{"id":2975,"date":"2008-08-18T09:18:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-18T09:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/deaconsbench\/2008\/08\/the-catholicism-of-mad-men.html"},"modified":"2008-08-18T09:18:00","modified_gmt":"2008-08-18T09:18:00","slug":"the-catholicism-of-mad-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2008\/08\/the-catholicism-of-mad-men.html","title":{"rendered":"The Catholicism of “Mad Men”"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>I\u2019m not sure if anybody noticed, but while the world has been enraptured by the Olympics and Mark Phelps, one of the most talked about and acclaimed dramas on television has Gone Catholic. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s \u201cMad Men,\u201d<\/a> the compellingly watchable and increasingly fascinating drama on AMC about advertising in the early 1960s. One of the characters is Peggy, a young and ambitious copywriter who worked her way up from secretary last season; Peggy had a brief fling with one of the married ad men, and that left her with a baby, now being raised by Peggy\u2019s mother in Brooklyn. <\/p>\n

This season, we\u2019re getting a glimpse at what that life in Brooklyn entails — including Sunday mass at Church of the Holy Innocents, where a new young priest has arrived. On last night’s episode, he was invited to have dinner with Peggy\u2019s family. <\/p>\n

One of the things that is so absorbing about \u201cMad Men\u201d is that it shows the world on the cusp, teetering between the picket fences of the \u201850s, and the picket lines in the \u201860s. It\u2019s 1962, and the first tremors of frustration and discontent are being felt that will lead to the seismic jolts that rocked everything from sexuality to politics to religion. When the young priest is asked to say grace before dinner, he offers a watery \u201cthanks-for-all-we-have-and-everybody-here.\u201d Peggy\u2019s mother glares for a moment. \u201cThat\u2019s very nice, Father,\u201d she snaps. \u201cBut could you please say grace?\u201d And he does. Later \u2013 in what could be the first stirrings of some attraction to Peggy \u2013 he drives her to the subway station and asks her thoughts, as a writer, about sermons. \u201cIt\u2019s the only part of the mass that\u2019s not in Latin,\u201d Peggy says, \u201cbut sometimes it\u2019s hard to tell.\u201d She offers him some advice about making eye contact. He asks her if she\u2019d look over his sermon for Easter, and she agrees. (She praises it later on by saying, \u201cIt was very\u2026colloquial.\u201d)<\/p>\n

All this plays out against a pitch-perfect background of aqua-colored Princess phones, huge wooden Hi-Fis in the living room, kitchens fully stocked with Tupperware, and offices tinted by the smoky haze of countless cigarettes. Sunday\u2019s show also played out during Holy Week of 1962, with the climax unfolding during a tense and emotionally draining Good Friday that subtly but effectively Changed Everything. <\/p>\n

It will be interesting to see where the show goes in its portrayal of Catholicism \u2013 so far, it\u2019s gotten almost everything right. (Though I don\u2019t think a priest in 1962 would have dared to drive a single young woman anywhere, alone, late at night.) But this layer of religion adds more credibility and texture and atmosphere to a show that already plays like a perfectly crafted souvenir plucked from a time capsule. <\/p>\n

You can\u2019t escape the gnawing feeling that, yep, this is the way we were. And — for better or for worse — this is also why we aren’t that way anymore.<\/p>\n

UPDATE:<\/b> The ever-observant James Martin over at America<\/i>, while also admiring the show, noted a few nuances<\/a> that escaped Your Humble Blogger — including the fact that the priest in question is a Jesuit who, with a telling gesture at the end of the episode, may have committed a mortal sin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m not sure if anybody noticed, but while the world has been enraptured by the Olympics and Mark Phelps, one of the most talked about and acclaimed dramas on television has Gone Catholic. It\u2019s \u201cMad Men,\u201d the compellingly watchable and increasingly fascinating drama on AMC about advertising in the early 1960s. One of the characters…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":204,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Catholicism of "Mad Men" - The Deacon's Bench<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2008\/08\/the-catholicism-of-mad-men.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Catholicism of "Mad Men" - The Deacon's Bench\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I\u2019m not sure if anybody noticed, but while the world has been enraptured by the Olympics and Mark Phelps, one of the most talked about and acclaimed dramas on television has Gone Catholic. 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Prior to that, Deacon Greg worked for 26 years as a writer and producer for CBS News, where he contributed to \"The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric,\" \"60 Minutes II,\" \"48 Hours,\" (Emmy Award, Writers Guild of America Award) and \"Sunday Morning.\" He was co-writer for the acclaimed documentary \"9\/11,\" hosted by Robert DeNiro. (Emmy Award, Christopher Award, Peabody Award, Writers Guild of America Award.) His radio essays were featured in the bestselling book \"Deadlines and Datelines\" by Dan Rather. He's also a two-time winner of the Catholic Press Association Award. Other places you may find him: AMERICA, U.S. CATHOLIC, CATHOLIC DIGEST, REALITY (Redemptorist Communications) and THE BROOKLYN TABLET. He also contributes homiletic reflections to the parish resource CONNECT!, published by Liturgical Publications. In November 2009, he began serving a three-year term as a consultant to the Communications Committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). Deacon Greg grew up in Maryland (Go Terps!) but he and his wife today live in the beautiful borough of Queens, New York. You can contact Deacon Greg at dcngreg@gmail.com.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/author\/gkandra"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/204"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2975\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}