Why They Are Afraid of Pope Francis 15

Bishop Bernard McQuaid--19th century architect

of American Catholic Isolationism.  Like they say,

a picture is worth ten thousand words--not the

faithful kept behind the fence. 

WASHINGTON — Shortly before leaving the Capitol for the holiday recess, Senate Democrats gathered behind closed doors to lay out an agenda for 2014. When the majority leader, Harry Reid, exhorted colleagues to “deal with the issue of income inequality,” the talk took a spiritual turn.

“You know,” declared Senator Bernard Sanders, the Vermont independent, who caucuses with Democrats, “we have a strong ally on our side in this issue — and that is the pope.”

That Mr. Sanders, who is Jewish, would invoke the pope to Mr. Reid, a Mormon, delighted Roman Catholics in the room. (“Bernie! You’re quoting my pope; this is good!” Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois recalled thinking.) Beyond interfaith banter, the comment underscored a larger truth: From 4,500 miles away at the Vatican, Pope Francis, who has captivated the world with a message of economic justice and tolerance, has become a presence in Washington’s policy debate.

The above is taken from an article that appeared in the New York Times a few weeks ago and it illustrates why this papacy is a very different papacy than its recent predecessors.  We have a Pope that isn’t playing in the intramural league.  This papacy is not nitpicking over internal issues like liturgical translations or nuns not being appropriately veiled.  It isn’t simply that this pope doesn’t think that we should stop “obsessing” over same-sex relationships or contraception, but he has taken the Church back out onto the court for serious game with the big boys.  When President Obama visits the Vatican in March it won’t be for the genteel sit-down and photo-op that it was with Pope Benedict.  This Pope is saying something that Mr. Obama (and Mr. Hollande, and Mr. Putin, and Mr. Peres, and Ms. Merkel, and other world leaders) are very interested in.  We’re back in the game now that we have stopped the navel-gazing and remembered our mission to announce the Kingdom of God.  But this is alarming to certain factions within the Church, and the American Church in particular, who are anxious to restore the ghetto mentality that pervaded American Catholicism from the final quarter of the nineteenth-century to the Second Vatican Council when the opened windows in Rome blew a wind strong enough to knock down the isolationist walls that had been carefully constructed by generations of American clergy who were terrified of the world outside the boundaries of the Church.  In the famous words of Bishop McQuaid of Rochester (1823-1909), one of the chief architects of the isolationist policy of the American Church:  “If the walls are not high enough, they must be raised; if they are not strong enough, they must be strengthened…”  When a pro-choice Jewish senator cites the Pope for policy support to a pro-choice Mormon senator—you know those walls aren’t standing anymore.  And this means that Catholics have to deal with the reality of a very non-Catholic world out there.  We can’t stay in our own enclave cheering each other on in our own in-house competitions and refusing to play ball with people who do not accept our basic premises.

Twenty years ago Cardinal Bernardin tried to stem the re-ghettoization of American Catholicism with his appeal for the Catholic Common Ground Initiative.  He was crushed by his fellow Cardinals Bernard Law and James Hickey who were determined that isolationism was the best policy for American Catholicism.  The complex ambiguities of Pope John Paul II’s papacy allowed the narrow vision of Hickey and Law to prevail and it led the American Church into a long cold dark night of increasing irrelevance.  With Cardinal Law the “kingmaker” of American bishops we were given a hierarchy that can only be described as masturbatory in its ecclesial leadership--  Francis George, Raymond Burke, Edwin O’Brien, William Lori, Michael Sheridan,  Edward Egan, John Myers, Edward Slattery, Charles Chaput, Joseph Martino, Fabian Bruskewitz, Thomas Olmstead, John McCormack, Richard Lennon, Thomas Tobin, to mention a few.  It didn’t get better with the rise in Roman influence of Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke and a new generation of bishops who lack vision such as, among others, Robert Finn, Salvatore Cordileone, Thomas Paprocki, Kevin Rhoades, Frank Dewane, and David O’Connell.  This is not to say that there have not been good bishops—and some very good bishops—over the last twenty-five years—but that the balance of power tipped to men who tried to re-fortify the American Church against the larger society.  I have no doubt that this was done in good faith but the results have been disastrous.  The Church not only retreated into a cultural isolationism—losing credibility among many of the more intellectual faithful in the process—but gained a reputation for being intellectually closed and negative in tone.  As one priest often said in his homilies “everyone knows what the Church is against; no one can articulate what it is for—and that is a disastrous position from which to evangelize.” 

