Historical Background
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Catholics have been present in
America since before the War for Independence.
From Lord Baltimore’s experiments in Maryland to the arrival of
groups of immigrants in Pennsylvania, New York, and the New England
states, Catholics faced a specific problem: how to maintain their
religious identity in a nation that was overwhelmingly Protestant.
By the 1840s, when many Americans took alarm at the new waves of
immigrants, often impoverished and often Irish, the problem grew severe.
In a certain Anglo-American understanding of the growth of free
institutions, Catholicism was The Enemy. As a result, Catholics faced
not only outright discrimination but even violence for both ethnic and
religious reasons. In the
19th century, no other religious faith except Mormonism was
treated as so fundamentally incompatible with the conception of the
American nation entertained by many Christians.
Catholics had to create their own institutions – churches,
schools, hospitals, orphanages, relief services – with little help or
encouragement from their fellow citizens.
Yet Catholic leaders were grateful for the religious freedom that
allowed them to do this, and they could not help but appreciate the
open, enterprising society that had given immigrants refuge from famine,
war, and persecution elsewhere. Still,
for Catholic leaders, the first priority was understandably the survival
and religious integrity of their own people.
Catholic civic engagement was often vigorous but also turned
inward. Catholic leadership
in the landmark struggles for American freedom was accordingly minimal.
At the same time, Catholic
leaders could not ignore the questions that American emphasis on
participatory democracy and individual rights and responsibilities put
to European Catholic traditions of more centralized government and close
collaboration between church and state.
Thanks to the work of several American Catholic churchmen at the
end of the 19th century, most notably James Cardinal Gibbons,
John Ireland, John J. Keane, Denis J. O’Connell, and John Lancaster
Spalding, as well as several later theorists and activists, Catholicism
has not only found a secure place in America, but has itself been
enriched by notions of human rights, pluralism, and religious liberty
emanating from the United States.
The Difficult Balance
Yet the development of
American Catholicism has been marked by serious tensions that
continue to challenge people who wish to be both fully Catholic
and unapologetically American – who wish, moreover, to be fully
Catholic precisely when they are fully present in the American
public square. Those
tensions once centered on the fact that Catholics could not feel
quite at home in the American polity: what might have been a
particular Catholic contribution to American public life was
frequently muted or marginal, and Catholics expended most of their
energies within their own ethnic communities and religious
subculture. Today the
tensions may center on the fact that Catholics can feel almost too
much at home in American society: what might be a distinctive
Catholic note in American public life is in danger of being
diluted and lost as a distinctive Catholic subculture dissolves.
Certainly it took a long
time for leaders in this country and in Rome to understand that
the principles of the American Founders could be harmonized to a
large extent with Catholic social principles.
The great contributions of the Jesuit philosopher and
theologian John Courtney Murray in this century inaugurated a
whole new way of reading the founding as embodying portions of
natural law to which Catholics in America could give ready assent.
Murray gave a hopeful
reading of the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that
“we hold these truths to be self-evident, that men have been
endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and that
among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
For Murray, this bold statement meant at least three main
things: there are truths, we can know them, and we, as Americans,
“hold” these truths as a basis for our common life together.
Though Murray well knew that this highly condensed version
of the natural law needed a great deal of unpacking, he was
cautiously optimistic that Roman Catholics could find here common
ground with their fellow citizens of other faiths in America.
Murray’s work not only helped shape developments at the
Second Vatican Council on questions like religious liberty; he
also stimulated a vigorous Catholic engagement with the
foundations of American political philosophy.
The
Tensions Remain
Along with these positive
developments, however, another set of questions arose for American
Catholics, especially in recent decades. Catholicism is one of the few world religions with a highly
developed system of modern social teaching.
That teaching goes a great deal further than the minimalist
natural law principles of the American Founding.
If Catholic principles like “subsidiarity” may be
rather easily harmonized with American notions like federalism or
localism, other Catholic principles find little or no place in
American thought. For
instance, America’s highly individualistic ethic clashes in
various ways with ideas like the “common good,”
“solidarity” and Catholic personalism.
In Catholic social thinking, the human person is neither an
autonomous individual nor a mere fragment of a social mass as in
several forms of 20th century collectivism.
The person is constituted by links to the family,
community, and political structure, and to independent sources of
moral reflection and action.
The person, then, exists in a matrix of relationships that
is not given much attention in mainstream American thought.
Catholic social teaching, with its highly technical and
somewhat foreign terminology, has therefore found itself in some
tension with mainstream American political discourse, and this
tension has given rise to disputes, even among Catholics, about
applicability of Catholic thought in the context of this nation.
