Response:
Leslie Tentler: When Peter Steinfels asked me to respond to
John’s excellent paper he gave me a rather odd assignment, one based on an
earlier incarnation of mine as an historian of the Archdiocese of Detroit. How,
Peter asked, would someone thinking of Catholicism’s public presence from the
viewpoint of Detroit’s past “connect” or “not connect” with the story John
tells beginning with slavery and abolition_
It’s
probably wise to begin by explaining why the Archdiocese of Detroit, which for
part of the 19th century was co-terminus with the state of Michigan
is, in fact, an excellent vantage point from which to engage John’s story.
Antebellum Michigan, as you probably know, was the birthplace of the Republican
Party, and it was a state with strong abolitionist sympathies. Anti-Catholicism was popular, too,
particularly among those residents most committed to the anti-slavery
cause. Anti-Catholicism, in fact,
remained a flourishing concern long after the Civil War was over. Michigan in
the 1890s boasted a larger membership in the American Protective Association (APA), most prominent of many 19th century anti-Catholic
organizations, than any other state. In the 1920s it was a hot bed of Ku Klux
Klan activity, much of which was directed against immigrants and Catholics.
So
the first chapter of John’s story played out in Michigan very much according to
his script. The same can be said of the
middle chapter, the one that centers on the social question. Michigan was early and fertile soil of
progressive reform in the course of which the state’s tradition of
anti-Catholicism went into temporary eclipse.
Even as the APA was recruiting a bumper crop of Michigan members a
progressive republican was being elected mayor of Detroit by vigorously
courting the immigrant Catholic vote. A
substantial majority of the city’s Catholic voters deserted their usual
Democratic Party allegiances to vote for one, Hazen C Pingree. famous in
Michigan, perhaps, but not at this gathering, motivated primarily by Pingree’s
ambitious but eminently practical reform agenda. So in Detroit in the
xenophobic 1890s the religious wars were temporarily muted by a
trans-confessional interest in municipally owned power, safe drinking water,
and lower streetcar fares. Pingree’s success—he was eventually elected
Michigan’s governor—was not lost on his Republican brethren whose slate many of
them adopted at least for the duration of the progressive era in more irenic
political style. Now, the 1920s, it’s
true, saw a resurgence of anti-Catholicism in state politics.
But
in the 1930s, and very much in accordance with John’s version of events, class
issues, economic issues, in other words, and particularly the right of workers
to organize made possible a new kind of coalition politics in Detroit and
Michigan—one that led to a marked decrease in Republican Catholicism. Heavily working-class Detroit was in fact a
powerful symbol of this new political mood, which I think was a nationwide
phenomenon. It was no accident that
Franklin D. Roosevelt should invoke Quadregisimo
Anno in a speech in Detroit nor the subsequent Democratic candidates would
for a generation inaugurate their campaigns at a Labor Day rally in the city’s
Cadillac square. That’s when campaigns
for president actually began, beginning in September, rather than at least a
year before the event. Nor was it an
accident that 1930 should inaugurate an era of Catholic ascendancy in the
politics of Detroit, which led in turn to unprecedented opportunities for
Catholic candidates in state and national politics. Frank Murphy became Detroit’s mayor in 1930; in 1936 he was
elected the state’s first Catholic governor; he subsequently served as
Roosevelt’s attorney general and as associate justice of the Supreme
Court. Murphy’s political roots were
deep in Catholic Detroit, quite literally, he began his political career in the
Holy Name Society. But his greater success as a politician came as a self
consciously ecumenical champion of social justice.
Abortion,
to turn to John’s third chapter, has been a deeply divisive issue in Michigan
politics for more than a generation. The state’s voters roundly rejected any
liberalization in the state’s restrictive abortion law, two months prior to the
Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade. The Michigan Catholic Conference
not surprisingly played a vigorous and, almost certainly, decisive role in that
statewide referendum. Right to Life of Michigan has since that time been a
potent force in state politics—most recently expanding its well-organized
efforts to include such issues as euthanasia and assisted suicide, spurred in
good part by the activities of a physician as notorious as Jack Kevorkian.
(That Michigan still does not have the death penalty—the territorial
legislature abolished the death penalty shortly before Michigan entered the
Union in 1837—is probably largely due to its current Catholic governor who is a
conservative Republican but who has clearly been affected in his thinking by
Catholic seamless garment teaching.)
