OK, don't give up hope just yet

Cardinal O'Malley and

You Know Who

Belated Happy Thanksgiving
Sorry for the hiatus.  And this is just a short posting to catch up.  We left off with Cardinal William O'Connell and I am anxious to get back to him.  O'Connell was called "Monsignor Pomposity" by one of his detractors--Vatican commentator Ella B. Edes, and to be honest she was being kind.  Today we are subject to O'Connell redivivus in such prelates as Cardinal Law and Archbishop Lori and especially Cardinal Burke.  Gosh, Burke is scary because he is so much like O'Connell that it is as if O'Connell came out of his tomb and walks the earth again--avoiding direct sunlight of course  But currently occupyng the cathedra once held by O'Connell is one of the few prelates who still is worth listening to, Cardinal Sean O'Malley.  I just found this Your Tube of O'Malley in which he "defends" Church teaching but in a way that is open and dialogic.  It gives us some hope that the American hierarchy isn't being taken over by aliens or zombies.  Anyhow, check it out--not great, but hopeful.   The man may walk the party line but he is reasonable. 

http://boston.cbslocal.com/2012/11/20/keller-large-one-on-one-with-cardinal-sean-omalley/


 

Catholic Calvinism

John Calvin, a patron saint

to some of us Americans

We’re Protestants, you and me, American Catholics.  We might like to think that we are faithful Catholics but we are so conditioned by our culture that we just don’t get the “Catholic thing.”  One example of what I mean is how we look at justice.  Like our neighbors coming out of the Calvinist tradition, we see justice as punitive, but that is not how our Catholic tradition understands justice.  Justice, in our Catholic heritage—whether it be based on the Epistles of Saint Paul or the patristic tradition or even Saint Thomas—is not about punishment due to sin, crime, or other wrongs, but it is about the Divine Order.  It is about each of God’s children having his or her share of creation that God has willed for that particular child of his to have.  This does not mean that we should all have the same.  And it doesn’t mean that we should all have our “fair” share—that is another misconception: that life should somehow or other be “fair.”  But it does mean that God wants the creation he entrusted to us collectively to be distributed equitably.  Of course I have no idea how “much” I should have, much less how “much” you should have.  But I do believe this: that God wants each of his children to have sufficient share of creation to live healthily and with dignity.  And when we talk about how human society should be organized, we Christians—if our faith is real—know that we must make this sort of justice the guiding principle of our actions and our choices.  Thy kingdom come: thy will be done…  God’s will is not being done when some of his children are hungry and others of us have so much more than we need. God’s will is not being done when some of his children are homeless and others own two and three homes.  God’s will is not being done when some of his children are left without medical care and others of us are indifferent to their plight.  A Calvinist would see that my surplus is a sign of God’s favor on me.  A Catholic knows that my surplus is God entrusting me with a responsibility for those who have less than they need.  Of course, good Calvinists and bad Catholics call that “socialism.” 

Apologia Pro Vita Mea

Bless me Father, for I

have sinned; I am a

Registered Democrat

In interest of full disclosure, I am a Democrat.  I can’t help it, I was born that way.  I grew up in South Buffalo—the same neighborhood as the late Tim Russert.  Remember how Tim used to describe South Buffalo:  where you are born Democrat and baptized Catholic.  He wasn’t exaggerating.  And I grew up in a Church family.  My dad was a daily communicant—as was his dad.  We went to Catholic School—the Sisters of Mercy.  Like Tim, when it was time for High School, I was sent cross-town, out of the Irish ghetto, to the Jesuits.  I learned my faith—at home, in Church, and at school. 

