By Dwight Longenecker, The Imaginative Conservative - And what happened to the Catholic religion? Instead of being Italian or Polish, Portuguese, Irish or Czech, it became American. After the war when the suburbs popped up, the big fan-shaped Catholic Churches also popped up, and they were pretty much indistinguishable from the Protestant churches that also sprouted like so many mushrooms. Inside the carpeted churches looked much alike, and neither were the message and music all that different. It was not supposed to be... It was the American message: that life was about the quest to find and retain liberty and the pursuit of happiness.