The Vatican spoke out authoritatively almost a century ago, but the
lessons drawn from the American experience remain crucial for the
Church today.
by Russell Shaw
One hardly expects the 95th anniversary of a Church document to
command a great deal of attention around the world-or even within the
Church, for that matter-when almost no one reads the document in
question these days. Still, when the 95th anniversary of <Testem
Benevolentiae> rolled around early last year, it probably deserved
better than the near total silence it received.
An apostolic letter addressed by Pope Leo XIII to Cardinal Gibbons of
Baltimore and dated January 22, 1899, <Testem Benevolentiae> is the
papal document that condemned "Americanism." Today the Americanist
impulse reigns supreme in American Catholicism. That is not a bad
career record for what has been called a "phantom heresy."
To be fair, the Americanists of the 19th century-men like Father
Isaac Hecker, founder of the Paulists; Orestes Brownson, the convert
journalist and social critic who lies buried in the chapel crypt at
the University of Notre Dame; and Archbishop John Ireland of St.
Paul, Minnesota-had no inkling of what would happen. They dreamed of
evangelizing American culture, even as they faced the challenge of
defending their Church against the slur that Catholicism could only
be an alien force in a democratic, pluralistic society.
As I write, I have before me a vivid illustration of the problem: a
Thomas Nast cartoon from the February 19, 1870 <Harper's Weekly>. Now
framed and hung in my office, it was given to me by a friend in
return for one of my books; both-cartoon and book-are entitled
"Church and State."
Nast was a brilliant cartoonist with a virulent antiCatholic streak,
and this is a fine example of his work in that vein. The cartoon has
two panels. In the upper panel, Pope Pius X sags disconsolately in
the arms of mitred clerics while Liberty tears a scroll whose two
halves bear the legends "Church" and "State." Looking on approvingly
are the European political leaders of the day, such as Queen
Victoria, Bismarck. In the lower panel, set in the US, a beaming Pius
X blesses a crone who is busily stitching "Church" and "State" back
together; Liberty in manacles glowers from a pillar emblazoned
"Fraudulent Votes" while an ugly lout with Irish features mocks her
plight. In the background a chubby priest gloats over a sack labeled
"Public School Money."
No wonder the Americanists of those days, confronting anti-Catholic
propagandizing like this, felt impelled to assert the compatibility
of their faith and their citizenship. They had no way to anticipate
the profoundly different problem Catholics in the United States would
face by the latter years of the 20th century: not exclusion from the
surrounding secular culture but radical absorption by it, so that the
distinctively Catholic character of American Catholicism would be in
danger of disappearing.
What is Americanism?
"There's not a dime's worth of difference between Catholics and their
fellow Americans now in moral outlook or religious practice. We
fornicate at the same rate. We divorce at the same rate. We abort our
children at the same rate. We are materially rich and so, in true
chauvinistic fashion, we claim favored-nation status before the
Lord." That unflattering judgment appears in a recent article on
Americanism by Father Rory Conley, a Washington, DC priest and
student of Church history. Writing in <Caelum et Terra> (winter
1993), he calls what has happened "the triumph of Americanism over
the Roman Catholic Church in this country."
One cannot lay all the blame at the door of Americanism, of course,
but its contribution should not be ignored. It is worth taking a look
back at the Americanist controversy for the light it sheds on how we
arrived where we are. Begin, then, with Pope Leo's apostolic letter
<Testem Benevolentiae>.
Most immediately, the papal document is concerned with certain
currents of thought in the French Catholicism of its day, rather than
with the United States. The occasion for issuing it was a French
translation and condensation of an American Paulist priest's <Life of
Isaac Thomas Hecker>, especially the preface written by a lecturer at
the Institut Catholique, Abbe Felix Klein. Published in 1896, the
book went into six printings in a matter of months, and touched off
heated controversy. Viewing Hecker as an exemplary priest for the
times, Klein argued that the Church should play down some elements of
the deposit of faith while adapting herself to the circumstances of
an advanced civilization. Pope Leo, working from a report by a
committee of cardinals, condemned these and other views without
attributing them to anyone. In doing so, he made it clear that he was
not criticizing "the characteristic qualities which reflect honor on
the people of America."
Is that all there is to <Testem Benevolentiae>? Indeed not. For years
before 1899 a serious "Americanist" controversy had been underway
among Catholics in the United States. It provided the background for
the events in France, and for Pope Leo's authoritative response.
