sample of leadership elites in the academy, business, government, and the mass media think some religious groups have too much influence. 43% of the media sample felt Catholics had too much influence and 40% of the academic sample shared this view; others were well below this level. But the concern was nothing like that expressed over evangelicals; 90% of the academic sample, 52% of the media sample, and even 52% of the business sample and 50% of the government sample felt evangelicals/the Religious Right had too much influence. Catholics themselves are split about the degree to which the Church should be involved in politics: 30% want a high wall of separation between church and state with no help to churches, 22% want the high wall but help for all churches, while 43% want protection and help for all churches (Jelen and Wilcox, 66).
The conflict between John Carroll and John Ireland remains to this day at all levels of the Church. As the agenda has shifted in the contemporary American political system to emphasize private rather than public problem-solving, it could very well be that Catholics best manifest their concern for human life, for justice and peace, for the poor through vigorous involvement in eleemosynary institutions. After all, that was the norm in the ethnic parish with its many protective and betterment societies. Our political surveys do not capture that kind of activity. Perhaps the New Deal and Great Society days where Catholics demanded effort out of the government—and got it—were an historical aberration. At least those government programs offered benefits widely throughout the society. Although the ethnic parish model took care of one’s own kind, as the late 20th Century unfolded, the great Catholic social service organizations -- e.g., Catholic Charities, Catholic Relief Services, soup kitchens, and inner city schools – reached out to all kinds of people, with need the only test. Perhaps the research agenda of the future will be to map the ways Catholic charitable acts in this more conservative and self-centered generation lead to systemic betterment of society. If indeed they do, the movement away from government as an engine to assure equality of opportunity will not have been as self-centered as it might appear.
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