I’m 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’s “Mad Men,” 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’s mother in Brooklyn.

This season, we’re 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’s family.

One of the things that is so absorbing about “Mad Men” is that it shows the world on the cusp, teetering between the picket fences of the ‘50s, and the picket lines in the ‘60s. It’s 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 “thanks-for-all-we-have-and-everybody-here.” Peggy’s mother glares for a moment. “That’s very nice, Father,” she snaps. “But could you please say grace?” And he does. Later – in what could be the first stirrings of some attraction to Peggy – he drives her to the subway station and asks her thoughts, as a writer, about sermons. “It’s the only part of the mass that’s not in Latin,” Peggy says, “but sometimes it’s hard to tell.” She offers him some advice about making eye contact. He asks her if she’d look over his sermon for Easter, and she agrees. (She praises it later on by saying, “It was very…colloquial.”)

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’s 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.

It will be interesting to see where the show goes in its portrayal of Catholicism – so far, it’s gotten almost everything right. (Though I don’t 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.

You can’t 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.

UPDATE: The ever-observant James Martin over at America, while also admiring the show, noted a few nuances 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.