The original comment was actually made by Seamus, not you. I’d like to hear what he has to say about it since he made it. He especially seems to relate moving physically to abandoning the Church - I’ve yet to see the connection.
Like I said, if you were living in a June Cleaver world maybe you never moved.
If you were living in the real world of my parents, grandparents and great grandparents then travel and moving were both commonplace and well-accepted. To the point where on my father’s side, and to a lesser extent my mother’s, it was the people who stayed put in the one village or town their whole lives who were the extreme oddities, not the mobile ones.
It’s not like immigration into the US, Australia or most other countries ceased, or slowed down, at any point that I’m aware of between about the post-Civil War era and WWII, certainly - apart from a temporary blip during the Great Depression.
Lily,
In the larger sense of this discussion, I don’t believe we’re talking about the world that the Immigrants came from, but the one in which they settled. America. I am second generation American on both sides of my family, all of whose roots are in Italy. If one went back about 5 generations on my maternal grandfather’s side, those roots are found in Croatia. Both of my parents have talked about the indignities they themselves and their parents and grandparents suffered because of their language and accents (my father’s, born in America, first language was a dialect of Italian, not learning English until going to school).
Both of my parents grew up in the Church, with a Catholic education. My mother was sent to Public HS, as was my father (who was the second to youngest of 16 children). As their families assimilated by “losing” their accents, and “joining” the middle class (both sides of the family were merchants in some sense–owning their own businesses, some as cobblers, some as builders), they were able to leave the “ghettoes” where they were forced to live. In the case of my father’s family, it wasn’t until the early 1970’s that many of his brothers and sisters and their families were ABLE to buy homes in different parts of town. In the case of my mother’s, it wasn’t until my grandfather built a “sub-division” in a part of Long Island that they were able have a home outside of the “Italian” section. Up until the 1970’s ethnic “neighborhoods” on Long Island were still pretty common.
Now my point is an easy one, and I am only speaking of my family’s experience here about which I’d like you to be clear. The Church was the center of the community in both my parents’ childhoods, until their families “made it.” When this happened, in both families–one family in NY, the other in Pa, they basically left the bosom of the Church. their children (me, my brothers and sisters and cousins) all received the Sacraments, but were not brought to Church or even expected to go after Confirmation. Church was treated as a tolerated necessity (more for the grandparents’ benefit).
My parents–both of whom had graduate degrees and were educators-- bought into the whole sexual revolution, but only to the extent that when they decided 5 children were enough (the fifth died in my mother’s womb at the beginning of her 8th month, at the time they did not surgically remove the dead child, but allowed the body to expel the dead child–my mother carried her dead baby in her womb for about 6 weeks until her body expelled him) they contracepted–and this was before it was ‘legal’ to buy prophylactics in NYS. My Father NEVER received Holy Communion (I respected him for that decision, since he knew he was contradicting Church Teachings), but also never went to seek Reconciliation and do Penance, even after contracepting became unnecessary in their marriage (at my urging my mother did, after dad died).
So, did leaving the ethnic neighborhood where the Church was its center and embracing the education and norms of the American Society that surrounded them lead to their loss of faith?
Honestly, Lily, I don’t know.
But I see that out of an immediate family–we’re Italians, don’t forget, what we consider immediate family includes more than 60 people–there are only maybe 10 of us who regularly go to Church. And believe me, the rest make fun of us (good naturedly, of course) for “believing in that stuff.” One branch of the family became Evangelicals.