For a long time, the tendency among Church historians was to
pooh-pooh this view of the matter. Thomas T. McAvoy, CSC, in The
Great CYESSS in American Catholic History 1895-1900, shows an
instance of this tendency. His argument was that, in the United
States at least, Americanism either hardly existed or, if it did
exist was nothing to cause concern. As far as the Church in this
country was concerned, Pope Leo needn't have worried.
More recently, however, the pendulum of historical opinion has swung
back the other way, so that American Catholic "Americanism" has come
to be seen as something both real and serious. Father Conley, for
example, identifies four central Americanist tenets:
* that the world was in an era of radical change (as indeed it was
then, and still is today);
* that America was at the cutting edge of change-indeed, was the very
embodiment of the future (which was also true, and very likely still
is true, although no one can say how long it will remain the case);
* that the Catholic Church was obliged to change with the times (a
proposition which may be either true or false, depending on what
specific content one gives to that statement); and
* that the Church in America-or, as is now often said, the "American
Church"-had a divine mission to point the way to the Church
everywhere else, and particularly to "Rome" (which contains an
element of truth, but suffers from a fatal arrogance as well as from
a failure to comprehend the divine constitution of the Church).
A corollary, perhaps, can be glimpsed in the exasperation seething
just below the surface in a writer like Brownson at the thought that
support for the pope's embattled temporal claims to the Papal States
was a relevant test of Catholic loyalty in the United States.
Catholicism and the American experience
There is, however, a central fifth tenet fundamental to the
Americanist point of view: a belief in the intrinsic compatibility
between Catholicism and American culture. Archbishop Ireland
expressed the idea in beguilingly simplistic terms in 1884: "The
choicest field which providence offers in the world today to the
occupancy of the Church is this republic, and she welcomes with
delight the signs of the times that indicate a glorious future for
her beneath the starry banner." And in a remarkable address to a
French audience in 1892, seven years before the promulgation of
<Testem Benevolentiae>, Ireland declared:
The future of the Catholic Church in America is bright and
encouraging. To people of other countries, American Catholicism
presents features which seem unusual; these features are the result
of the freedom which our civil and political institutions give us;
but in devotion to Catholic principles, and in loyalty to the
successor of Peter, American Catholics yield to none.... Besides,
those who differ from us in faith have no distrust of Catholic
bishops and priests. Why should they? By word and act we prove that
we are patriots of patriots. Our hearts always beat with love for the
republic. Our tongues are always eloquent in celebrating her praises.
Our hands are always uplifted to bless her banners and her soldiers.
This is as naive as it is sincere. In the middle years of this
century, by contrast, John Courtney Murray, SJ, polished the
Americanizers' intuitions to a sophisticated high gloss. The Catholic
Church, he argued, was not simply comfortable in America; properly
understood, the American tradition and the Catholic tradition were
very nearly one and the same. In his celebrated and enormously
influential book <We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the
American Proposition> (1960), Murray wrote of the "evident
coincidence of the principles which inspired the American Republic
with the principles which are structural to the Western Christian
political tradition"-principles which, he contended, find their
fullest expression in the Catholic natural-law tradition.
John Courtney Murray died in 1967. He lived long enough to see the
leading edge of the cultural revolution of that era, but not the full
collapse into secularized barbarism that followed. That may have been
his good fortune, but it raises unavoidable questions about his
relevance today. Murray correctly argued the compatibility of
Catholicism and the American system at a time when they were
compatible. What of the nearly three decades since then? What of the
situation now?
Kennedy in Houston
To Murray's credit, he anticipated the onset of the deluge and
attempted to project his analysis into the radically changed cultural
circumstances that only fully emerged after his death. In 1962 he
wrote:
If this country is to be overthrown from within or without, I would
suggest that it will not be overthrown by Communism. It will be
overthrown because it will have made an impossible experiment. It
will have undertaken to establish a technological order of most
marvelous intricacy, which will have been constructed and will
operate without relations to true political ends: and this
technological order will hang, as it were, suspended over a moral
confusion; and this moral confusion will itself be suspended over a
spiritual vacuum.
For something written more than three decades ago, this is a
remarkably apt description of America in 1995. The struggle now, as
Murray foresaw, is for the very soul of America. Murray's
intellectual heirs among contemporary Catholic neoconservatives
continue to argue the fundamental compatibility in principle between
the American system and the Catholic natural-law tradition. As a
practical matter they are right to make that argument, for unless
their position is correct and, even more to the point, unless it can
be vindicated against powerful forces of post-modern disintegration,
the likely future of the United States and its culturally assimilated
Catholics is an increasingly deadly moral chaos.