Concrete historical
developments in the United States have injected paradoxes and
ironies into Catholic civic engagement.
Besides the tensions long felt (but increasingly resolved)
between the nation’s founding principles and the Catholic
tradition and the gap still remaining between America’s
individualistic ethics and political discourse, on the one hand,
and Catholicism’s unfamiliar vocabulary and community focus, on
the other, at least three main developments have complicated the
picture:
-
the emergence of a
current of political liberalism from the Progressive Era
onwards that at many points converged with the Catholic
tradition practically but diverged from it more and more
culturally and philosophically;
-
the nation’s growing
pluralism and the decline of mainline Protestant cultural and
moral hegemony; and
-
the
waning of the Catholic ethnic-religious subculture in the
1950s and ’60s followed by the dramatic reconfiguration of
American Catholicism after the Second Vatican Council.
1. Liberal Progressivism:
Convergence and Divergence
Explicit Catholic social
teaching, although rooted in an ancient theological and
sacramental tradition, arose in the 19th century as a
response to the industrial revolution, to the trauma of transition
from a rural paternalism to an urban capitalism, and to the rival
worldview of socialism. A
parallel development took place in the United States.
Appalled (and sometimes frightened) by hordes of
immigrants, many of them Catholic, crowded into urban tenements
and laboring in the harsh conditions of an expanding, unregulated
economy, an unstable alliance of old-stock gentry, grass-roots
organizers and tribunes, evangelical and liberal proponents of the
Social Gospel, and avant-garde cultural rebels sponsored a wide
and sometimes contradictory agenda of reform, from economic
regulation and trade-union organization to welfare provision and
even Prohibition.
American Catholics,
precariously exposed on the lower rungs of the American economy,
stood to benefit from many, though not all, of these proposals and
did not share the deep-seated antagonism to positive government
intervention that marked the older Anglo-American liberalism.
The Catholic Bishops’ Program for Social Reconstruction
of 1919 echoed many of these reform proposals and foreshadowed
much of the New Deal. Of
course, Catholics could not ignore some of the elements hostile to
immigrants or immigrant culture in the reform alliances.
But far more troubling was the fact that the new reformism,
in its revolt against the complacencies of Victorian America, was
suspicious of all tradition and religious authority, two hallmarks
of the church. Indeed,
the philosophical and cultural vanguards of the new progressivism
appeared to reject the fixity of truth or morality altogether,
even in the nation’s founding documents.
Many of the fault lines in the church’s current efforts
to project a distinctive Catholic presence in the public square
can be traced to this history of practical convergence and
philosophical divergence with a major 20th-century
current of American politics.
2. The Naked Public Square
In recent
decades, the decline of the old Protestant establishment
has given rise to another set of questions for Catholics in the
public square. Despite
the conflicts and outright anti-Catholicism of the past, American
Catholics and Protestants shared a common moral vision rooted in
Scripture. If
Catholics created their own school system to provide a kind of
education that was missing or, sometimes, disparaged in the
basically Protestant public school system, they still championed
the American experiment and the largely sound social ethic they
found all around them.
Explanations of the
decline of Protestant Christian cultural hegemony are complex and
much debated. Some
factors are said to go back to the early 19th century.
Others are tied to the liberal and progressive intellectual
currents mentioned above. Others
derive from the overreaching typical of any hegemony and from
practices of exclusion that eventually discredited attempts to
maintain the religious character of institutions that once upheld
the Protestant culture. Still other factors are largely demographic, including the
shifting profile of the American population, the lower birth rates
of mainline Protestants, and the entry of Jews and Catholics into
the ranks of the affluent and highly educated.
By the 1920s and 1930s, certainly by the 1940s, Catholic
bishops had already begun to replace leading Protestant clergymen
as the ready spokesmen for traditional morality, but the Catholics
were filling a role that had been defined by Protestant forebears.
Then, in the past few decades, came the full-scale
dismantling of the implicit Protestant establishment.
This dismantling, combined
with a growing awareness of the multiplicity of worldviews in
American society and the liberal argument that the public sphere
should remain scrupulously neutral on ultimate questions, has led
to what some observers call a naked public square in which not
only Catholicism but all religious influence has been reduced to
an extent possibly unprecedented in American history. In addition, it is not clear whether the foundational idea of
an America based on “self-evident” truths derived from nature
or nature’s God retains more than a purely rhetorical place in
contemporary American social discourse.
By contrast, one recent Supreme Court decision warned
against anything that would prevent individual Americans from
defining for themselves their own idea of the mystery of the
universe.