And what was that faith I learned.  I learned from the good nuns that Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore had gone to bat for Terrence Powderly and the Knights of Labor when more conservative churchmen like Archbishop Corrigan and Cardinal Taschereau were labeling them communists and socialists.  I learned from the nuns that Pope Leo XIII had embraced the side of the working classes against the robber barons with the encyclical Rerum Novarum.  And I learned the Pius XI had reinforced this with Quadrigesimo Anno some Quadrigesimo annos later.  I learned that Monsignor John Ryan who had taught at the Catholic University of America for many years and was the Director of the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Council (the predecessor of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) wrote about the rights of labor and the responsibilities of management.  I learned that  Bishop Francis Haas of Grand Grapids had served as a member of the National Labor Board and that Bishop Haas and Monsignor Ryan had worked with the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations to help pull us out of the Great Depression which had been caused by the reckless pro-rich policies of the Harding and Coolidge Administrations.  I learned that AFL-CIO President John F. Sweeney had said of Monsignor George Higgins of Catholic University: “He has been an irresistible force in bringing labor and church together…we respect him for his strength, we revere him for his conscience, we stand in awe of his intellect and we thank him for his love.”  I learned from the nuns that discrimination against people for any reasons whatsoever—in those days it was mostly because of race but the nuns didn’t limit their condemnations to that—discrimination against people for any reason whatsoever was sinful and wrong.  And by the way—all this was before Vatican II.  I learned that people had a right to live wherever they wanted and that it was wrong to refuse to rent or sell them property because they were “different.”  And I learned that yes, there were priests and even bishops in some places in the United States that believed that not all people should have equal rights but that they differed from the teaching of the Church and were an embarrassment to her.  I learned that we were here to serve the needs of others regardless of race or religion or any other barrier. In those days, of course, we didn’t have gay rights or women’s rights so those weren’t the issue but we weren’t taught issues, we were taught principles from which we could make rational applications to the issues at hand.  We did learn that rights and responsibilities were not limited to Catholics and did not depend on the state of one’s soul but only on the fact that they were human persons created by God.  The good Sisters themselves probably didn’t understand the implications that would unfold a half-century and more later from their teaching but they laid the groundwork—along with my parents and the parish priests—for the kind of Catholic I am today.
The Jesuits added to this not so much in content as in depth.  They gave us discipline and taught us character.  Their students were not all from the Irish Ghetto and as many came from wealthy families we were a far less homogenous group politically and socially.  The good Fathers of the Society of Jesus were far more sophisticated than the Sisters had been.  We learned more about the abstractions of what justice is from a theological viewpoint.  We learned that the Gospels put before us a certain vision of society—for example we learned that there are frightening implications in the story of Lazarus and the rich man.  What does that story say about distributive justice?  Unlike the nuns, the Jesuits did not give us answers—they posed questions, dilemmas, anomalies, and paradoxes.  They didn’t think for us but they taught us to think and they told us that no one else could think for us.  They refused to think for us and they told us not to let anyone else—no politician, no prelate (nor even a pope), no priest, to professor, no parent, no nobody think for us because God had given us an intelligence and would hold us to account for it one day.  It was and has proved to be a huge responsibility and when people comment on how many Jesuit alumni have left the Church and even devolved into atheism I think it is precisely because the Jesuits would not let us shirk moral responsibility and that proved too heavy a burden for those who wanted to choose “success” or “happiness” or whatever rather than integrity. 
With this sort of a background how could I have become anything other than a Democrat.  Now remember, growing up in New York State in the 50’s and ‘60’s the Republicans were the liberal party—the party of Rockefeller and Javits.  But there is more history than that.
The Catholics in the first days of our Republic gravitated to the Federalist party.  Catholics—in those early days—were heavily of the Maryland aristocracy.  They were moneyed and propertied.  The French Revolution scared them from Jefferson and his Republicans who naively idealized the revolution and its goals.  Jefferson’s party would eventually grow into today’s Democratic Party but the Catholics would find in it a refuge from the more extreme liberalism of the Whigs and the Republicans.
By the 1824 presidential election the Federalist party had collapsed.  George Washington had never wanted to see political parties as he believed—from the experience of the Whigs and Tories in the England of his day—that they divided the nation and that seeking the common good was a collaborative and not a competitive effort.  But political parties were an inevitability given the way government was structured—and probably even more that human nature has been flawed by original sin—and there seems to be an inevitable need, for people to see themselves in opposition to others.  All may want the “common good” but different people will see from different perspectives diverse propositions of what the common good may be.  And so as the Federalists died away it was all but inevitable that a counter-weight to Jefferson’s (and now Jackson’s) political machine should develop. 
You may remember from earlier entries (Jan 22, 23, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, Feb 1, and March 7, 2011) that it was at this time—the 1830’s—that a virulent strain anti-Catholicism first began to reemerge in the American Republic.)  Catholic support for the American Revolution and the spirit of tolerance that pervaded the Republic through its early years had muted the tradition of anti-Catholicism that the colonists had brought with them from England.  But as the first great wave of immigration brought Catholics in great numbers—mostly Irish and German at this point—to America’s shores, there was a negative reaction from those who wanted to “keep America American.”  Episodes like the Charlestown convent burning and the anti-Catholic riots in Philadelphia and New York represent this caricature of Catholicism as a “foreign” and “unAmerican” religion.
Now pay attention as this explanation is going to use terms in ways that are a bit different than we use them today.  It was the “liberal” faction in American society that wanted to keep the country from immigrant (and Catholic) influence.  They saw Europeans as monarchy-loving and unable to absorb the democratic principles on which our nation was founded.  They sought to pass laws limiting numbers of immigrants except Protestants from Britain.  They wanted to put in difficult barriers from those born in other European countries attaining citizenship.  They wanted to limit positions as public school teachers to Protestants.  This was all to protect the American tradition from being corrupted by monarchy and Catholicism.  Catholicism was identified with the European absolutist monarchs—France, Spain, Portugal, Bavaria, the Austrian Emperor, and, of course, the Pope who himself was king of a significant slice of the Italian Peninsula called the Papal States. 
The Jefferson-Jackson party—the Democratic Republicans—today’s Democrats—were the conservative party.  And while Jefferson had thought religion, all religion, was only for the common sort of people and not intellectuals like himself, and while Jackson had a frontier Second-Great-Awakening prejudice against Catholicism, their party offered a safer refuge for Catholics than the liberal “Whigs” who saw Catholicism as unAmerican and dangerous to democracy. 
The Whigs themselves soon, by the 1850’s, morphed into what we know today as the Republican Party.  Catholics were, for the most part, not as bitterly opposed to “The South’s Peculiar Institution” (slavery) as the evangelicals that made up a significant part of the Whig (and then Republican) Party.  (Yes, these were days when the Evangelicals and Republicans were liberals.)  In the Civil War while Archbishop John Hughes of New York was an ardent supporter of the Republic and encouraged recruitment in the  “Fighting 69th  (New York 69th  regiment) among the Irish immigrants of New York City, Catholics in general were more tepid supporters of “Mr. Lincoln’s War.” 
After the Civil War the estrangement between Catholics and the Republican party only grew stronger.  In the 1884 presidential campaign, Republican candidate James G. Blaine, was on the platform when a speaker, the Reverend Dr. Samuel Burchard declared “We are Republicans and we don’t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.”  Blaine did not disassociate himself from the remark and it cost him the Catholic vote and the election.  It also firmly impressed on the Catholic memory that the Republican Party was no friends of the Catholics. 
