Dissertation Information for Michael Edmond O'SullivanNAME:
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SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: MPACT Status: Fully Complete Title: Persevering piety and declining devotion: Popular Catholicism, secularization, and everyday religion in Western Germany, 1918--1965 Abstract: My dissertation, a history of everyday Catholicism from 1918-1965, examines patterns of spiritual awakening and decline in order to question linear secularization narratives. It suggests a new chronology that is more congruent with this tumultuous period in German history. Most social historians of twentieth-century German Christianity focus on the weakening of Catholic social structures and institutions, such as associations, youth groups, and political parties to demonstrate the gradual secularization of German society. In a fresh interpretation, my project emphasizes how Catholicism alternated between decline and renewal as Germany experienced total war, economic depression, dictatorship, genocide, occupation, and an economic miracle. The dissertation explores how the Catholic Church in Germany adapted to twentieth-century forms of modernity and maintained influence during waves of social and cultural transformation from 1918-1955. The project also demonstrates how the mostly secular culture of present-day western Germany possesses roots in a period of steep decline during the late 1950s and early 1960s when the rate of post-1945 change outpaced the ability of the Church to counter-react. The dissertation uses the methods of gender historians and students of "lived religion" to construct this narrative. It stresses the previously neglected role of women and masculinity in both the persistence of Catholic religious belief into the early 1950s and its swift decline during the late 1950s. The project also examines evidence about perceived religious miracles and traditional beliefs usually not associated with the twentieth century to illustrate the malleability of Catholicism in the contemporary world. In sum, I argue that twentieth-century German Catholicism did not undergo gradual decline. Rather, it experienced several waves of disinterest followed by periods of renewed fervor until the Church exhausted its ability to adapt in the late 1950s. |
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