I can’t remember the details of my first encounter with the Roman Catholic Church. This is because it happened shortly after I was born, in a Yokohama army hospital, where the Catholic obstetrician in charge of my introduction to the world performed a convenience baptism on the spot. But I encountered it soon enough in more recognizable forms, since my grandfather was born Irish, Catholic, and South Philadelphian, and that translated into large networks of Catholic kin and frequent funeral masses for the elders.
Not that my grandfather was insistent on having me pay attention to Catholicism. He had left the Church decades before, a quiet, skeptical, good-humored paperhanger who bridled at the notion of submitting to the dictates of the parish priest. My grandmother was a fervent Protestant, raised a Methodist by an immigrant Swedish father, who himself had been converted under Dwight L. Moody. She was just as fervent an anti-Catholic, and by her dismissive reckoning, Catholics (with almost no exceptions) were loutish, drunken, conscienceless pigs. But attendance at the funerals could not be negotiated. At age eight, I was planted on a sofa in a funeral parlor while a room packed with black-draped mourners for my 100-year-old Irish great-grandmother tonelessly chanted Hail Marys and Our Fathers and Seven Sorrowful Mysteries. All of which fell on my stripling ears like so much gobbledygook, and after that, I was on my grandmother’s side. Catholics were pigs.
It gave me one of the great shocks of my life, a decade later, when the girl I was then deeply enamored of—a Catholic—laughed out loud when I told her I thought Catholics must be liberals. After all, they drank, smoked, danced, fornicated, ran to the confessional to belch it all away, and then returned to their behavioral vomit for more. She told me I didn’t know what I was talking about, that Catholics were the most ultra-conservative, strait-laced, buttoned-up people on the earth’s wide face. They led lives of guilt and penance, and I had only seen the worst of them because all of the best had betaken themselves to the priesthood or the convent. When it turned out that the high-school disciplinary officer was also a Catholic—his daughter was another girl I fell for—the epiphany was complete. I’ve been confused about Catholicism ever since.
But so, by John T. McGreevy’s new account of the Catholic experience of Americanization, have American Catholics. Catholics gained their first beachhead in British North America in the 1630s, first in a short-lived colony on Newfoundland, and then in Maryland. But they did so as a proscribed sect in the English-speaking realms, and the consciousness of needing to tread quietly shaped pre-Revolutionary Catholicism into an unobtrusive and largely eccentric club of minor gentry whose loyalties to the Roman Church were distant and flaccid. This might not have prevented the overwhelmingly Protestant and deistical Revolutionaries from using them as whipping boys anyway, except that it became necessary for the Continental Congress to court alliances, first with French Catholic Canada (in 1775) and then with France and Spain (in 1777). Tolerance of Catholics became a virtue, partly because the virtue was a diplomatic necessity, and partly because the Catholicism of the American Catholics (like Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the longest-lived of the signers) had grown so genteel and domesticated.
All this changed at the point where McGreevy’s story really begins, with the influx of a new brand of Catholics among the great waves of northern European immigration between 1800 and 1860. Not only were these new Catholics foreign—and therefore more likely to inflate their loyalty to the Church as a mechanism for resisting assimilation—but they were also the subjects of a revival of Catholic devotion, born out of the vicious conflicts of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars, and romanticized by Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Rene de Chateaubriand. “Historians have only begun to investigate the revival’s disruptive effects,” McGreevy writes, but that ignorance has been deadly to a serious understanding of Catholicism in America. By the late 19th century, the ultramontane revival had collected under its mozetta “the rehabilitation of philosophy in the tradition of Saint Thomas Aquinas, a more intense piety focused on the suffering Jesus and the miraculous”—the rosary, the cult of Mary, the bleeding Jesus, Lourdes, benediction of the blessed sacrament—”and an emphasis on Catholic parishes, schools and organizations as refuges from an increasingly secular, even hostile, world.” It was the Catholicism I encountered at my great-grandmother’s funeral. And just on those terms alone, the new Catholicism had everything it required to become an object of suspicion and loathing among America’s Protestant majority.
But that was only the surface offense. The Catholic revival also turned a cold eye on liberal democracy, since it identified liberalism with anti-clericalism and Protestantism. “If nineteenth-century liberals idealized human autonomy,” McGreevy writes, “Catholics habitually referred to communities.” That intellectual alliance with romantic organicism, which also shows up in semi-Catholic movements like the Mercersburg Theology and Episcopal Anglo-Catholicism, threw the new American Catholicism into sympathy with Southern romantic apologists for slavery. (One of McGreevy’s strongest suits in this book is his ability to connect events in the international world of the Catholic Church with domestic American crises and issues.) So, when in 1839 Pope Gregory XVI issued a condemnation of the slave trade, but not slavery, this was a signal to American Catholics that Protestant abolitionism was not for them. The signal was read, perhaps entirely too well, by both Catholics and Protestants in America. On the one hand, few Catholics appear in abolitionist organizations. On the other, the first abolitionist martyr, Elijah Lovejoy, was a raving Catholicophobe, and McGreevy notes that Tom’s one great success in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the conversion of Little Eva from Catholicism to Methodism.