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were marked by massive immigration from Catholic Europe—not only Ireland and Germany, but Italy and the Austro-Hungarian empire.  Once again the Liberals—and this politically meant the Republicans—were alarmed at the number and influence of the immigrant populations.  Quotas were imposed, though not very successfully, favoring Protestant nations of northern Europe over the Catholic populations of central and southern Europe.  The interventions of Pope Leo XIII to try to avert the Spanish-American War were resented by the Republicans—the party of Teddy Roosevelt who declared: “it’s a little war, but it’s the only one we have.”  The liberal goal was to spread America and American democracy—and with it Protestantism—around the world and the defeat of Spain put both Cuba and the Philippines under American tutelage. 
It is difficult for us to think of Manifest Destiny (a polite term for American Imperialism), colonialism, anti-immigrant sentiment, English-only, etc. as a liberal agenda.  It only goes to show how ideologies, like fashions, change.  But as for American Catholics, they saw themselves as being pushed to the margins of a society that idealized and identified itself with old blood and old money.   This view of America believed and taught that anyone could pull themselves up by the bootstraps and holding up rugged individualism as the American way saw labor unions and collective protection of workers as subverting our American principles.  Consequently the immigrants and factory-workers—overwhelmingly Catholic—turned to the Democratic Party where they felt they were being heard.  The dedication of Church leaders such as Cardinal Gibbons solidified the ties between working-class and immigrant Catholics and the Democratic Party. 
Not all bishops supported the working classes, of course. Corrigan of New York and O’Connell of Boston—an arrogant blowhard of a mitered Pharisee if there ever was one—supported the Protestant ascendancy of the old and moneyed families and the few Paddy-Catholic nouveau riche against the social and economic interests of the sheep entrusted to their episcopal care, but while these bishops had great power they did not have the respect that was given to Gibbons and those bishops who were concerned about the working classes—many of whom were forced to live in squalor while their employers, the great Robber-Barons, had their Fifth-Avenue townhouses and summer homes in Newport.
Just as not all bishops supported labor, nor did all Democrats like Catholics.  Woodrow Wilson, in so many ways an idealist, had a strong streak of anti-Catholicism.  He was, after all, a preacher’s kid from the Old South and carried all those prejudices.  He made sure that Benedict XV was kept out of the peace conferences that ended World War I and that may have played a role in the unhappy and unjust “peace” that would bear fruit in a resentful Germany rising from the encumbrances placed on it by the Allies and striking back in World War II.  But at home in the United States the Catholic faithful overlooked Wilson’s biases and maintained their loyalty to the Democratic Party.  In 1928 the Democrats took a bold chance and nominated a Catholic, Governor Al Smith of New York, for the presidency.  Bold, it was also a bad choice.  A tsunami of Anti-Catholicism swept over the country as rumors of a papal takeover and destruction of the Republic threw the nation into a frenzy.  Smith lost in a landslide as Protestant Ministers joined Ku Klux Klanners in rallying bigots of every shade of sickly pale from Boston Brahmin to Southern Cracker to keep the nation Protestant and Republican.  But it was still good for the Democrats.   The defeat of Smith solidified Catholic support for the Democrats as the sense of shared defeat made the Catholics feel that the Democrats were their protectors while in fact the Democrat machine probably saw them more as a constituency to be manipulated than an honored ally.
FDR made the most of that alliance.  In his programs to rebuild the nation from the disaster of the Great Depression he made fast the ties between the Catholic Church and the Democratic Party.  Roosevelt came from a very blue-blood WASP family who only knew Catholics as chauffer’s and parlor-maids, but he didn’t let his personal prejudices get in the way of valuable political alliances.  He courted the Catholic Church.  He made it clear that he wanted the national capital to be the seat of an Archbishop: the honor of the United States required it.  He appointed prominent priests and monsignors to various posts—mostly having to do with economics and labor relations.  He sent a personal representative to the Vatican.  (Congress, or the national mood, was not about to let him establish formal diplomatic relations.)  Not all Catholics liked him.  Father Charles Coughlin, a Michigan priest with a popular—very popular—radio following, quickly turned from a Roosevelt supporter to a Roosevelt foe but Coughlin, a notorious anti-Semite, was probably more valuable as an enemy than a friend.   Roosevelt actively courted Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago, and Mundelein, though no liberal, relished the attention. Then there were any number of social progressives in the hierarchy—Cardinal Mooney of Detroit, Archbishops McNicholas and Sheil, Bishop Frank Haas of Grand Rapids, Monsignor John Ryan of Catholic University.  Harry Truman, a Baptist, also kept the Catholics on his side continuing the alliance between Democrats and labor.  This was a time when Catholics worked in factories or construction and depended on labor unions to protect them.  Catholic teaching on the rights of labor, articulated by Leo XIII and Pius XI, brought politics, economics, and religion into harmony.
The apex of the Catholic/Democrat alliance was reached when John F. Kennedy was the Democratic nominee for President in 1960.  Catholics saw the day come when the highest office in the land was now open to one of their own and they were no longer second class citizens.  The anti-Catholicism that had surfaced during the campaign only served to solidify the marriage of Catholics and the Democratic Party, but things were already beginning to change. 
Thanks to the GI Bill Catholics were beginning to move up the social ladder rapidly and from the blue collar workforce into the professions.  Democrats too were changing—from working-class liberals to suburban liberals.  The issues had changed from economics to social questions and Catholics, particularly those who attended Church, were not always ready to move.  Catholics had been slow to get aboard the Civil Rights movement though eventually they came over—not without some pushing from Rome—and they were even slower to stand up against the war in Vietnam.  But where the great divide fell into place was with Roe vs. Wade and the consequent legalization of abortion. 
Abortion has been perhaps the most divisive issue in America since the Civil War, but what is the most dangerous aspect of the polarization caused by this issue is that the various sides have been unable to establish any dialogue or discussion that can bridge the divide and find some common ground on which to build a national consensus.  When the late Cardinal Bernadin called for such an initiative his fellow prelates, especially the much admired Cardinal Law and his shanty side-kick, the ideologue Cardinal Hickey publicly ripped him apart in a shameful manner.  One can be solidly pro-life and willing to speak with—and listen to—those who are “pro-choice.”  Indeed, if we ever want to resolve this issue in order to protect the unborn we will have to listen attentively to one another.  A refusal to dialogue only condemns the reluctant mother to be pitted against her unborn child, but at this point both sides are so septic that I wonder if any rational conversation is in the realm of possibility. 
Catholics only began going over to the Republican party in the 1984 election as Ronald Reagan had begun to win their trust against a Democratic Party that had begun to take them for granted.  Unlike in the America of my salad days, Catholics are no longer automatically Democrats.  Now there is a split down the middle.  Most who have become Republicans have done so not so much for the conservative social agenda as Catholics, abortion aside, still tend toward the left on social questions (“tend” being the operative word).  White, professional Catholics from the more secure social classes feel more at home in the Republican party as that is where their colleagues and neighbors feel most at home.   Blue collar, racially diverse, lower economic strata Catholics (of which there are fewer and fewer)—along with us educated old liberal leftovers from the sixties—still hang out with the Democrats though we often feel like the patronized stepchildren of the chic arm-chair liberals that run the party.  Sometimes I wish I had taken less philosophy courses and more business ones and then I too could have voted for Newt in the primaries.  But at the end of the day I can’t slip my history, my Catholic history and while I have voted for Republican candidates when I think they are the better person for the office, and while I will at times vote Republican again—like Tim Russert I am going to have to explain to Saint Peter why, at heart, I am a Democrat regardless of the attempts of our good bishops to convert me. 

