Defining the “New American Catholic”
The post below was originally published on this site on March 4, 2025.
New American Catholics: A Movement Shaped by Vatican II
The subtitle of Against the Current is Father Tom Oddo and the New American Catholic. Chapter Three of the book is also titled “The New American Catholic.” But what exactly is a New American Catholic? It seems to be the polar opposite of the idyllic Catholic described in Tom Oddo’s yearbooks from Holy Cross High School on Long Island, a “God-centered patriot” who was “Strong in the love of his/CREATOR” and “Virile in his attachment to his COUNTRY.”
Chapter Three of Against the Current covers the period between 1959-1971, discussing the Second Vatican Council (also known as “Vatican II”) and the impacts it had on the Catholic Church in the United States. Vatican II followed the First Council by almost a century, and the intent of its summoner, Pope John XXIII, was to revive the life force of the church through the renewal of liturgy and the adoption of practices that would make the church accessible to more of the faithful and new parishioners. The resulting changes, debated over several years and often after thousands of revisions, produced a cultural shift in Catholicism that was especially felt in the United States after the council concluded in 1965.
How a 1968 Documentary Captured a Changing Church
NBC produced a documentary titled “The New American Catholic” in 1968, a film that captures just how deep the shift ran. Images from a church service that included priests playing guitars and young women singing while others in the congregation marched with banners, one written in Yiddish to represent Judaism, opened the broadcast. Vestments and other customary pieces of Catholic high-church culture are replaced by everyday attire befitting an expanding middle class. Composed mostly of unnarrated segments cut from interviews with clergy and laypeople, speeches by priests and notable Catholics, and raw footage from services, “The New American Catholic” is a patchwork of voices in opposition to one another seeking to find common ground.
In various segments, the program intercut pieces of different interviews to show the diversity of opinion: An older woman remarks how, growing up in a strict church which declared itself “infallible,” she couldn’t understand why the church had changed at all, or how she could explain it to her children; a younger man remarks how he understands why older members would have such an issue with changes in their lifelong traditions, having known nothing else; and a priest described the situation following Vatican II as one of polar opposites that demanded a central moderating force. That priest, Father James P. Shannon—former President of the College of St. Thomas, Auxiliary Bishop of St. Paul, Minnesota, and titular Bishop of Lacubaza in present-day Algeria—would receive such condemnation for his appearance on the program that it would contribute to his decision to resign the priesthood later that year. He married soon after, in 1969.
The special is still available online, one of many interesting finds in my research for Against the Current. If the images portrayed can be understood as representative of the American church at that time, the “New American Catholic” was the image of a new kind of believer: young, secularized, and plugged in to pop culture, someone who was more likely to worship in ways aesthetically closer to the services of later megachurches (and even Holy Rolling Pentecostal services) than to traditional Catholic Mass. This spirit, the Vatican II Spirit, was what Tom Oddo adopted when he entered the priesthood in 1970, and was the motivating force of priests like him who fought for civil rights, global disarmament, and peace between nations. It is arguable that the same spirit inspired Pope Francis’s papacy, himself ordained a priest the year after NBC’s special, and one year before Tom’s ordination.
How Vatican II Inspired Social Justice Movements in the Church
The effects of Vatican II continue to ripple across the years as the church has continually changed and evolved, especially on topics related to LGBTQ+ rights. In revisiting Father Tom’s story, it was clear almost immediately that he represented something new in the church, something new in Catholic university leadership motivated by a desire for change, for openness, for progress beyond the customs of a thousand years. He spoke for value-based education and against the proliferation of nuclear weapons; he agreed to open co-ed housing at UP and fought against the closure of its AFROTC unit; and through his years of activism spoke out against the restrictions and censorship of church leadership, declaring that organizations like Dignity and its affiliate members would not wait for higher approval to make the changes they wanted to see in their faith communities. This legacy shows Tom remains emblematic of the New American Catholic, and of the Vatican II Spirit: a youthful, resilient, and deeply faithful priest desiring to make a better church and a better world for all. Such a moniker is central to his identity.
