From the start, the question at the heart of the Catholic experience in America has been this: How can people be altogether American and authentically Catholic at one and the same time? Anyone who thinks the problem has been definitively solved by now doesn’t understand the question very well.
Efforts to work out an answer are in effect the history of the Catholic Church in the United States. The numerous discontinuities and conflicts in the story arise in large part from varying degrees of satisfaction and dissatisfaction among various groups — both inside and outside the Church — with the provisional answer at any particular time.
Notre Dame historian John T. McGreevy examines these issues in depth in an interesting new volume called Catholicism and American Freedom (Norton, 2003). Significantly, the title is a play on American Freedom and Catholic Power, Paul Blanshard's Catholic-baiting study of the Romish menace whose simple theme brought it a Book of the Month Club recommendation and made it a 1949-50 best-seller. The message, in Blanshard's words, was: “The Catholic problem is still with us.”
That was hardly new. Blanshard's precursors — Maria Monk, the Know-Nothings, the American Protective Association, the Klan, and all the rest of that shady anti-Catholic crew — had been saying essentially the same thing for well over a century.
McGreevy documents this ugly tale of bigotry in exhaustive and illuminating detail. Many readers will be surprised to learn, for example, how large a strain of anti-Catholic sentiment there was in the abolitionist movement before the Civil War, visible even in that hardy anti-slavery classic, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Admittedly, Catholics brought some of this on themselves by their ambivalence about slavery. But even so, the anti-Catholic vitriol of some abolitionist leaders looks bizarre in retrospect.
And then there was President Ulysses S. Grant. Speaking in Des Moines in 1875 to a rally of Union Army veterans, Grant declared: “If we are to have another contest in the near future…I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.” Everyone knew perfectly well that “superstition, ambition and ignorance” meant Catholic.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries leaders like Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore and Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul worked hard — and with substantial opposition from forces inside the Church — for the assimilation of Catholics into American society. By the middle years of the last century, the assimilation project was largely accomplished.
A story with a happy ending? Don't be sure. Lately, no less than Harvard's Samuel Huntington has taken to warning of the threat posed by Hispanic immigration to “the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream.” Huntington has serious points to make about migration, but he makes them in a way that to some ears sounds uncomfortably like elitist nativism. The Catholic problem, as Paul Blanshard would have said, is still with us.
But so is something else. The candidacy of a pro-choice Catholic, John Kerry, for president of the United States has shed new light on the dark side of the assimilation project pursued in good faith by men like Gibbons and Ireland. Kerry-style Catholics are very American indeed. And it's a huge challenge for the Church.
This is an intrinsically unstable moment — a transition point in American Catholic history. Most Catholics appear to be obliviously comfortable with the situation of their Church in today's United States. The overwhelming certainty spotlighted by current events is that they shouldn't be.
Russell Shaw is a free lance writer from Washington, D.C. You can email him at RShaw10290@aol.com.
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