Freedom From Religion and Freedom of Religion IV

Anti-Catholic cartoon by American polotical

cartoonist Thomas Nast (1840-1902) illustrating

fear of Catholic Takeover of the United States

Well, as we have pointed out in our last entries, the Catholic Church was opposed not only to the Separation of Church and State as outlined in the United States Constitution but opposed to the idea of religious liberty or “freedom of conscience” itself.  This put the Church square in conflict with the American constitutional tradition which Americans, including Catholic Americans, for the most part overwhelmingly embraced.  Conflict of ideologies was inevitable and finally came to a head in 1954 when the Holy See silenced Jesuit Father John Courtney Murray for his views on the subject.  In a surprising reversal of the Magisterium, however, the Magisterium itself abandoned its long-held tenet and in the 1965 Conciliar Decree Dignitatis Humanae subscribed to the principle that each person should be free to follow the directives of his or her own conscience in matters of religious belief and be granted in civil law the freedom of worship according to individual conscience.  

    Until the notoriety of the Murray silencing, most American Catholics were unaware of the conflict between the United States Constitution and Catholic Magisterial teaching.  American Protestants, however, knew it. Anti-Catholicism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was primarily linked to anti-immigrant sentiment.  If you look at the right hand column where it is marked “Labels” you will see thirteen postings on “anti-Catholicism.”  One of the reasons that so many Americans feared the growth of the Catholic Church in the American Republic is that they saw that Catholicism posed a danger to American liberties.  We ridicule the idea that Catholics, if they attained a political majority, would take away Freedom of Religion in the United States—but remember, that is precisely what the papacy expected them to do.  I doubt it ever would have come to that.  I think Americans of whatever religious faith make a clear distinction in their public and political life between one’s religious convictions and the commitment we have to the freedoms outlined in the Bill of Rights.  While we might vote our faith, and while our electoral choices should—like all decisions in our lives—reflect the values our Christian and Catholic faith has given us, I think the civic values of the American Constitutional tradition are a firewall against religious extremism. 

     Now although Catholic doctrine has changed to embrace freedom of conscience, this question does have relevance today.  Just as Catholics can expect neither their faith nor the canon law of their Church to determine the laws of the Nation or of any State, County, or local jurisdiction, we must also insist that no other creed or religious law find its way into public legislation.  There must be no more room for Sharia than there is for Canon Law or the Mosaic Law in public life.  Individuals are free, indeed should be encouraged, to follow religious precepts in their individual lives and within the framework of their particular religious community,  but the anti-establishment clause of the first amendment protects us from having any one religious philosophy imposed on the American people.    

      Sharia law might be the obvious threat today but there are Catholics who still want to see Catholicism established as the official religion of the United States.  I used to think they were all crazies like Solange Hertz, a Leesburg Virginia doyenne with more bats in her belfry than Hogwarts at Halloween but then a couple of years ago along came Michael Voris from Real Catholic TV suggesting that what we need now is a Catholic Monarchy to replace our Republican Government.  Fortunately Voris has no support from the Church for his bizarre ideas and little influence among everyday Catholics but he is articulate and, adjusting for the observation that his reality coordinates are off kilter, within his own world of factoids he invariably has a well thought out and philosophically consistent patter.   Indeed he is not alone in his parallel universe.  There is a considerable faction among the neo-traditionalists who reject the Second Vatican Council whose fundamental opposition to the Catholic Church is not about the liturgy but about the Conciliar Decrees, especially Dignitatis Humanae and its assertion of Freedom of Conscience.  In the end, the ascendancy of Catholic Law over the larger society would be as fatal a blow to the Human Dignity with which our Creator has endowed us as would be Sharia law.  We may be more familiar with Catholic theology and law than Sharia Law, and Catholic hegemony might require less adjustment on our part, but are we willing to yield to any outside force the sovereignty of our conscience, the consciences of which God has made us each a steward and for which God will hold us accountable?

     Religion cannot be banned from public life—nor should it be. We are guaranteed the free exercise of religion.   There is no effective way in a democracy to keep religion out of public life because religious citizens will (hopefully) have their political philosophies shaped by their religious faith.  Even non-believers have their attitudes and values shaped by their non-belief.  Religion (or lack thereof) will all come to the lawmakers’ table but it must only come to the table through the agency of the individual citizens and never through the direct influence of religious institutions over government.   And if the Churches (and Synagogues and Mosques and various Atheistic Associations) are performing their role in raising the consciousness of their individual members, making convincing arguments for the political consequences of their beliefs, those beliefs will be reflected in the democratic process.   But the attempt to coerce believers into voting blocs sorted by religion undermines the constitutional processes.  I expect my pastor to tell me that abortion is wrong.  I expect my pastor to tell me that same-sex marriage is not consistent with our Christian understanding of matrimony.  I expect my pastor to tell me that we have a responsibility to provide for the needy and vulnerable among us.  I expect my pastor to pass on the Church’s teaching regarding immigration and the death penalty as well as contraception and divorce. I hope my pastor will have the coglioni to tell me to vote my conscience (not my religion [collective] but  my conscience [individual]) and not my wallet.  And I hope I will have the intelligence to know the difference and the integrity to be truthful as to which is which. 

