I remember growing up around that time. The local Roman Catholic church was more or less the cool place to go.

And it was a rock of American orthodoxy. It was terribly important in the decline of our civilization into one with no beliefs, no structure. The Church used to be a center of intellectualism (see how in the late 1800's, the future Pope Benedict XV had to defend a research paper weekly and was judged and promoted by his performance [link to en.wikipedia.org] but perhaps it serves no righteous purpose any more. I think the current Pope Benedict XVI is trying to restore its intellectual traditions, but it's very hard; the church may simply have become irrelevant to the development of human thought.

To bring in a currently hot issue, I have not heard rumors of priests playing around with little children in the 1950's. But maybe it was hidden.