The Automobile Drove Away the Faithful

I read a review of a book written by a young priest who blames the decline of the Catholic denomination on "the suburbs." He says Catholic life thrives in either country life of central city life. The in between, the suburbs, kill the proper relationship between people and their parish church. 

Rural and central city life is good for Catholicism for various reasons, he theorizes. First, ethnic groups and their individual versions of the faith are cemented together there. When the suburbs came along, the Catholic German lived next to the Baptist and the Methodist. This diluted the importance of the ethnic church. Second, people living close together and close to their church made the urban church their headquarters. They lived and solved life's problems together. When the suburbs galloped across the farm land around cities the church lost its way. These are not exclusively Catholic problems; they apply to many branches of the faith. 

The priest author blames growth of the suburbs on the public's desire for material goods and space. This desire is not a good thing for the worthy Catholic life. What he seems not to understand is that it was the automobile, cheap gasoline and subsidized road construction that caused the suburbs. It was not related to church life or lack of values. People were paid, i.e. subsidized, to leave cities and farms and move to the suburbs. The land outside of central cities was cheaper. Then governments collected tax money to build cheap roads to the cheap land. 

The priest is no doubt correct that all of this weakened older parishes and church life in general. He will not condemn highways, however. They are too popular with the faithful to risk that.