America's Two Churches

Catholic Church, St. Mary's

City, Maryland in the simple

American Recusant style



In my courses on the history of the Catholic Church in the United States I show the students that there has existed two distinct Catholic Churches in the American Republic for two hundred years now.  One Catholic Church is represented by the colonial tradition brought by English Recusants to the Maryland colony with the Ark and the Dove in 1634.  Led by Jesuit Father Andrew White the Catholic settlers in Maryland brought the discreet Catholicism of Stuart England.  Due to the penal laws in England, it was a sober Catholicism where devotional life was centered in the family and devoid of the public spectacles of Continental Catholicism.  Its spirituality, impregnated with the heritage of its Jesuit chaplains, was centered about the person and life of Jesus Christ and it was a faith of spiritual reading and meditative prayer.   Its churches were simple and its liturgy plain in the recusant style.  This was the Catholicism of John Carroll and Leonard Neale.  It fit in well with the American Republic and its democratic traditions.  It was glad to be rid of monarchy and monarchial style—the Catholics universally supporting the War of Independence and embracing the new Republic.  Its new Cathedral in Baltimore, the Basilica of the Assumption designed in the neo-classic Federal Style by Benjamin Latrobe, was devoid of statues even of Christ and his Mother.  Its clergy, including Archbishop Carroll, wore simple clothes in the lay style but in black or darker shades and without ornamentation.  Its nuns—Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton’s Sisters of Charity, eschewed veils and wimples for the sober dress and bonnets characteristic of widows in the early nineteenth century.  

With the waves of immigration that began coming after 1830, another Catholic Church took root in the United States.  Initially predominately German, it was soon supplemented by Italians and later by Poles and refugees from what was the Hapsburg Empire.  Here came the tradition of public processions in the streets and churches rich with stained glass and statuary.  Here came devotion to myriad saints from long ago and faraway places.  (The Irish—having lost their traditions after three centuries of English Persecution—mostly identified more with the old American/Recusant heritage.) This immigrant Catholicism and old American Catholicism barely recognized one another as sharing the same faith.  At first the American bishops tried to suppress the European Continental Catholicism or at least confine it to ethnic parishes but it was not to be contained.  After a period of time it divided along ethnic and more importantly along class lines with the older (and more upper-crust) American families preferring a more sober approach to their faith and the immigrant traditions and working classes liking the more colorful and distinctive expression of Catholicism.  This is far more simplistic than I would like it to be but one can only do so much in a blog entry. 

