Kenneth Woodwdard remembers the American Church of the '50s

First Things: Memories of a Catholic Boyhood
Growing up in the parallel culture of the Church in the 1950s

To be a Catholic child in the fifties was to imagine yourself at the center of concentric circles of belonging. They included not only the other Catholics that we knew, not only, even, all the Catholics we saw at other parish churches when traveling, but all Catholics who ever were or would be on the face of the earth—plus quite a few saints we knew by name who were now, we believed, with God in heaven but still close enough to talk to because they were always watching over us like grandparents looking down from high front porches.


In other words, the religious identity we acquired in childhood was a primal identity that absorbed and conditioned all the others. This communal formation began, almost imperceptibly, with the transformation of the seasons.

Was a sense of religious-cultural identity among Catholics in an "immigrant" Church an obstacle to effective evangelization of others?