Just as John Courtney Murray provided the definitive intellectual
rationale for the Americanizers' vision of Catholic and American
compatibility, so the election of John E. Kennedy as president in
1960 supplied the definitive affirmation of the same insight on the
political and symbolic levels. That also is significant. Crucial to
Kennedy's victory was his famous speech in Houston to an audience of
suspicious Protestant ministers-a speech promising that he would not
allow religious allegiance to override his duties as president and
that, in the event of irresolvable conflict between the two, he would
resign. Whatever Kennedy and his theological speech-writers (the
Catholic journalist, later an Episcopalian priest, John Cogley, is
said to have been the principal author) were thinking of, the door
was thereby opened to a generation of Catholic politicians who soon
would troop through proclaiming themselves "personally opposed" to
abortion (as their religious affiliation required them to be) but no
less opposed to "imposing their morality" on others by law and public
policy.
Archbishops, theologians, and presidents are, in the nature of
things, not your typical men in the street. So one might ask: Are the
shifting currents of Americanism reflected in the everyday world of
grassroots Catholicism? Have ordinary American Catholics wrestled-and
do they now wrestle-with what it means to be both Catholic and
American? Indeed they have, and indeed they do.
A case study
Consider the Knights of Columbus. Disclosure is required here. I work
for the K of C. My purpose, however, is not to sing the praises of
the organization, but to use the Knights to illustrate the tensions
at work in this still-unfolding tale. Even within the Church the
Knights of Columbus often are taken for granted, and that is a
mistake bred of elitism. With 1.2 million members in the United
States, this organization of American origin occupies a position of
great importance in Catholic life. More than any other Church
institution (with the possible exception of the parochial school), it
is a distinctive expression of American Catholicism-one that tells
much about the Church in this country. The Knights of Columbus were
founded in 1882 in New Haven, Connecticut, by a young Irish-American
priest, Father Michael J. McGivney, and a group of Irish-American
laymen. Their choice of Columbus as patron was a true indicator of
their intentions: a conscious symbolic affirmation of the
compatibility of Catholicism and Americanism. Hadn't the Catholic
Columbus arrived here in America first, well over a century before
the (Protestant) Puritans reached Plymouth Rock? By putting the focus
on the symbol of Columbus, argues historian Christopher J. Kauffman
in his history of the K of C, Faith and Fraternalism, "this small
group of New Haven Irish-American Catholics displayed their pride in
America's Catholic heritage. The name Columbus evoked the aura of
Catholicity and affirmed the discovery of America as a Catholic
event."
In the years that followed, the Knights not only remained true to
their original inspiration-the vision of their Church and their
country forever linked-but the organization also functioned,
practically speaking, as a powerful engine for the assimilation of
several generations of Catholic immigrants into American culture.
Irishmen, Germans, Poles, Italians, Slovaks-all became American as
well as Catholic partly through the good offices of the K of C.
Writes Kauffman:
From its origins to World War I, the Order's goals were most visibly
expressed in its assertion of the social legitimacy and patriotic
loyalty of Catholic immigrants [a striking instance of that is the
Knights' "patriotic" Fourth Degree]. By accepting-indeed,
extolling-the religious and ethnic pluralism of American society, by
portraying Catholic citizenship as the highest form of American
citizenship, by promoting American- Catholic culture...and by
expressing a firm belief that the American Catholic experience has
had a transforming effect upon Catholicism and upon American society,
the Knights generally reflected the optimism characteristic of
several ecclesiastical leaders associated with the "Americanist"
posture in American Catholicism.
If the Knights' role in fostering the assimilation of Catholic
immigrants diminished after the First World War, that was because
Catholic immigration also diminished, thanks to changes in
immigration law inspired (at least in part) by the nativist sentiment
of the times. The basic affirmation-Catholicism and America are
compatible- remained strong, so that in 1960 the Knights of Columbus
took rich satisfaction from the fact that John E. Kennedy was a
Fourth-Degree Knight.
A shift toward the counterculture
As the cultural revolution of the 1960s set in and progressed,
however, the Knights' situation began to change. The change can be
traced to-among other sources-the rhetoric of John W. McDevitt,
Supreme Knight of the K of C in those years. McDevitt, who died last
December at the age of 87, headed the organization from 1964 to
1977-by anyone's standards a stressful period in secular and
ecclesiastical history. One measure of the times can be found in the
increasingly negative tone of McDevitt's public comments about the
Church's enemies within and without.