I think since the Second Vatican Council a second division has cut cross-wise through the American Church.  Again we have two churches.  We have a Church that looks to the past and cherishes the distinctiveness of Catholic identity with its rich ethnic heritage.  There is a strong move to build churches again in the baroque style, filled with color and stained glass and statues.  There is a desire for outdoor processions where priests show off their silk and brocade robes to our mundane world of jeans and sweatshirts.  There is a desire to restore the pomp and power that characterized the Church of the first half of the twentieth century.  I know I make relentless fun of Cardinal Burke and others for their long trains of silk and their fur wraps, but the desire is to hold on to the power that bishops and cardinals once had—and through them we as Church had—over politicians and newspapers for fear of alienating the masses of Catholics who were blindly loyal to their institutional leaders. We resent the loss of power and influence and even mistake this shift as “persecution” or impingements on religious freedom.  

On the other hand there are Catholics today who look not to this past—glorious as it was—but to the future and see the vocation of the Church to be for service.  Cardinal Dulles, in his book on the Catholicity of the Church, says that the first millennium of the Church was characterized by witness, the second by power and the third will be characterized by service.  There are those in the Church who are ready to renounce the drive for power and to move into this third millennium and take up the vocation of service.  They see the Church as here to be servant to the world and think that these signs of earthly power—the long robes, the kissing of hands and rings, the quasi-imperial edicts emitting from bishops like Fabian Bruskewitz, late of Lincoln, or Thomas Olmstead of Phoenix or Cardinal Burke, once of Saint Louis—are anachronisms that make the Church appear, well as the late Cardinal Martini said, 200 years out of date. 

Those who look to the future tend to identify more with the old American tradition; those who relish the past identify more with the immigrant tradition.  Both are Catholic.  Both are American.  But at times we look at one another and wonder how—and if—we are in the same Church at all.    



The Maryland Catholic Tradition: Ahead of its Time

Bishop John Carroll

I have made several entries on the style of Catholicism in colonial and early Republican Maryland and how much it has in common with modern Catholic practice.  Churches were plain and without much decoration—the Cathedral in Baltimore not even having statues.  While the Mass was in Latin (despite Bishop Carroll’s desire for it to be in the vernacular), Carroll and other clergy had translated much of the sacramental ritual from Latin into English.  Despite Roman prohibitions on ecumenism, American Catholics were used to cooperating with their Protestant countrymen and even worshipping with them on occasion. Churches usually had lay trustees—something that would cause Carroll and other bishops enough headaches that they would eventually do away with them.  (Bishop John England of Charleston, on the other hand, wrote a Constitution for his diocese and had an annual convention of lay and clergy to help in the decision making.)  Carroll had been elected bishop by the clergy and he hoped that Rome would permit future bishops to be elected as well.  (Rome did not permit.)  Carroll and other clergy routinely wore lay clothing, albeit in dark colors, while on the street.  When Carroll brought the first religious women to the United States—four Carmelite cloistered nuns from the Netherlands (three of whom were Maryland natives) they arrived in secular dress and resumed their habit only when they were ensconced in their monastery at Port Tobacco.  Several years later when he asked Elizabeth Ann Seton, a widowed convert from Episcopalianism, to organize an American religious sisterhood based on Vincent dePaul’s Daughters of Charity, it was decided that they would wear the plain black dress and bonnet of widows rather than the cornettes of their French counterparts or the more traditional wimple and veil of nuns.    Carroll, his priests, and the American faithful had no qualms of “fitting in”—indeed that was their goal.  They saw no reason why they had to stand aside from their countrymen believing that Americanism and Catholicism were perfectly compatible. The Catholic faith was to be packaged in American homespun rather than European brocade. 
     Maryland Catholics would never have worked their way into the untenable position of the Leesburg Knights of Columbus who insisted on a religious display on the Courthouse lawn only to find that their campaign opened the door to atheist displays that mocked not only Catholicism but faith itself.  In Carroll’s day Catholicism was known for what it stood for; today Catholicism is too often better known for what it is against.  Evangelism doesn’t work when the message is what we are against.  

More on Maryland's post Vatican II heritage even before Vatican II

Pius VI who was Pope at the time
of the American Revolution and
later named John Carroll as the
first Catholic Bishop for the new
Republic

