Abstract

The crisis into which the Catholic Church in America fell in the late 1960s and early ‘70s is in large measure the result of three factors that occurred more or less simultaneously, thereby creating a “perfect storm” for US Catholicism: Vatican II, the end of the so-called “Catholic ghetto,” and the cultural revolution that swept the US beginning in the ‘60s. Just as Catholics were entering the mainstream of American culture, that culture was losing its old Protestant character and taking on a new, secularist character.