This announcement and description of the project on American Catholics in the Public Square was issued on February 1, 2000.  

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TWO GROUPS EMBARKING 
ON MAJOR STUDY OF THE ROLE 
OF ROMAN CATHOLICISM 
IN AMERICAN PUBLIC LIFE

Do American Catholics approach civic life differently than do other Americans_  Can a Catholic presence in the public square contribute something distinctive to the nation’s political and cultural debates_  How has American culture affected Catholic political and social thought_ Are younger Catholics being drawn to new expressions of public Catholicism – or to none at all_ 

Such questions have an obvious urgency today, when the intersection of religion and politics is particularly controversial and America’s more than 60 million Roman Catholics constitute the nation’s largest single religious group.  Seeking answers will be the work of a major $1.5 million, three-year research project on “American Catholics in the Public Square,” now being initiated jointly by the Commonweal Foundation in New York City and the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington D.C. 

The Pew Charitable Trusts are supporting the project as part of a larger examination of seven major religious groups in the United States and their place in public life. 

“A strong public expression of religious faith and an open, pluralistic public square don’t have to be mutually exclusive,” said Rebecca W. Rimel, president of The Pew Charitable Trusts, in launching Religious Communities and the American Public Square, an initiative that has awarded grants of more than $1 million each to researchers studying the civic contributions of mainline Protestant, Catholic, Evangelical Christian, Muslim, Latino, African-American and Jewish religious groups in the U.S.

Catholicism has had a long, complex and often conflict-ridden tradition of linking religious belief and civic activity, of understanding the relationship between the individual and the community, and of viewing freedom and responsibility.  In recent decades, that tradition has been enriched by elements as different as the American contribution to the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 Declaration on Religious Liberty, the spectrum of Latin American liberation theologies, the Polish Solidarity movement, and the writings of John Paul II. 

Earlier, Catholic immigrants to the United States put their own special stamp on neighborhood life, urban politics, the welfare state, and economic activity.  The church itself, with its extensive network of schools, health care facilities, and social service agencies, has often served as an important public actor.  But Catholic social involvement sometimes created serious tensions challenging a population that wished to be both fully Catholic and unapologetically American. 

  Those tensions have not gone away:

• To what extent do church teachings, about society’s obligations to the poor or the unborn, for example, continue to influence increasingly independent Catholic voters_ 

• How are Catholics to be present in an American public life that typically runs hot and cold about public religion, now welcoming, now allergic, now tolerant but only within strict limits_

• Can Catholics exert public influence if the once cohesive Catholic subcultures of belief and ethnicity are dissolved and their vibrant imaginative worlds are transformed into yet undetermined forms_

The three-year project will strive to identify distinctive elements in a Catholic approach to civic life and explore the strengths and weaknesses of this tradition in the American context.  The project will examine how the tradition is being currently expressed, how it is being transmitted, and what obstacles, within the church or the culture, stand in the way of a more robust presence in the public square. 

High among the project’s goals is clarifying how Catholics may work better with those holding other religious or philosophical convictions toward revitalizing both the religious environment and civic participation in the American republic.

The project will feature several national conferences organized jointly by the Commonweal Foundation and the Faith & Reason Institute, as well as numerous colloquia and case studies pursued independently by the two groups. 

Focus groups and a national poll will be conducted during the presidential election year to explore how Catholics make decisions about voting.  CARA (Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate), a polling and research organization affiliated with Georgetown University, will cooperate in this phase of the research.

The Commonweal Foundation is a not-for profit educational and religious foundation that publishes Commonweal magazine, an independent biweekly review of religion, politics, books, and the arts that has been published by Catholic lay men and women for 75 years. 

The Faith & Reason Institute is a newly established research organization dedicated to the study of religion and culture.

Robert Royal, president of the Faith & Reason Institute and a contributing editor to Crisis magazine, will direct the Institute’s research and activities for the project.  A scholar at Washington think tanks for almost twenty years, he has written, translated, or edited over a dozen books on Catholic culture, politics, and American society.

Peter Steinfels will direct the research for the Commonweal Foundation, which will administer the grant.  A former religion correspondent who continues to write the “Beliefs” column on religion for The New York Times, Steinfels is also a Visiting Professor of History at Georgetown University.  He has written widely on religion, political life, and contemporary culture. 

Based in Philadelphia, The Pew Charitable Trusts support nonprofit activities in the areas of culture, education, the environment, health and human services, public policy and religion.  More information can be found at

“The commitment of The Pew Charitable Trusts is to find helpful ways of building social trust and restoring the health of American democracy,” said Luis Lugo, director of the Religion program at the Trusts.  “By supporting programs that deal with issues at the intersection of religion and public life, we hope to deepen the political debate and enrich the American experiment in ordered liberty.”

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