I had mentioned in an earlier blog that colonial and early American Maryland Catholicism bore more resemblance to contemporary Catholicism than to the pre-Conciliar Church in which many of us grew up.  While the Mass was in Latin and celebrated with the priest’s back to the people in eighteenth century Maryland and the liturgy—in general—was the same liturgy (for the most part) we all knew up until the 1964 changes began to introduce a thorough revision of the Mass, there was still much with which we would feel comfortable today.  Priests, on their own, had put some of the sacraments—especially Matrimony, Baptism, and Penance into English, either in whole or in part.  Many of the funeral rites were celebrated in English.  It went so far as that in order to have some uniformity in rites a “Baltimore Ceremonial” was drawn up and that was done without any reference to Rome.  Unlike today when any perceived variation in the liturgical text or form is reported to Rome, this was not a problem in an American Church that recognized its own maturity to deal with the pastoral needs of its people without constant reference to purpled desk-jockeys from a foreign culture who had themselves never undertaken a pastoral ministry much less one in what was then a missionary land.  The first American bishop (and first Archbishop), John Carroll, fostered loyalty to the Holy See among American Catholics, but according to the website of what was his archdiocese, Baltimore,” he was not overly generous in the information he supplied the Roman authorities nor overly conscientious in following their directives.”   (The website is new—Carroll was pretty modern but not that modern.)  During much of Carroll’s episcopacy the popes—Pius VI and Pius VII—were kept by Napoleon in exile from Rome which somewhat naturally separated papal loyalty from curial obedience, a healthy distinction.  
      When Carroll built his Cathedral in Baltimore, now known as the Basilica of the Assumption, he hired Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the architect who built the United States Capitol despite the fact the Latrobe was not a Catholic.  Carroll wanted a Cathedral that did not reflect European heritage but the ideals of the new American Republic.  The consequent church, like the public buildings of the republic, embodied reason, order, discipline, and harmony.  It’s crisp clean lines, not in gothic or baroque but in American Federal style speak of the American faith experience: enlightened, rational, discreet, and hopeful.  But Carroll, for some reason, never thought to put a single statue in his basilica—that would only come with Archbishop Maréchal, Carroll’s second successor who was Archbishop from 1817 until 1828.   The basilica recently underwent a restoration and has proved itself to be suitable for the current liturgy without doing violence to the original design. 

Does Rome Have a Bias against America?

I received this email from a reader and promised to respond to it

Something just came to mind from reading your blog posts.  America magazine and even to some degree American Catholic (Franciscans out of Ohio) are panned by some as too liberal.  Are "America" and "American" charged words in Roman Catholicism?  Does having "America" in their names suggest an intentional desire to emphasize their ties to American Catholicism over European Catholicism?
Or am I just reading too much into that?  I can't think of a Catholic publication, radio program, etc. that people consider "conservative" here in the states that has "America" in its name.

This is a great question.  And in one word the answer is “yes.” 

In this blog I have a series on the history of the Catholic Church in the United States.   It is a topic I intend to return to—especially a more close examination of the history of the Church in the colonial and revolutionary period in which Catholicism in the British North American colonies and in the infant republic was stamped with a democratic character, an ecumenical openness, and a reluctance to exert power in political and social matters.  In case you haven’t noticed, that isn’t the contemporary Catholic take—either here in the U.S. from the Bishops or in Rome from the Holy See.  It was only at the turn of the nineteenth-twentieth centuries that Rome even began to notice that there was a Catholic Church in the United States and that it was quite different in character from the European model of Church.  Let me refer back to the entry of  April 13^th  2011 where I wrote:

The Holy See was increasingly frustrated with the American Church.  They were appalled at its openness to non-Catholics, they were fearful of its democratic heritage, and they did not understand why it was so unable to influence the society in which it was rooted.  The Holy See saw a potential for power in the American Church that it had not itself yet recognized.  While it may have been only a small fragment of the general population, it was the largest—and fastest growing—religious body in the United States.  Surely with the right sort of leadership it could leverage itself from its position in the shadows of American Presbyterianism, Methodism, and Episcopalianism into the  catbird seat of American public influence.  All it needed was the right leadership..

There was a definite change in leadership style in the American Church after 1900 and the appointment of William O’Connell at Archbishop of  Boston and his soon thereafter appointment to the College of Cardinals.  Over the years, and especially the mid-century period there was some backsliding into American oriented prelates being appointed from Rome.  While men like Mundelein and Spellman could not have been more loyal to Rome, they were also died-in-the wool Americans, particularly in the issue of separation of Church and State where they defended the American aberration from Roman Doctrine, and the American spirit began to revive.    During the papacy of Paul VI and especially the years that Jean Jadot was Apostolic Delegate this Americanism thrived.  In the 70’s and ’80’s there were appointed remarkable bishops that took Vatican II to the limits of its revolutionary doctrines—men like Cardinal Bernadin, Cardinal Shehan of Baltimore, Archbishop Hallinan, Bishop Clark of Rochester, Bishop Kenneth Untener of Saginaw, Bishop Howard Hubbard of Albany, Archbishop Roach of St. Paul, Archbishop Kelly of Louisville, Archbishop Hunthausen of Seattle, Archbishop Quinn of San Francisco, and many others.   The election of John Paul II, however, marked a sure but steady change of direction in the Church and under John Paul, and now with Pope Benedict, the first and all important characteristic for appointment to the hierarchy is an unquestioning loyalty to Rome.  Now, there is nothing wrong with this.  Indeed the unity of the Church requires that the various dioceses throughout the world, through their bishops, are firmly cemented in unity with the See of Peter.  But what is worth noting is that the emphasis that this is given; the loyalty and total obedience to every detail of the authority of the Holy See is a clear indication that Rome does not trust the American Church.  For a wider discussion of this topic, you might want to check the various blog entries under the labels “Americanism” and “American Catholics and Roman Catholics.”
The only thing I want to add to this, is that I am very familiar with Rome and the Curia Romana.  I have lived and worked in Rome for various periods totaling about ten years of my adult life.  I am normally in Rome two to four times a year.  I have many friends in Rome with whom I am in regular contact and who stay with me when in the States or whom I meet at various international meetings.  The vast majority of these friends are Italian and are connected in some way or other with international Catholicism.  Indeed, the vast majority are clergy, some holding Vatican posts. 

