Authors on Authors: Deborah Kanter & Stephen Koeth

For years now, Stephen Koeth and Deborah Kanter have found themselves attending the same conference panels, drawn to overlapping conversations about twentieth-century American Catholicism, urbanism, ethnicity, gender, and Vatican II. In Crabgrass Catholicism, Koeth explores the experience of the millions who left the city for the suburbs and nature of the evolving Catholic church here. In Pioneers of Latino Ministry, Kanter concentrates more on the people who arrived in urban parishes, especially Latinos, in the same era. With their books out in fall 2025, the two historians enjoyed reading and connecting the dots of their research projects that, taken together, reflect a changing American Catholic church and shifting notions of race and ethnicity.

DK: Catholic life in the postwar suburbs is an understudied topic. What brought you to the topic? Did you experience a moment or interaction that compelled you to this pursue this research?

SK: I grew up in Staten Island, NY and am therefore a product of the crabgrass Catholicism which first sprouted in the postwar period. Throughout graduate studies in theology and history I gravitated toward scholarship that explored the history of Catholic immigration, ethnic parishes, and religious reform – all of which helped form the world I grew up in. But then, as a doctoral student at Columbia University, I read Tom Sugrue’s contribution to the Cushwa Center’s volume, Catholics in the American Century, which lamented the lack of scholarship on suburban Catholicism. I knew this was a natural extension of my intellectual interests and personal history and an area in which I could contribute original research. And my proximity to the Diocese of Rockville Centre on Long Island, and its status as the nation’s first suburban diocese, made it an ideal location in which to explore how suburbanization transformed Catholic faith and practice.

DK: You grew up in Staten Island, but Crabgrass Catholicism explores the Diocese of Rockville Centre in Nassau and Suffolk Counties. In what ways does this Long Island history reflect wider phenomena in the history of New York City and metropolitan areas across the country?

SK: When the Vatican established the Diocese of Rockville Centre in 1957 commentators said it was an indication of the American Church’s suburban future and that developments in the Church on Long Island could provide lessons for the Church in the rest of the country as it expanded into suburbia. Despite being one of New York City’s five boroughs, Staten Island undeniably followed a suburban pattern of development and New York’s suburbs spread not only out onto Long Island but into Westchester County and northern New Jersey. And in the 1950s this pattern of development was replicated in major metropolitan areas across the country and has continued to this day. Although there were clearly differences between suburban development in New York and Los Angeles, for example, the changes in the suburban Church I focus on were fairly universal. Amidst rapid development and population growth, parishes initially employed impromptu venues for Mass and religious education and then built functional and modernist church buildings. With an insufficient number of priests and religious sisters, the lay faithful were called into new leadership roles in the Church and new family associations replaced the pious associations of the immigrant era. Unable to provide sufficient parochial school desks amidst the baby boom, more and more Catholic children attended public school and received religious instruction after school one day a week. And most fundamentally, the suburb’s focus on domesticity and the nuclear family shifted the center of parish life from the church to the family home and undermined the community of the parish. These are changes that occurred in suburbs all across the country and which fundamentally reshaped the Church since World War II.

DK: Forty years have passed since the publication of Crabgrass Frontier. How does your book build upon that seminal work? What are Crabgrass Catholicism’s big takeaways for students of U.S. immigration and ethnic history?

SK: At Columbia, I was lucky enough to study under Kenneth T. Jackson whose Crabgrass Frontier remains a foundational text for urban and suburban studies. His work highlighted the critical role that federal policies, including redlining, highway programs, and mortgage subsidies, played in driving suburbanization. Like so many other urban historians I attempt to build on Jackson’s foundation, in this case by exploring the role that religious institutions played in advancing the suburban ideal and building suburbia, and the ways suburbanization then transformed American religion. In terms of immigration and ethnicity, with Jackson I argue that suburban homeownership helped undermine the ethnic identity that had endured within urban parishes from the era of European immigration. This collapse of ethnic Catholicism, along with challenges in building sufficient suburban parish schools and changes in theories of religious education, created a crisis for the Church in how to pass the faith on to the next generation. In time, with increasing waves of Latino immigration, the Church also faced once more the challenge of integrating adherents whose practice of the faith was rooted in ethnic identity. Even today, the challenges posed by religious disaffiliation and new waves of Latino immigration, are the two crucial issues facing the Catholic Church in the US.