Responding in 1968 to the question, "Are the Knights progressive or
conservative?" McDevitt argued that they were both: progressive on
matters of social policy, "conservative in our reaction to those who
lobby for causes which would rob our country of its ties to
Judeo-Christian morality."
The inroads of secular humanism became a frequent McDevitt theme. In
1976, in one of his last major addresses as Supreme Knight, he lashed
out at the Supreme Court as a source of much of the trouble.
"Contrary to the original intent of a benign tolerance of all
religions," he said, "the current court philosophy has forced
government to take a position of negative neutrality on all
religion." As a result, "we do have an established religion...the
religion of irreligion-secular humanism, established and decreed by
the courts." We have come a long way here from John Ireland's
"glorious future... beneath the starry banner."
Whether one agrees or disagrees with McDevitt's analysis, no one
familiar with the K of C doubts that it was widely shared at the
time, and remains so today. As the secularization of American culture
has proceeded in the last three decades, and as the assimilation of
American Catholics into that increasingly secularized culture has not
only continued but apparently speeded up, the Knights of
Columbus-this grassroots, mainstream organization of ordinary
American laymen-has grown more and more countercultural in principles
and beliefs. While any given local council of the K of C may
successfully avoid controversy, the organization's national
leadership has taken an increasingly clear stand.
Illustrations abound: the organization's official, explicit,
unapologetic, and repeated support for <Humanae Vitae>; its
endorsement of natural family planning, backed by annual subsidies
for the NFP programs of the bishops in the United States and several
other countries; its opposition to abortion and support for the
pro-life movement, again backed up by heavy expenditures for its own
programs as well as those of the bishops; its "Catholic Advertising"
program aimed at winning converts to the Church in an era when the
effort to win converts is sometimes viewed askance; its unblushing
encouragement of traditional Catholic spirituality (the Rosary and
other Marian devotions, the sacrament of penance); its continued
emphasis on vocations to the priesthood and religious life.
Especially noteworthy in the present context is the overtly Roman
orientation of the Knights, which found its dual symbol in the 1980s
when the K of C paid for the renovation of the facade of St. Peter's
basilica.
The end of assimilation
Not all individual Knights of Columbus share the convictions and
commitments of the organization's leadership; no group the size of
the K of C enjoys uniformity like that. But these are the policies,
the programs, and the principles of the Knights as a collective
entity. Born in the late 19th century as a grassroots expression of
the American Catholicism of that day, the K of C now is arguably the
most strongly Roman Catholic institution of its size in the Church in
the United States. Kauffman concludes his history with the
observation: "Still grounded in a strong pride in the Catholic
heritage of North America, Columbianism developed into a conscious
cultivation of traditional Catholic loyalties to authority and of
Catholic social and moral values in a society characterized by the
decline of tradition." Having served for decades as a powerful force
for cultural assimilation, the K of C now helps slow down what could
otherwise be the terminal assimilation of American Catholics-their
absorption to the vanishing point by the secular culture that
surrounds and threatens to overwhelm them.
Plainly, the Knights of Columbus alone will not save the Catholic
community in the United States from that fate. It remains to be seen
whether anything will. Here and there, one sees signs of hope,
especially in the increasing talk (if not yet action) regarding
"Catholic identity." But the "American Church" is now dominant-so
that, for example, the attenuated religious identity of those
colleges that formerly called themselves "Catholic" and now tellingly
call themselves colleges "in the Catholic tradition" occupies the
mainstream albeit a mainstream in visible decline-of institutional
Catholicism in the United States today.
For Catholics who regard this as a profoundly unhealthy state of
affairs, there is an obvious conclusion. Roman Catholics in the
United States must urgently explore the range of options open to them
for practicing creative counterculturalism. Obvious models exist.
These range from the Amish (separatism, flight-the deliberate effort
to escape a corrupt and corrupting secular culture and raise walls
against it) to the model of the Christian Coalition (aggressive
engagement, in hopes of besting the adversary culture with political
weapons). Does either model appeal to Roman Catholics of the United
States? Is there some Catholic third way? Without panic, but in
clear-eyed recognition of our parlous state, we need to begin talking
about these things. If the Catholic Church in the United States means
to survive, Americanism must finally- nearly a century after <Testem
Benevolentiae> undertook to do the job be laid to rest. What comes
next?
Russell Shaw, a veteran journalist, is director of public information
for the Knights of Columbus, based in Washington, DC.
This article appeared in the May 1995 issue of "The Catholic World
Report," P.O. Box 6718, Syracuse, NY 13217-7912, 800-825-0061.
Published monthly except bimonthly August/September at $39.95 per
year.