My experience is, and I will speak only from experience, that Curial officials, especially the Europeans in the Italians in particular, have strong cultural biases against America in the realms of culture, religious practice, and law.  They openly mock American culture in terms of art, music, literature, cuisine, education, and intellectual work. The Italians in particular tend to be very culturally isolated believing that there is nothing beyond the Alps that compares to anything Italian.  There is a strong degree of Racism, especially directed towards peoples of South-East Asia and Africa.   What is tragic about this is that Church attendance among American Catholics—while it could be better—is six times that of Italian Catholics.  There is no comparison t the financial support given the Church—both locally and to the Holy See—between American and Italian faithful.  For all the issues about celibacy, it is far better observed in the American Church than it is among Italian clergy.  The American Church has issues, but it is a far more vibrant Church than one finds anywhere in Western Europe.  Far from being a model for the Americans, the European Church—and the Italian Church in particular—has much it could learn from us (and from other national Churches around the world) and the tampering in American Church life by Rome is doing far more damage than help.  Indeed, the Curia should get the beam out of their own eye before they try to clear up the speck in ours.

Roots of the Reformation VIII: Reformation or Reformations

reliquary bust of Charlemagne

I was asked why I keep referring to the Protestant Reformations—note the plural.  I think “the Reformation” is often misunderstood  because we do not nuance the term correctly and in a historical context.  There was no single Reformation.  Indeed the Church has known a series of Reformations—some of which happened within the unity of the Church and some of which happened in such a way as to separate groups within the Church from one another and divide the Church.  And that was not the end of it—within some of the Churches formed by the divisions, there were further Reformations.  Perhaps we can look at the history and see this.  

First of all, let’s remember the axiom: ecclesia semper reformans, semper reformanda—the Church, always reforming; always in need of reform.  History has borne that out.  Human nature being what it is, the Chuch—which after all is a collection of humans with all the faults and failures of the residue of original sin—keeps slipping from the ideal is Founder set for it and, like the individuals who comprise it, needs to do penance and amend its ways. 

When I teach the history of the Church, the earliest reformation of the Church, or at least the Church in the West, that I treat is the Reform of Charlemagne.  I suspect that one might be able to look back to Gregory the Great (c.600) and argue for a Reform, though personally I don’t see that being a time of Reform but more of a pristine idealism in a Church had had yet to be corrupted.  On the other hand I am probably naïve; human nature being what it is the Church has probably needed Reform from the time of the Apostles.    Some might speak of “Constantine’s Reformation”—after all he did call the Council of Nicea and he reshaped the Church to fit into the Roman world, but I guess I come out of the Niebuhr school that judges Constantine’s influence on the Church to have been deforming rather than reforming.  That will be an interesting series of blog entries—the Constantinian heritage.  Hmmm  have to think about that.

In any event, we will start with the Carolingian Reformation—which was part of the Carolingian Renaissance—renaissances and reformations often travel together through the pages of history books.  Charlemagne was faced with a problem.  He had a vast empire which today would cover France, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, most of Germany, the northeastern corner of Spain, parts of Austria, and Italy as far south as Rome.  There were, in this Empire, huge variances in language, culture, and religion.  When I say there were differences of religion, most of the region had been Christianized but there were significant differences in liturgy (worship practices and rites), monastic practices, and church discipline.  While the pope had the title of Patriarch of the West, in actual fact he had no power and there was no central authority.  Each bishop was elected in his diocese and was pretty much independent.  Charlemagne wanted to unify his empire and so he decreed that there would be one language for all official business-Latin, the language of ancient Rome.  And as for religion—he decided that Roman practices should be used throughout his empire.  The Roman liturgical books were made standard.  Now, in the ninth century liturgical books contained the texts of prayers, not the rubrics.  Matters such as the number of candles on the altar, the color of vestments, when to bow or genuflect—that still varied from city to city according to the local custom.  Charlemagne imposed a uniform calendar (again, allowing for additions of local usage) and the text of the prayers. Thus, for example, the Roman Canon (today’s Eucharistic Prayer I) became the standard consecratory prayer used throughout the empire.  Similarly the structure of the Mass and the various collects for Sundays and major feasts were determined for all the empire, which meant practically speaking, for all Western Europe.  The Roman martyrs and saints began to be venerated throughout Europe, while the memory of local saints were still honored in their home region.     

Charlemagne also imposed the Roman Rule for Monks—that is the Rule of Saint Benedict—on all the monasteries of his empire.  There were innumerable monasteries of nuns and monks in the ninth century and again, in various matters such as the arrangement of the monastic garb or what foods were eaten at which season, local custom remained, but in the essentials of monastic organization and discipline, Charlemagne established a uniformity. Every monastery had an abbot.  Every monastery fasted from “the ides of September until Easter Day” as Benedict prescribed.  The round of daily services—Matins, Vespers, Compline, etc. was followed as it was in Rome.  Charlemagne also mandated that all the monasteries, at least of men, should have a school as education was very important to his program.  Of course, other than future monks few attended these schools but it did preserve learning and culture.  By the way, the nuns’ monasteries often had schools every bit as good as the monks’ and though they were primarily for the education of future nuns they did provide an opportunity for women to learn not only how to read and write, but Latin, music, art, astronomy, mathematics and other disciplines.  

