A Catholic Crisis in the Rust Belt
City Journal Audio
Manhattan Institute
4.7 • 657 Ratings
🗓️ 15 May 2019
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Charles McElwee joins Seth Barron to discuss the decline of the Catholic Church in the Rust Belt and the impact of immigration on a working-class community in Pennsylvania.
The Catholic Church faces a crisis in an area that remains disproportionately Catholic. In 2018, a Pennsylvania grand jury report detailed how clergy covered up the abuse of children by more than 300 priests over a period of 70 years. Congregations continue to shrink, deepening the region's fragmentation and leaving a hole in its community life.
McElwee has just joined City Journal as assistant editor. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The American Conservative, National Review Online, The Weekly Standard, and other publications.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the 10 Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. |
| 0:05.6 | Coming on the show today, our associate editor, Seth Barron, will talk with the newest member of the |
| 0:11.4 | City Journal team, Charles McElwley. Charles joins us from Pennsylvania. He's our new assistant |
| 0:17.2 | editor, and he's written a number of articles for the magazine already. Last spring, |
| 0:21.8 | we published his first essay for City Journal, Chain Migration comes to Hazleton about the impact |
| 0:27.7 | of Jane Migration on his working class hometown in Pennsylvania. Then this past winter, he wrote |
| 0:33.8 | the Battle for Rust Belt Catholicism, which was about the collapse of the Catholic |
| 0:38.4 | Church in the region. Charles has also written for the Atlantic National Review, the Weekly |
| 0:44.5 | Standard, the American Conservative, and other publications. You can find him on Twitter at |
| 0:50.6 | CF McElwick. We're happy to have them on the team, very happy, in fact, and we hope our listeners |
| 0:55.7 | enjoy a new voice on the podcast. |
| 0:59.1 | That's it for me. |
| 0:59.9 | Here's the conversation between Seth Barron and Charles McElwee beginning after this. |
| 1:05.2 | Thank you. Welcome back to 10 blocks, the podcast of City Journal. |
| 1:22.9 | This is your host for today, Seth Barron, Associate Editor for City Journal. |
| 1:30.8 | Charles McAulwe is an assistant editor at City Journal. He just started a few weeks ago. He's a native of Pennsylvania and has written |
| 1:36.1 | extensively on economic development, demography, and culture in the Keystone State. A recent piece in the |
| 1:42.6 | magazine is called The Battle for Rust Belt Catholicism. Thanks for |
| 1:47.3 | joining us, Charles. Thank you for having me, Seth. So you make the point that the industrial |
| 1:51.9 | Midwest has a long Catholic history, which I didn't really know very much about. But can you |
| 1:57.6 | talk about how that came about and maybe the importance of the church to civic life? |
| 2:03.3 | Yes. So the Catholic Church really shaped the civic life of industrial cities in the upper Midwest and |
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