Is Georgetown University Committing Suicide? - 1967 For more than a century, from 1830 to after 1940, Catholics in America lived in a ghetto. When American Catholics decided to leave their ghetto (right after the Jews and just before the Italians and Negroes), they did what any people fleeing a ghetto do: they uncritically embraced the outside world, without seeing that that world was moving rapidly toward increased chaos, corruption and absurdity. They abandoned completely a basic principle of the Christian West: that salvation is to be found, either for the individual or for the community, only in slow growth in terms of one's own traditions and background.