In many ways it was Charlemagne’s Reform that created a “Roman” Catholic Church although it would not be called that for several centuries.  Charlemagne did his best in the Reform of the Church, but there were many issues left pending.  Economically the Church was deeply immersed in the feudal system and its offices and incomes would be exploited by kings and nobles alike—bishoprics and abbacies were too often filled with men (or in the case of abbacies, with women as well as men) whose only qualification was their parentage or patronage.   Monasticism was limited to the upper classes and the ordinary peasantry was relegated to a life that was more superstitious piety than Christian discipleship.  The primitive Church’s idealism regarding pacificism was forgotten as the demands of political situations required warfare.  Nevertheless, Charlemagne’s efforts should not be dismissed.  While he did not do all the Church needed for reform, given the resources with which he had to work, he made an honest effort and it was not without its benefits, most notably in regards to education.  

Origins of Radical Catholicism XXV: The Spanish-American War and the Vatican

“It’s just a little war—but it’s the only one we have” was the way that Theodore Roosevelt described the Spanish American War—and he should know: he led the famous Rough-Riders down San Juan Hill as part of America’s move to push Spain off the stage of history.  At the beginning of the nineteenth century Spain had an empire that spanned the globe: as great and far flung as Britain’s.  By the end of the century Spain’s ragged empire consisted only a few semi-neglected possessions.  Spain itself was spent, a has-been nation.  For the United States to pick a war with Spain was like the neighbourhood bully to push down an old lady and grab her purse with its few dollars, but that is what we did.

America was spoiling for war.  It was a time of “Manifest Destiny”—it was, we were telling ourselves—God’s plan that we bring civilization and Christianity to the rest of the world.  Civilization meant American ways and Christianity, of course, meant Protestantism.  And we wanted an opportunity to show Europe that we were ready to be a world power.  We had come of age.  Spain, for its part, did not want a war with America.  It knew it couldn’t win, but the United States was determined not to give it a choice.  The pickings were too easy; the fruit of empire hanging too low not to pluck it. 

The Holy See was not anxious for a war between Spain and the United States.   Spain was an old ally of the papacy—not always a faithful child—but an old ally none the less.  The Church knew that if America won the war and seized Spanish possessions—Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines—those lands would be opened up to American ways, and worse, to Protestant Missionaries.  Spain’s dominions had been Catholic for centuries.  Catholic hegemony would be lost, and in the mentality of the Church at that time, souls would be lost to the heresies the “evangelists” would bring.  Spain’s dominions had been Catholic for centuries. 
The American bishops, liberal and conservative, were Americans after all and their loyalty was divided.  The bishops felt that the Church in the United States was at a critical time and it would not be wise to oppose American policy despite the wishes of the Holy See.  The United States had been whipped into a war fury by newspaper magnates Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst and while Republican President McKinley was anxious to settle the issues with Spain—which were many and complex—by negotiation, the newspaper industry and the Democratic Party were hell-bent for leather on a war.    

Leo XIII tried to have Archbishop Ireland intervene with President McKinley—with whom Ireland was a friend—but he was unsuccessful.  This was not because McKinley wanted a war—unlike Teddy Roosevelt, McKinley did not—but because the tide of public opinion could not be resisted.  While most of the bishops chose neither to endorse the war nor pass on the Pope’s insistence that we not go to war (sound familiar—remember the American bishops not conveying to their congregants papal condemnation of the wars in Viet Nam and Iraq) Ireland, once we were in the war, was an outspoken advocate of the American cause.  This did not delight the Holy See and was probably one of several reasons why Ireland never got a red hat.   

This was not a good time for the Holy See and its relationship with the United States.  The Holy See was unhappy with the fact that they best they could do with Washington was to have an Apostolic Delegation.  It was very important for the papacy to have full diplomatic relations with nations in order to demonstrate to the Kingdom of Italy that while Italy has taken its land it could not take its Sovereign authority.   But anti-Catholicism was too strong in the American Republic to allow the Vatican this conceit.  It would only be in Reagan-John Paul exchange of tits for tats in their cooperative effort to bring down Marxism that the Delegation would be raised to an accredited embassy, a nunciature.    

The Holy See was increasingly frustrated with the American Church.  They were appalled at its openness to non-Catholics, they were fearful of its democratic heritage, and they did not understand why it was so unable to influence the society in which it was rooted.  The Holy See saw a potential for power in the American Church that it had not itself yet recognized.  While it may have been only a small fragment of the general population, it was the largest—and fastest growing—religious body in the United States.  Surely with the right sort of leadership it could leverage itself from its position in the shadows of American Presbyterianism, Methodism, and Episcopalianism into the  catbird seat of American public influence.  All it needed was the right leadership...hmmm.  we’ll have some fun with that  This has been a long and (mostly) unbroken run and I want to continue it in two directions--Americanism back to the time of John Carroll and earlier, and forward into the twentieth century.  I think we will be able to understand some of the things that are going on in the Church today if we look at the long tradition of American Catholicism.   But we do need a break.  I have some other entries prepared on a variety of subjects and then go back and tie up some issues we had started--Saint Peter's Basilica, for example--and maybe start some new ones.  So stay tuned. 
The image is Cardinal Gibbons greeting Theodore Roosevelt.