Exactly how naked is the
naked public square, that is, how stripped of undisguised
religious presence_ The
exact degree is a matter of debate, but the clear tendency, along
with the decline of that “civil religion” that in the past
held Americans together, has presented a whole set of new
questions to religious Americans, Catholics not the least among
them. The Catholic
church, for instance, runs the most extensive education system,
health services, and relief efforts of any American faith group.
It was inevitable, then, that it would be centrally
involved at local, state, and national level in such issues as
abortion, euthanasia, family stability, homosexuality, welfare
reform, and economic policies. The church also has developed positions on war and peace,
which were brought forward vigorously during the debates over
nuclear deterrence during the Cold War and continue to be applied
to conflict situations around the world where the United States
often acts as the world’s only remaining superpower.
Under John Paul II, the church has been pressing for
restrictions on use of the death penalty.
All these issues and more inevitably flow from the
church’s social thought and practice.
3. The
Post-Subculture,
Post-Conciliar Situation
Lying behind all these discrete problems, moreover, is a deeper
question for American Catholics today.
How are they to be present in an American public life that
increasingly runs hot and cold about public religion, now
welcoming, now allergic, now tolerant but only within strict
limits_ And how are
they to achieve this presence while the cohesive Catholic
subculture of at least a century’s standing transforms itself
into some as yet undetermined form_
The church, since Vatican
II, has done three things of central importance to this challenge.
First, it welcomed an understanding of the church’s role
that made striving for justice in the social arena an integral
part of Christian witness and not, as had often been suggested,
simply a preparation for a more spiritual or other-worldly
missionizing. Second,
it argued that engagement with the public realm is primarily the
responsibility of the laity.
Third, by calling for a stance toward modern culture marked
by dialogue at least as much as by combat or rejection, the church
lowered the walls of the Catholic subculture and contributed,
intentionally or not, to the assimilation of Catholics into
mainstream American culture.
The first of these changes
made distinctively Catholic civic engagement more religiously
charged than before. What
often remained on the periphery of a largely other-worldly
spirituality was now shifted toward the center.
The positions of pastors, bishops, and pope could not as
easily be set aside as idiosyncratic opinions irrelevant to the
sacramental life or the work of salvation.
A more conscious response was required, even if it was one
ultimately of dismissing the authoritative character of church
positions.
The second of these
changes, emphasizing the role of the laity, harmonizes with what
comes naturally to many Catholic lay people, acculturated as they
are to America’s remarkable tradition of popular initiatives and
spontaneous organization for social purposes.
But it appears that the lines of responsibility are not as
clear in practice as the Council’s principles would suggest.
Some American lay people still have the habit of looking to
their bishops, clerical organizations, and Rome itself to take the
lead on social issues, even though many lay organizations have
sprung up in the wake of the Council.
Other Catholic laity take almost automatic offense at civic
direction from church leaders.
The very energy of lay
initiatives has, to some observers, led to a certain incoherence
in the Catholic presence in American civic life. Bishops and clergy encourage lay participation but may look
askance at some of the forms that this participation takes.
In a church that has long been marked by its careful
attention to doctrinal orthodoxy and unity with the Bishop of
Rome, letting go of authority and trusting lay initiative has been
difficult. In
addition, it is the nature of the American context that groups may
form calling themselves Catholic but who work at cross purposes to
what the hierarchy may see as undeniable theological and moral
teachings. Both
clergy and laity find themselves in a delicate situation where the
“Catholic” voice is diluted or obscured, where dramatic
heterodoxy and mere differences in lay opinion cannot be
distinguished.
The third change raises
the question of how Catholics will blend their Catholicism with
their assimilation to America.
This was not a problem when Catholics mostly lived – by
outside pressure and internal choice – in a kind of Catholic
“ghetto.” The
success and acceptance in American society that Catholics have
come to enjoy is a welcome development.
So is the sense of responsibility and shared destiny that
they feel with that society.
But as with all other religious and ethnic groups who have
come to these shores, integration into the American mainstream has
costs as well as benefits. Can Catholic doctors, lawyers, politicians, educators,
businessmen – to say nothing of schools, colleges, universities,
hospitals, relief services – remain both Catholic and American
in a United States that, at least at a superficial level, seems to
have moved far from the Biblical and natural-law principles that
provided a bridge between Catholicity and Americanness_
There is no question that
one of the central challenges facing American Catholicism, clergy
and laity, liberal and conservative alike, is how to maintain a
specific identity in the face of forces, both national and global,
both cultural and economic, that seem to be making for a much
greater uniformity and far less vigorous and articulated religious
participation in public affairs.
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