Some will remember the mid-20th century as the “brick-and-mortar” era of the American Church — parishes going up, vocations booming, schools clogged with children in uniforms. And nuns. Lots of ’em. I can still see them: the starched habits, the massive wooden rosaries, the worn hands dusty with chalk, the wire-rimmed glasses that, miraculously, never smudged.

Now someone has done an exhaustive study about that period of American life:

Millions of middle-aged and older Catholics remember Sister Mary Margaret, their third-grade teacher. She told gory stories about the martyrs, lived and breathed The Baltimore Catechism, and made you hold your nose to the blackboard if you didn’t do your homework.

Fuel for some funny stories, yes. But noted Catholic scholar Robert Orsi says that Sister provided fervent religious formation and helped transform Catholics into one of the most educated, most successful segments of American society.

Teaching nuns in 1960 were “the most educated sisters in all Catholic history,” he said in a lecture at Purdue University Feb. 8. “They had been going to summer schools since the 1920s … The idea that these were ignorant women who knew nothing about the world was simply not the case.”

Orsi, who earned a doctorate from Yale, holds the Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic Studies at Northwestern University. His talk, titled “Growing Up Catholic: A Case Study of Catholic Children in Mid-20th Century America,” drew a crowd of approximately 150. It was based on the research he did for a book on the social and cultural history of 20th-century Catholic childhoods, which will be published by Harvard University Press.

The lecture was sponsored by the Aquinas Education Foundation and the Religious Studies Program at Purdue.

“My dad is Irish-Catholic, so it’s interesting to hear how he grew up,” said Michael O’Neill, a Purdue economics major from Indianapolis. “I grew up in Catholic schools, too. Our sisters said they would pray for us students.”

Orsi previously taught at Fordham, Indiana University and the Harvard Divinity School. He is past-president of the American Academy of Religion. The author of several books, he is an expert on Catholicism in the United States.

His research focused on Catholic children between 1925 and 1975. During that 50-year period, Catholics caught up with Protestants and Jews educationally, and by the 1970s they were more educated, and earning more, than either group, he said.

“These children were prepared for the world and did very well in it,” he said.

Catholic children, especially those taught in Catholic schools, tended to be disciplined and extremely well-versed in their faith, Orsi said. To them, supernatural things were real. Guardian angels were real. Souls in purgatory were really released. The saints depicted on religious cards shed real blood.

“Before World War II, if the crayon makers made colors just for Catholic children, they would come mostly in shades of red,” said Orsi, whose study involved interviewing adults across the country about their Catholic childhoods.

Check the lik for the rest. Ah, memories.