Keys to the Kingdom

The tension between religion and American culture dates from the earliest settlements. Although most of the colonies had some form of established church, religious pluralism was the norm by the early 18th century. A country peopled by the descendants of fugitives seeking freedom of worship was poor soil for the kind of religious repression characteristic of the Old World. Still, the commitment to principled consistency embodied in the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment to the Constitution was extraordinary.

Under the constitutional theory of the day, however, the 1st Amendment did not apply to the states, many of which still legislated religious discrimination, chiefly against “papists”--the adherents of the “Romish” church, the “Whore of Babylon” of the Apocalypse. Beyond sheer prejudice, in fact, there were many reasons why one might conclude that Catholicism was fundamentally disposed against the American experiment. The Vatican left no doubt of its preference for monarchy, fulminating in encyclical after encyclical that freedom of speech, of the press and of religion was “insanity.”

Jay P. Dolan is the author and editor of numerous books on American Catholic history. Over the last 30 years at Notre Dame University, he has built the nation’s finest archive of source materials on American Catholicism. His new book, “In Search of an American Catholicism,” is an essay on the ups and downs of the always-uneasy accommodation between Catholicism and American-style religious pluralism.

Dolan distinguishes five broad stages of adaptation. From the revolutionary era through the 1820s, the Catholic population contained a high proportion of upper-middle-class, educated individuals imbued with Enlightenment and republican ideals. Despite the instinctive mistrust of Catholics by Protestant fundamentalists, Catholicism had actually begun to acquire a certain intellectual cachet in the early 19th century. The year 1832 marked the first and only time that a Catholic priest was named chaplain to the U.S. Congress. Matthew Carey, a university-educated Philadelphia publisher and pamphleteer who emigrated from Ireland in 1784, and the remarkable Maryland Carroll family--Charles Carroll was a signer of the Declaration of Independence--are Dolan’s prime exhibits.

Virulent anti-Catholicism returned during the antebellum period of rapid emigration of European peasants and small farmers, especially from Ireland. To the guardians of order in large cities, Catholic immigrants appeared to be destructive hordes, their religion a bizarre form of theater dedicated to extracting money from inert masses. John Hughes, the fiery archbishop of New York City and the bete noire of New York intellectuals, created the carapaced, immigrant-based, ghettoized style of American Catholicism that persisted until the 1950s.

After the Civil War--Dolan’s third period--the Hughes brand of ghetto Catholicism was challenged by an “Americanist” wing of the U.S. hierarchy, led by Minnesota bishop, John Ireland. The battle centered on the church’s commitment to a separate parochial school system. Ireland was eventually routed out by the hierarchy’s conservatives, who counterbalanced their distancing of the church from American culture with a vigorous flag-waving patriotism. By World War I, the patriotism of Catholics was no longer in question.

That adroit combination of separatism and patriotism was the platform for the American church’s most successful expansionist period, which extended roughly from the 1920s through John Kennedy’s election as president in 1960. Catholics, and Catholic priests, defined the progressive but socially conservative style of American unionism. Powerful big-city bishops were a force in Democratic Party politics. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen ruled the airwaves. The vigorous Spencer Tracy stereotype of the Catholic priest became almost a masculine ideal. Influential Protestant journals lamented that Catholicism seemed to be taking over the whole country.

Just as it was influencing American culture, the powerful American Catholic Church was also transmitting American values to world Catholicism. The final episode in Dolan’s tale opens with an account of how Vatican II, the council of bishops summoned by Pope John XXIII in 1962, officially endorsed American-style freedom of religion. It was the sweetest of victories for the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray, the primary drafter of the canons, who had been firmly squelched by the Vatican just a decade before for his justifications of religious toleration.

To Dolan, the attributes of the post-Vatican II American church that he most admires--the respect for parish democracy, the leading role of women, the vibrant engagement with American culture--are finally bringing it back to its true roots, in the Enlightenment and republican ideals represented by the Careys and Carrolls at the very outset of the American Catholic experience.

There is no question about Dolan’s mastery of his material, but the book’s rigid schematic frame suggests that his material may sometimes be tailored to fit his argument rather than the other way around. For example, he points to the resistance to assimilation by ethnic Polish parishes and their mode of organization (a form of lay association) as an example of the pervasiveness of the Catholic democratic impulse.

But the Catholic Poles who emigrated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries came from a world devoid of democratic traditions, and their pastors, such as Msgr. Vincent Barzynski, the semi-legendary “Polish bishop” of Chicago, ruled like petty czars. Their organizational modes were more plausibly a device to keep parish property out of the reach of the diocesan administrative machinery. The breakaway Polish National Church of the 1920s also had less to do with democratic aspirations than with ethnic resentment against the Germans who controlled the church in most areas of Polish settlement. In the same vein, although Irish bishops justified their attempts to break up ethnically organized German parishes in the name of “Americanization”--and a few may actually have meant it--the confrontations were really about power and political control.

The more prosaic truth behind the church’s shifting patterns of accommodation to American democratic values may simply be that middle-and upper-class parishioners demand a say in how their churches are run. When the American church was primarily concerned with assimilating unlettered immigrants, pastors and bishops reigned like minor deities. When the laity is relatively well-educated, as in the Maryland brand of 18th century Catholicism or as in the last generation, they take a much stronger role. The same could be said of almost any religion.

But whatever the ultimate causes, the Americanization of Catholicism still leaves the burning question that so troubled conservative prelates in the 19th century: Can the church achieve an American version of Catholicism without getting swallowed up in the all-enveloping American culture? The answer to that question is still very much in doubt, as Dolan acknowledges, and his extended essay is a compact guide to the twisty accommodations that have evolved over the last 200 years.