Portrayals of Roman Catholicism in North American Children’s And Adolescent Literature Following Vatican II
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While American children’s literature scholars have analyzed issues of Christianity broadly, and there are many considerations of Roman Catholicism within European children’s literature scholarship, there is a lack of scholarly discourse regarding Roman Catholicism within children’s literature published in the United States. This dissertation considers how North American children’s and adolescent literature approach the issues that preoccupied North American Roman Catholicism post-Vatican II as well as how such portrayals have impacted readers’ understanding of the faith during this vital period of transition within the Church. Chapter 1 focuses on the way young adult literature published in the early 1970s addressed the conflict between America’s movement towards gender equality and Roman Catholicism’s patriarchal hierarchy as well as its stance in favor of traditional gender roles. Focusing on the works of prolific picture book author and illustrator Tomie dePaola, chapter 2 considers his approach to topics ground in Roman Catholic traditions that secularize the faith and underscore the assimilation of Italian Americans into mainstream American culture during this time. Chapter 3 analyzes several award-winning texts by Latinx authors and the way they utilize Roman Catholicism as the main representation of Latin American ideology that is regularly in conflict with the protagonists' developing American identities and lifestyles. My final chapter compares the portrayals of Catholic Indian residential schools in children’s and adolescent literature published within the United States and Canada to consider what these representations communicate about the level of accountability each country holds the Church to when confronting this cultural genocide. The authors of post-Vatican II children’s and adolescent fiction explore conflicts between traditional Catholic values and modern American ideals. These texts not only mirror the concerns of the Roman Catholic community during this pivotal time, but the way these issues were and continue to be expressed to the next generation helps shape the widespread understanding of these discussions, and in turn the American Roman Catholic Church itself, as we progress further into the post-Vatican II era.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".