Abortion is one reason and, by no means the only reason, that Michigan
is famous to so-called “Reagan or (perhaps I should say “Nixon”_) Democrats,”
with Macomb county in suburban Detroit serving as a veritable laboratory for
pollsters and academics interested in the phenomenon.
So
Michigan—or, if you will, the Archdiocese of Detroit—does indeed “connect” to,
and I think affirm, John’s story. It
also suggests some addenda to that story that is offered here not in a spirit
of criticism—John’s work is properly and profitably focussed on political
elites—but simply to introduce to the discussions some additional perspectives
on Catholic social engagement. Let’s begin with the mid-19th
century. Had the “average” Michigan Protestant then been asked about the
Catholic public presence in his or her hometown, I rather doubt that slavery
would have been the first issue mentioned.
I even doubt that the response would have been unambiguously
anti-Catholic. Now Michigan’s Protestants in the 1850s were no more
enthusiastic about the Catholic immigration into their state than they were
about the pope. But many of them, even in the 1850s had a kind of grudging
admiration for the Catholic church, which they recognized as a force of
discipline among immigrant newcomers, as an important provider of social
services, and even as a source of culture and architectural sophistication in
what was still something of a hard scrabble frontier. For many Protestants in mid-century, then, the most visible
Catholic public presence was probably not an overtly political one, but rather
had to do with the Catholic propensity for institution building: the new church
rising near the town center—to the cost of which surprisingly local Protestants
often contributed; the hospitals, orphanages,
and old age homes already appearing in the state’s largest cities,
(Detroit’s first hospital—literally first hospital—opened in the midst of the
1834 cholera epidemic was a Colletine Poor Clares); the Catholic schools, too,
figure into the picture; these are, of course, only attached to the larger
parishes. They will be by the 1850s a
source of political friction, but in the 1930s and 1940s they were also a
public service to the many affluent Protestant parents who enrolled their
children; so too, the confraternities and benefit societies, that quickly
became in the 19th century a staple of parish life but also of 19th
century “parade culture.” Much as
Michigan’s Protestants dreaded the prospect of Catholic political hegemony
then, they understood the social benefits attendant on Catholic institutions
and the very process of their creation.
Good citizens were built along with those churches and schools; public
order was reinforced; the municipal landscape was improved, and civic pride
augmented.
Well,
what does all this mean for our current discussion of Catholic civic
engagement_ To put it as succinctly as I can, we should not in our necessary
concentration on voting behavior, elite debate over public policy, and formal
modes of transmitting Catholic social teaching, forget the parish. We should
not, in other words, neglect the arena where Catholics are still most likely to
participate as Catholics in the nation’s public life. They do so as builders and supporters of churches and schools, as
volunteer social service providers, as models of faith and upright conduct, as
sustainers of social networks (bowl in a parish league, rather than alone.) Nor
should we dismiss these contributions as not genuinely “public,” on the grounds
that they benefit Catholics only or even in increasingly rare cases—Catholics
of a single ethnic group. Michigan’s Protestants knew better than that even in
the 19th century. It’s not
simply that social services are provided by Catholics today regardless of the
recipient’s religion, something, that was occasionally true in the 19th
century as well. It’s that local
activism of this sort, shores up the mediating institutions that make a
democratic culture possible, perhaps especially in a society like ours with its
high degree of ethnic, racial, and religious heterogeneity. Social citizenship, to put it another way,
is for most of us a necessary prerequisite for effective political citizenship.
We need both to inventory and appreciate this tradition of parish-based
activism in its present incarnation, and talk about ways of strengthening
it. Parish volunteerism is obviously
threatened today by unforgiving work schedules, perhaps especially those of
women, and by diminution among Catholics of regular religious practice. It may also be threatened by the failure of
Catholic intellectuals and, I use this term broadly, to endorse this kind of
activism as a genuine contribution to civic health and public order.