The secession of American Catholics from the Protestant cultural mainstream might easily have triggered the same kind of kulturkampf that occurred in Bismarck’s Germany and Cavour’s Italy, culminating in the emergence of Catholic political parties between 1865 and 1900. It never came to that, because Catholics discovered in the Democratic Party a political organization which was, for very different reasons, just as suspicious of northern Protestant imperialism as they were. In a movement parallel to that of Jews in the 20th century, urban Catholics made common cause with white racist agrarian Southerners in an effort to keep the Beechers and the Lovejoys—the old Whig-Republican axis—from using their victory in the Civil War to stamp the entire country with the Protestant evangelical die. Where Russell Conwell saw acres of liberal capitalist diamonds and William James found truth in experience, Southern agrarians and Catholic factory workers saw only Yankee exploitation and interference. The highpoint of this alliance was reached in the 1930s: in 1931, Pius XI issued the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, decrying capitalism as a product of “the errors of individualist economic teaching,” and two years later, Dorothy Day founded The Catholic Worker.
One thus arrives at the halfway-point of Catholicism and American Freedom finding things pretty much as I thought they were at my great-grandmother’s funeral. In his 1949 manifesto, American Freedom and Catholic Power, Paul Blanshard codified the idea that Catholicism really did represent something alien, retrograde, and hostile to liberal democracy, warning the Protestant Élite that the huddled Catholic masses, behind the walls of their parish schools and sodalities, were yearning to breathe fascism.
But McGreevy is also a great noticer of irony, and the principal irony of Catholicism and American Freedom is that the 1940s were precisely the moment when long-dormant Catholic voices calling for assimilation and accommodation to liberal democracy began to clear their throats and be heard. The twin horrors of fascism and communism persuaded many Catholics—and McGreevy focuses strongly on Jacques Maritain—that visions of paradisiacal communities, including those based on class or race, were delusions, and that liberal democracy, whatever its problems, was an infinitely safer bet for Catholics than the fascism of Franco, Petain, Salazar, and the Anschluss. In the United States, legal disputes over schools and local tax revenues found Catholics deploying church-state-separation arguments to demand equal treatment; the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray argued for a reconciliation of Catholicism and American democracy, even if the price was a cautious endorsement of individualism. And the proof was in the presidential pudding. John F. Kennedy was narrowly elected president in 1960, despite the less-than-discreet questions about whether his loyalty to the Catholic Church was at war with his loyalty to the Constitution, and to the mortification of truculent Protestants, the republic did not end.
All too soon, however, it became apparent that conflict over Catholicism and American freedom, far from disappearing, had only shifted its location, from Catholics v. American culture to Catholics v. Catholics. Every hope of liberal Catholics that the way was now clear for a rapprochement with American life crashed onto the twin rocks of Catholic moral theology: contraception and abortion. The indifference with which the American Catholic laity greeted Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical on contraception, Humanae Vitae, suggested that the cultural rapprochement had been a little too successful. “Most Catholic couples rejected the teaching or ignored it,” McGreevy admits, and as early as 1964, Catholic physicians were already suggesting that the Church needed to “redefine what is meant by abortion.” Intellectually, Catholic theologians heaved overboard the ballast of Thomistic theology as “legalism” and shifted their attention to “the historical, the particular, the individual, the changing and the relational” —the words coming, not from a Protestant situational ethicist, but from Fr. Charles Curran.
But the one unarguable virtue of an ecclesiastical hierarchy which is pledged to the principle of semper eadem is the conviction that there are some rocks on which it would be better if the ship actually broke rather than transforming itself into a sponge, and abortion proved to be one of them. Also, even the most forward liberal Catholics sat uneasily beside the onward rush of American political and legal thought beyond Isaiah Berlin’s “two ideas” of liberal democracy and into the embrace of John Rawls and the “third idea” of liberalism as absolute individualistic self-definition (now enshrined in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion, striking down the Texas sodomy law).
What is surprising in this regard is how near to success Catholics were in turning back state legislation liberalizing abortion in the early 1970s; it was the overriding intervention of the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton which upset the expectation that the tide of individualism could be resisted by Catholic political strength alone. Still more surprising, and more ironic, was how abortion signaled the end of the alliance between Catholics and Democrats. “A Democratic Party adamant that all abortions remain legal” drove observant Catholics (and the more observant, the more driven) into the unlikely arms of both the Republican Party and Protestant evangelicals. As liberal Protestantism dissolved into mere blue-America secularism, Protestant evangelicalism found itself, for the first time, as deeply alienated from the dominant culture as Catholics had been a century before. It discovered the limits on raging individualism, and then discovered that conservative Catholics also had a controversy with individualism, based on natural law theory. Suddenly, like the Continental Congress in 1775, Catholics did not look so piggish as they did to my grandmother, and might even turn out to be friends. When the scandal over pedo-philiac child abuse by priests in Boston and Los Angeles broke in 2002, Protestant evangelicals were the one public community which remained deafeningly silent, like Conan Doyle’s dog that did not bark.
I first met John McGreevy at Harvard in 1994, when he was coming to the end of his junior appointment in the history department there, just before he moved to his current academic home at Notre Dame. He was quiet, intense, and well-liked—not a frequent combination—and his book is very much like the man. Catholicism and American Freedom is thorough, phenomenally well-researched, broad in its perspective, and sober in its judgments. It will not be the book Catholics will like to read about themselves, because it is really the story of a misalliance, between a Catholic culture that should have remained Catholic and an American culture which was persistently indifferent to Catholic wooing. Although McGreevy’s final message is about whether American culture has finally developed the maturity to welcome Catholics as equal partners rather than strangers, it is hard to avoid the implications McGreevy strews in the reader’s path that Catholics might be better advised to forget assimilation to a culture drunk with autonomous individualism and be content with Catholicism’s own authentic strangeness. Forty years after my great-grandmother’s incomprehensible Irish wake, that advice does not seem at all strange to me.
Allen Guelzo’s new book, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America, has just been published by Simon & Schuster.
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