Freedom from Religion and Freedom of Religion III

The Tomb of Pope Leo XIII in the
Basilica of Saint John Lateran

The United States, including its Catholic citizens, was very committed to the principle of the Separation of Church and State.  The papacy was very committed to the idea that the Catholic Faith should be established by law in every nation and that other religions—and especially heretical “cults” (aka Protestants) should be proscribed.  Two trains running down tracks ultimately destined to collide.  

     The collision was to be a long time in coming however.  In a world without modern communications the American Republic was no more than a vague idea to the Papal Court.  Until the final decades of the nineteenth century, basically until people began to accustom themselves to the transatlantic cable, the American Church in its day to day operations was all but independent from Rome.  John Carroll had deliberately held communications with the Holy See to a minimum and his successors in the American episcopacy followed suite.  It was pointless to involve Rome in local decisions—before steamships for a letter to go to Rome, be considered by a congregation, and come back was at least a six month process and could easily take twice that long.  Whatever decision was needed was long past its time before the Holy See could respond.  And frankly, European bishops were no more inclined to surrender decision making to the Roman Curia were jealous of their own authority in their own dioceses.  That only began to change with the collapse of the Papal States in 1870 when the popes needed to consolidate their religious authority to compensate the diminution of prestige at the loss of the Papal States.  It was after Vatican I—and the fall of Rome to the Italian Monarchy that same year—that Rome really began to take note of the American Church and it was startled to see how “American” (i.e. non-Roman) it was.  This came to a bit of a head with Leo XIII’s 1895 Encyclical Latter, Longinqua Oceani, in which the pope declared  that the Church “ would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority.”  Such favor and patronage, of course, is in direct contradiction to the United States Constitution which declares in its first amendment that “Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion…”   Leo further admonished the American Church that while it might have to live with the idea of separation of Church and State at least until a Catholic majority could correct the situation, it “would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced.”  In other words, the American situation of the separation of Church and State is not an ideal but an anomaly.

     It could have been worse.  Leo was, unlike his predecessors, not opposed to Republics per se.  To the rage of conservatives he encouraged French Catholics to give their support to the Third Republic which replaced the Second Empire after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.  Conservative Catholics in France wanted to restore the Bourbon monarchy and while Leo wold have preferred that, he conceded that the Republic was acceptable.  Catholicism had always seen monarchy as the ideal, the thought being that civil government should be along the lines of Divine Government and so just as God governs the world, a monarch should govern the people.  Forget this Vox Dei Vox Populi idea—it is dangerous to Church and State alike. (Vox Dei Vox Populi is Latin for The Voice of God [is found in] the voice of the people.  You can see why Popes who consider themselves the Vox Dei don’t like that idea.) 