Let
me now jump ahead to the 1930s, which John has persuasively sketched as the
time of greatest rapprochement between American Catholics and an increasingly
secular liberalism. Seen from the vantage point of the Archdiocese of Detroit,
any account of Catholic civic engagement in this decade is incomplete without
some mention of the industrial union movement. Catholics were, of course,
prominent in that movement both as leaders and members, and the various
institutions of the Catholic subculture, not to mention the skills acquired in
building and sustaining those institutions were important to the movement’s
growth. Union rallies and organizing
meetings took place in Hibernian Halls,
Dom Polski’s, even church basements; labor priests blessed the cause,
and in so doing, often gave a new vitality to their priesthood. The more progressive bishops seized the
occasion to inculcate the basics of Catholic social teaching. Certainly this was true in Detroit where a
network of clerically run labor schools taught not only the social encyclicals
but parliamentary procedure as well, the latter to better to battle the
sectarian left in union gatherings. For a great many Catholics in the 1930s the
union movement was a first time immersion in active political citizenship,
particularly given the low voter turnout and Republican dominance of the 1920s.
That same movement built bridges between hitherto antagonistic ethnic groups,
and even facilitated an easing of Catholic racism.
The
importance of the industrial union movement in Catholic political life, not to
mention Catholic social mobility, needs to be more fully appreciated by
scholars and commentators today, and the impact on our polity of unions
decline, unionism’s decline needs to be more thoroughly explored. Nor should we neglect in our discussions the
present day union movement, which has made remarkable gains of late among the
working poor, many of them immigrants and many of those, at least, nominally
Catholic. Due to the current trends and
the distribution of income it might just be time for liberals of every variety
to coalesce once again around economic issues—even around the family wage, dare
I say it, the evident sexism of which could with some tinkering probably be remedied.
The
1930s was also a time as John mentioned when birth control assumed, what I
think can reasonably be called, an unnatural prominence in American Catholic
life. Pius XI, of course, spoke to the issue in the famous encyclical in 1930. The growing social acceptance of
contraception and its increasing accessibility in that decade held Catholic
leaders to a new frankness and urgency in addressing the subject. Catholics
thus entered a peculiar chapter in their American history—one where the church’s
stand on contraceptive stood in the public eye and for many Catholics, too, as
at least as definitive a hallmark of Catholicism as belief in the real presence
or intercessory power of the saints.
Tensions over birth control did growing damage to the Catholic-secular-liberal
alliance, certainly central to the intellectualized and generally reform-minded
Catholicism that enjoyed a revival after World War II. And ultimately, as we all know, the issue
did serious internal damage to the church, undermining the credibility of the
church’s teaching authority for the greater number of laity, and seriously
eroding the confidence of many priests in their advocacy even their legitimacy
as moral teachers.
The
successive sexual revolutions of the 20th century, which are
revolutions of the intellectual as well as behavioral order, have been for the
church, I think, analogous to the democratic revolutions of the 19th
century. We Catholics are still in the phase of official rejection with regard
to the sexual revolution despite the current “personalist” even sometime
romantic rhetoric on the subject of sex.
So it has been hard, even occasionally dangerous, for Catholic scholars,
particularly if they happen to be clerics, to try to find a middle way: to
embrace what is good and necessary in our revised understanding of sexuality
while subjecting that revised understanding to a critical scrutiny rooted in
Catholic tradition.
Indeed,
what is striking to me about the current discussions of abortion is how
thoroughly these tend to avoid the subject of sex. Abortion is first and
foremost a life issue. And I applaud
the seamless garment approach as John does for reasons of conscience as well as
practical politics. But abortion is
obviously related to questions of sexual morality, questions that need
addressing at this juncture in our history, perhaps more than ever before. And here the ineffectiveness of the church
is striking. Much of this has to do with the still unresolved problem of
contraception, which delegitimates for most Americans any and all Catholic
pronouncements on sex. Given recent
sexual scandals among the clergy it is likely that mandatory clerical celibacy
is beginning to have a similar effect.
And then there is the problem of the all-male clergy and hierarchy. If
the church can’t speak persuasively to our current crisis of sexual morality,
what claim does it really have to be a public actor_
So
maybe I can add a third moral to the two that John has drawn from his
historical survey. And that would be
this: Catholics will have difficulty engaging in the salient issues of the day
if their own house is not in order. We
need as Catholics to be involved in a world outside the church. But we have an unfinished and equally
urgent, internal reform agenda as well.
McGreevy Panel Paper
Farina
Response
Panel Discussion
McGreevy Full Paper
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