DK: Crabgrass Catholicism posits the dilution of European ethnic identities (i.e., Italian, Irish) and the emergence of a broader white Catholic identity in post-war Long Island. What people, places or anecdotes best exemplify this evolution?

SK: European immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made U.S. Catholicism simultaneously urban and ethnic. While the Irish predominated, German, Polish, Italian and numerous other Catholic immigrant groups established national parishes in which their language and cultural traditions were preserved. But as the experience of immigration faded, and subsequent generations moved to the suburbs, the ethnic identity of Catholic parishes receded. At Our Lady of Mount Carmel Parish in Patchogue, for example, suburban expansion diversified the parish driving down the percentage of Italian families from over 88% in 1922 to just 68% in 1951, even before the height of the postwar suburban boom. By 1963, the parish had hosted its Feast of Saint Liberata for the last time. And when it dedicated a new church a few years later it was more than a mile from the heart of the old Italian neighborhood thus catering to a diversity of parishioners who drove to Mass every Sunday. Even when other parishes attempted to revive the Italian tradition of the festa, as Sacred Heart Parish in Island Park did in 1970, these celebrations included a variety of ethnic traditions and foods and aimed at developing a spirit of parish unity rather than perpetuating ethnic identity.

DK: Your discussion of race, ethnicity and mixed parishes relies heavily on articles in the diocesan paper from the 1960s and 1970s. What was the diocesan angle on non-white Catholics? How might these sources provide a skewed view of this history?

SK: As I researched the history of suburban Catholicism, I was lucky to have access to the Long Island Catholic the Diocese of Rockville Centre’s award-winning diocesan newspaper. Like the parishioners it served, the paper’s perspective was undeniably that of white suburban Catholics. Cultural and linguistic differences and geographically scattered minority populations likely made press coverage of non-white Catholics challenging. But the paper had a long tradition of supporting the civil rights movement, advocating for migrant farm workers, and celebrating the experiences and contributions of non-white Catholics. Indeed, in 1968 the Long Island Catholic commissioned a seventeen-week series on the history of Black Americans that was incorporated into numerous parochial and even public school curricula. And in several interview series with Long Island’s Black and Hispanic Catholics the newspaper never shied away from criticisms of Church leadership and of white Catholics for failures to welcome, integrate, and effectively serve minority populations in the Church. In many ways, the voices of Black and Hispanic Catholics resonated more in the diocesan newspaper than in the diocesan and parochial archives I consulted. There is still much work to be done on suburban Catholicism in general, and in-depth studies of racial and ethnic minorities and immigrants in Catholic suburbia are undeniably one such area for development.

SK: Before writing this history of the Claretian Missionaries, you were familiar with them because of their ministry to Mexican immigrants in Chicago. As you dove into the order’s archives, visited its parishes around the country, and spoke with priests and parishioners, what surprised you the most about Claretian history?

DK: Given the historic antipathy between Spaniards and Mexicans, I was surprised by how easily Spanish priests and Mexican laypeople found common ground in the missions and pioneering parishes throughout the U.S. The earliest generations of the Claretians were all from Spain. This was the case for the Claretian individuals who arrived here in 1902, and they dominated the U.S. province until 1950. Despite differences in accent and culture, the Claretians and Mexican laity had a shared faith and a shared experience as newcomers. I argue that laypeople and Claretians worked together to foster strong foundations, identities, and voices for Latino Catholics.

SK: What were the challenges and opportunities of writing something of an institutional history of a religious order?

DK: I set out to write the first book-length history of the Claretians in the U.S. My predilection to research from the bottom-up breaks from conventional Catholic history that usually relies on hierarchical structures and top-down documentation. I wanted to uncover the story of the Latino communities served by Claretians and who influenced the priests. My book uncovers diverse Latino communities throughout the country—cotton farmers, railway workers, steel millworkers, miners and their families. Readers gain a well-rounded history of often forgotten places. The rich records at the Claretian Missionaries US-Canada Archive allowed me to document neighborhoods and towns that no longer stand in Arizona, Texas, Kansas, and Chicago. My dual focus allowed me to tell stories of many Mexican American priests. Pioneers, in the end, Pioneers of Latino Ministry offers a unique congregational history: equal parts Latino and Catholic history.

