Our Lady of Perpetual Help, gender roles, and the decline of devotional Catholicism

Pittsburgh Catholics participated in a devotion to the religious icon Our Lady of Perpetual Help (a painting of Madonna and child) beginning in the late nineteenth century. Participation, high during the 1930s and 1940s, began a rapid decline in the 1950s. This article argues that the decline reflected a changed religious sensibility, a shift in ideology. The devotion inculcated Catholics, especially females, with the belief that women should seek to navigate the temporal world through Mary (and that the best requests to Mary were for help to accept the world passively). Their rejection of this ritual derived in some measure from the rejection of the belief that power derives from passivity. That rejection likely resulted when women saw an achievable alternative to the discourse that the devotion fostered, and that alternate path (also evidenced in women's reproduction and family behaviors) derived from women's increasing work outside of the home. That these changes came prior to the Second Vatican Council and the 1960s women's movement suggests both that the transformation in religious sensibility derived from other sources and that the 1950s saw dramatic cultural and social change. Alternative explanations for the rejection of devotional behavior depend too strongly upon developments that occurred after Catholics had begun to abandon the devotion to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and therefore cannot adequately interpret the decline.