Pope Francis has changed all that but to the consternation of those who favor ecclesial isolationism.  It should not be surprising that these same people favor a cultural isolationism that wants to preserve American Catholicism from the rich diversity that its membership reflects.  Their idea of church buildings is the retro appeal of a 1930’s “Chicago basilica style.”  Music is limited to organ accompaniment and Latin libretto.  Religious art is of the pre-Raphaelite revival.  Prayers are found in the Enchiridion or to be said on beads.  Mariachi bands, gospel choirs, and dance have no place. The politics follow with anti-immigrant bias and an identification of Catholicism with what might be called “Spellman Capitalism” in honor of the Cardinal Archbishop of New York who vigorously supported the “military industrial complex” in its war to defend American economic hegemony.  But that is not where Pope Francis is.  Here he is giving his weapons to those closet Marxists who call themselves “Democrats” and overturning all that we Americans hold dear in our dream that any red-blooded American boy can claw his way to the top, earning 230 times what the slaves who toil in his industry earn.  What would Jesus say?  

The Origins of Radical Catholicism VI: The Fight for Catholic Schools

Labor was only one issue that set a boundary between the liberal and conservative wings of the Catholic Church in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century.  The First Plenary Council of Baltimore (a meeting of all the American bishops along with the superiors of the major male religious orders) mandated that every Catholic parish have a parochial school and this item was reiterated at the second and third Plenary Councils.  Of course it was not always possible financially or otherwise for a parish to have a school, but more to the point there were some pastors who were not convinced that Catholic Schools were necessary and there were some bishops who agreed with them.

Catholic parents had  legitimate concerns about Catholic children attending public schools.  Bible reading, school prayer, and even (Protestant) religious education were standard practices nineteenth century America.  The bible used, of course, was the King James translation which was all but universal among Protestants of the time but which Catholics found objectionable.  Moreover Catholic children frequently faced religious prejudice from their teachers who were most often themselves Protestant and  who did not hesitate to say negative things about the Catholic faith in their classrooms.  Indeed, there was a strong movement by Catholic leaders in the decades after the civil war up until the Kennedy Presidency to keep Catholics in a cultural ghetto where their faith would be secure from outside influences.  Bernard McQuaid, Bishop of Rochester from 1868 until 1909, is a prime example of a bishop who wanted to protect his flock from “the wolves of this world.”  Speaking of the desirability of separating Catholics from mainstream society McQuaid explicitly used the image of the Ghettos in which the Jews of Europe had traditionally been confined and, speaking of creating Catholic cultural ghettos declared: If the walls are not high enough, they must be raised; if they are not strong enough, they must be strengthened…"

There was another aspect of creating these Catholic enclaves and this had to do with immigration.  While the Irish were, for the most part, already well used to the English Language, most immigrant groups not only were slow to learn English but wanted their children to be educated in their national language.  That is to say they not only wanted their children to learn their national language, but to study all their subjects in that language.  The Germans were particularly strong on this, but Lithuanians, Hungarians, Italians, and others felt equally strong.  They established their own parish churches and they had their own schools in which German was the dominant language.

Inevitably there was a reaction on the part of the Americanized citizens or "yankees"  to the vast numbers of immigrants coming into the United States who were not anxious to assimilate, and in several places English-only Education was mandated by law.  William D. Hoard was a Wisconsin Dairy Farmer who had never held political office.  In a populist movement not unlike the Tea Party today, groups within the Republican party in Wisconsin managed to wrest control of the party away from the state Republican organization and to nominate Hoard for governor.  Hoard’s campaign cry was “the Little Schoolhouse, stand by it” and rallied the “Yankee” population of the State to achieve his election in 1890.  Hoard went on to say: "We must fight alienism and selfish ecclesiasticism.... The parents, the pastors and the church have entered into a conspiracy to darken the understanding of the children, who are denied by cupidity and bigotry the privilege of even the free schools of the state."  In other words, Hoard was declaring that the State was a better guardian of children than their parents.  He also was attacking the religious institutions and leaders in which people had put their trust.  Now let me make a point that we need to keep in mind and most people fail to understand.  In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century the Republicans were the liberal party and this English-only program was a liberal position.   It was ardently opposed by German Catholics and Lutherans alike and while it was rare for Catholic Archbishop of Milwaukee Frederick Katzer and Wisconsin and Missouri Synod Lutherans to agree on anything (the two Lutheran Groups have rarely been able to agree between themselves much less with a Catholic—these two synods holding at the time Luther’s position that the Pope was the anti-Christ), the defense of their parochial schools gave them a common cause.  The Irish—and this will be crucial for future blogs—the Irish supported the Law.  In the event, the opposition of the Churches was the undoing and the law was repealed in 1891.  But the issue of parochial schools would remain—more as an internal battle within the Catholic Church and with the civil law.  Next Blog will look at Catholics—including some very influential ones—who would support Public Education.