SK: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Catholic immigrants to the U.S. were typically served in national parishes by clergy of the same culture and language. In different ways, these parishes both helped maintain culture and aid in assimilation. You show how Claretians served Mexican migrants in what were effectively national parishes, but you also explore parishes that gathered various Spanish speaking immigrant communities together. What challenges did Claretians encounter trying to serve diverse immigrant groups in the same language-based parish settings? What are the relative strengths and weaknesses of such a parochial approach even today?

DK: The issue of serving people of multiple Spanish speaking nationalities is very timely today as the U.S. Latino population grows ever more diverse. The Claretians focused their ministry on Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Texas, California, and Chicago. Everywhere, the Claretians fostered embryonic parishes in working poor neighborhoods and, as a result, created stable, multifaceted institutions that anchored what outside observers called “slums” or blighted areas. Claretians put these Spanish-speaking parishes on the map as they hired architects, planted the seeds of parish societies, publicized beyond the parish boundaries, and created opportunities for lay leadership. I argue that the Claretians played a vital intermediary role between diocesan structures that embodied centralizing, Americanizing impulses and the desires of Mexican and Puerto Rican Catholics to nurture the culture of home. American parish structures with linguistically competent and culturally sensitive leadership have worked well for Latin American immigrants and their children.

SK: I explore how the Church struggled to adapt parish ministry as Catholics moved from urban ethnic parishes to the postwar suburbs. But the Claretians in your study ministered to Mexican migrants who moved from rural to urban communities. How do you see space shaping religious practice? How did the Claretians maintain or change their approaches to migrant ministry as they moved from farms to city? How did the temporary and impromptu spaces employed by urban parishes for Latinos affect people’s faith and religious observance?

DK: The Claretians came to this country in 1902, while the U.S. was still deemed “mission” territory by the Vatican. They were primed to hold itinerant missions, traveling to rural settlements and following railway workers. But these Spanish priests quickly grew familiar with U.S. parish structures and adopted them with much success. The physical structures of parishes were often essential to supporting new faith communities. In Claretian parishes across the country, the founding laity were emigrants and exiles in a strange land, far from the rancho or barrio that they had called home. Moving to the United States meant confronting a new language, often facing ethno-racial subordination, and getting accustomed to a city that seldom felt like home. Finding a new home could be as basic as attending Mass or murmuring prayers before a familiar icon such as the Virgin of Guadalupe. As these new members became immersed in the parish, by joining a theater group or building a parade float, serving as an usher or donning the sash of the Apostolate of Prayer, the church often served as a substitute pueblo or rancho that provided new affective and social ties, as well offering channels to dignity and empowerment.

SK: A consistent theme in immigration studies is the transition from the immigrant generation to subsequent native-born generations. It seems something similar was at work in the Claretians in the U.S., as Spanish-born missionaries gave way to American clerics born and trained in the U.S. How did this transition change the order? In particular, what role did this generational divide play in a later debate about the priority of Spanish-speaking ministry in the order’s mission?

DK: The Claretians’ accompaniment of Hispanic Catholics stands out as a continuity in over a century of work in the U.S. That said, upon arrival, a subset of Claretians proved uneasy with their mission’s concentration on Hispanic ministry. Too often individual Claretians held notions of racial difference and hierarchy (for example, white/European/Spaniard versus mixed race/indigenous/Mexican) that fueled a prolonged, fundamental ambivalence about the congregation’s purpose in this country. Some priests picked up these understandings of race during their time working in Mexico. Others arriving from Spain sought to align themselves with white American Catholics, so taking on judgmental attitudes about the católicos they served. The majority of Claretians did demonstrate a fundamental sense of empathy and connection with their Latino flock. After 1950, the Claretians were a mostly American group of religious including many Mexican American clergy. I was surprised to learn that their seminaries did not stress Spanish language and even undermined its use among native speakers. The province long harbored ambivalence about its mission: whether to concentrate on Hispanic ministry or to reach whiter, wealthier Catholics. Today the Claretians unequivocally prioritize Latino ministry, but increasingly the priests are themselves immigrants—from India, Africa, southeast Asia, and Latin America. Claretians in America vividly embody “mission in reverse.”