     Fortunately it took a long time to bring this pot to a boil, but to a boil it was to come.  An American Jesuit, John Courtney Murray, was teaching at the Catholic University in Washington DC.  The experience of Christians of various faiths cooperating against the Third Reich in the years before and during World War II convinced Father Murray that the traditional anti-ecumenical policies of Catholicism and the resultant Catholic isolationism was an obsolete and a dangerous policy in a world haunted by totalitarianism.  He further came to believe that, despite the admonition of Leo XIII in Longinqua Oceani,  religious freedom as outlined in the First Amendment to the American Constitution was an ideal that should be embraced in the twentieth century.  In these ideas he was far ahead of his time—too far ahead of his time for many of his fellow Catholics who saw the ethnic and religious ghettos into which the Catholics of the early twentieth century had retreated as essential to preserve the faith.  Teaching with Father Murray at Catholic University was Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton, one of the most arrogant and acrimonious junior grade prelates the Church has known in its long history of arrogant and acrimonious prelates.  Monsignor Fenton was editor of the American Ecclesiastical Review.  Fenton despised Religious.  Fenton despised anyone who he considered beneath him and his monsignoral dignity him which more or less included the human race as a collective.  He was probably also a bit jealous of Murray and his popularity.  Fenton reported Murray to the appropriate Roman dicasteries and the redoubtable Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, head of the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, who silenced Murray and prohibited him from speaking or writing on the topic of Church/State relations.  These were the final years of the papacy of Pius XII who that year had suffered from a hiatal hernia requiring surgery and whose health went into a steady decline during which more and more of the papal prerogatives were assumed by curial officials such as Ottaviani.  Pius’s successor, John XXIII convoked an Ecumenical Council with the express purpose of opening the Catholic Church up to the ecumenical movement which had long been prohibited it by Popes such as Pius XI whose encyclical Mortalium Animos condemned ecumenism as undermining Catholic doctrinal hegemony.  Ottaviani insured that Fenton would be on the various commissions that were preparing the Conciliar agenda and it was planned by Ottaviani that no serious doctrinal shift, especially as regards ecumenism or freedom of conscience would be submitted to the bishops.  When the bishops assembled in the autumn of 1962 for the first session of the Council, however, they would not accept the conservative agenda, however and demanded that the schemata for the council prepared by Fenton and others be abandoned and a new agenda drawn up.  It was at this point that Francis Spellman, the Cardinal Archbishop of New York, rescued John Courtney Murray from the obscurity to which Fenton’s accusations had reduced him and brought him to the Council as Spellman’s personal theologian.  Here Murray had his revenge on his reactionary foes as the Council in its decree on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, enshrined the basic principles of freedom of conscience and the very doctrine that Leo XIII had said should not be spread from America to the rest of the world became a universally recognized principle in Catholic teaching.  Eternal Rest to Joseph Fenton, Alfredo Ottaviani, and Leo XIII.  One of those three, despite his fear of freedom of conscience, is probably a saint.  It wouldn’t be Fenton or Ottaviani.  

Origins of Radical Catholicism X: A Catholic University

The next scheme the liberal party came up with was the founding of a Catholic University in Washington DC.  John Lancaster Spalding, Bishop of Peoria, won the endorsement of the majority of bishops at the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884 for this idea.  This should not be surprising as Spalding had already presented the plan to Leo XIII for his approval—which was given—and he also had persuaded a wealthy New York Heiress Mary Gwendolyn Caldwell for a burse of three hundred thousand dollars (worth approx 6.7 million today) to realize the initial phase of the university.  Caldwell Hall, the principal residence for priests professors is named after Ms. Caldwell.   (We might do an adults-only blog on the Spalding/Caldwell ties.)   Not everyone was in favor of this projected university; there was, one should not be surprised, an agenda.  The primary function of the University was to be a  seminarium principale for the American Church—a place where dioceses could send their men to study and earn pontifical degrees without having to go to Europe.  Up until this time, if a priest wished to earn a church-recognized degree (which was required for seminary professors) he had to go to one of the European universities such as Leuven in Belgium or Innsbruck in Austria or one of the Roman Universities.  (There were other options, notably in Spain, but most Americans went to one of the three named; and in fact most went to Rome.) The liberals, in their project to stamp the Church in the United States with a distinctly American identity, wanted to avoid exposing future generations of clergy as much as possible to European thought and customs.  Given the strong monarchial and integrist tenor of late nineteenth century Europe this is understandable.  As the Americanist agenda became more clear, the more conservative bishops—German and American alike—began to back off their support.  Corrigan led the way.  Of course, Corrigan had an agenda too—he wanted Fordham, the Jesuit University in his archdiocese, to be the official Catholic University for the United States.  Milwaukee Archbishop Michael Heiss, the leading German bishop in the United States and an implacable foe of the liberal party, was a member of the committee to choose a rector, and his abrupt resignation alerted Rome that something more than what appeared was going on.  The Jesuits—jealous to protect Georgetown from a second church affiliated university in Washington and anxious to make their university at Fordham the Catholic University, worked with Corrigan.  In the end, it was Gibbons (who ironically was not a supporter of the idea) who used his friendship with Leo XIII to bring the project to fruition.  The University opened in 1889—the centenary year for the establishment of a Catholic hierarchy in the United States—with John Joseph Keane as Rector.  (Keane, you may remember from earlier posts, was a leading liberal).  The university would be the scene of many a battle between liberals and conservatives over the course of the twentieth century, not least of which was the Henry Poels debacle in 1908, the John Courtney Murray archdebacle in the 1950’s, and the case of Father Charles Curran after the Humanae Vitae Encyclical in 1968 with Act II of this tragic farce from 1986-89.   These are blips, however, on a fairly consistent track record of arbitrary authority triumphing over sound scholarship.   At some future time when I do a blog or two on the John Courtney Murray debacle I will justify the words "arbitrary" and "sound," but until then we move on—the next blog will be on the Apostolic Delegation.  Remember that while blogs are posted most days, there will be gaps as i do have a (not terribly demanding) day job.  The image today is McMahon Hall on the campus of The Catholic University of America, Washington DC