Reform in the Queen City: Religion and Race in Cincinnati in the Era of Vatican II

This dissertation examines how the Roman Catholic community of Cincinnati, Ohio, experienced the reform movement initiated by the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council, at which the world’s bishops met in Rome in four sessions between 1962 and 1965. The study focuses on two aspects of conciliar reform as it shaped life in Cincinnati: Jewish-Catholic relations and the Catholic response to racism in church and society. As such it makes two major interventions into the historiography.

First, while the Second Vatican Council (“Vatican II”) is often touted as a revolutionary moment given its repudiation of centuries of Catholic anti-Semitism, in Cincinnati such a pronouncement barely rippled among local Catholics and Jews, who had long cooperated, especially on civic projects, with little thought for the theological obstacles that ostensibly divided them. Thus what was revolutionary at the level of the global Church was met with little attention at the local level. Second, Vatican II’s neglect of race as a discrete social concern fueled intra-Catholic conflict over the Church’s

response to discrimination in local communities. With no clear direction on how the Catholic laity were to respond to racism, despite making forceful admonitions that lay men and women should be deeply engaged in their surrounding communities, Vatican II led to bitter disputes over the propriety of lay activism on race or even the acknowledgement of race as a systemic illness of American society. How religious believers were to reform their own communities, then, was conditioned by their experience of reform within their own traditions, with local conditions taking priority over universal pronouncements at the highest levels of theological authority. To paraphrase a well-worn saying: “All religion is local.”

In Cincinnati, Catholics determined a formal response to these problems through an archdiocesan synod, which concluded in 1971 and outlined the local Church’s renewal process vis-á-vis Vatican II and contemporary social upheaval. Most importantly for this dissertation, Cincinnati Catholics confirmed their friendship with Cincinnati Jews, acknowledged the need for a coherent racial policy, and formulated a response to the conditions of their community in the post-Vatican II world.