ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH

With some 50 million members, the Roman Catholic church is much the largest religious organization in America. Yet at the time of the American Revolution, there were only a few American Catholics: mostly people from Spanish and French colonies, along with a handful of English-speaking Catholics who lived mainly in the Middle Colonies, especially Maryland.

Neither Catholic Europe nor the overwhelmingly Protestant United States anticipated then that the new nation would prove hospitable to the emergence of a strong American Catholicism. For one thing, the church was proudly Roman, and the new nation was manifestly committed to developing American institutions—in religion as well as in politics and economics. Throughout the nineteenth century, furthermore, the church became increasingly ultramontane, concentrating ever more authority in Rome and skeptical of adaptations to national folkways. The Vatican Council of 1869-1870 endowed the popes with ordinary jurisdiction in every Catholic diocese.

Second, American religious culture, almost from the start, was pluralistic; even in those few colonies that attempted to establish the one true religion, dissenting faiths soon were granted considerable freedoms. The First Amendment to the Constitution stipulated that there would be no established religion in the new nation, and no state tried for very long to maintain an establishment. In fact, Protestants quickly came to acknowledge that most other religious groups were legitimate "denominations" of the true church. In contrast, Catholics were obliged by their faith to insist that theirs was the one true church. Catholics could accept the separation of church and state only as an unfortunate necessity in a culture where so many erroneous churches flourished.

Finally, American culture, in religion as in politics and economics, was deeply individualistic, antihierarchical, and anti-authoritarian. Laypeople, speaking for themselves or in concert with a congregation, were accustomed to judge the clergy as functionaries expected to give a moving sermon, preach up a revival, or meet other lay needs. In contrast, the trend in Catholicism, since the Council of Trent, had been to emphasize hierarchy and the authority of priests, bishops, and popes. (Not until the middle of the twentieth century—when Catholics began to stress the "mystical body of Christ," which included both laypeople and clergy, and in the Second Vatican Council, the "people of God"—was the celebration of unqualified clerical authority reconsidered.) Much of the drama in the history of the American Catholic church centered around attempts to transcend these seeming contradictions between Americanism and Catholicism.

The first leader of an American Roman Catholic church was John Carroll (1735-1815), a member of a prominent Maryland family. Carroll, chosen the first bishop of the American church in 1790, endorsed the separation of church and state because he believed it essential to Catholic freedom in a pluralist society like America and because he felt that established churches in Europe had suffered gravely from state control. He argued that the church in America should be headed by a bishop nominated by the American clergy. He wanted also to avoid overclose supervision of the young American church by the Roman Curia.

Carroll believed that American Catholics would be best served by American-born, American-trained priests and hoped that the laity would play an active role in managing their parishes. In his early years as bishop, he endorsed the use of English in the liturgy, believing that free men and women would place a high value on intelligibility. He seems to have favored a private, internal piety more than public, clerically led, devotional exercises. In his later years, however, Carroll was troubled by the lengths to which republicanism had been carried in France and was distressed by the unwillingness of some laypeople to accept the leadership of priests or bishops. Increasingly, he stressed tradition and the virtue of laypeople submitting to the clergy, the clergy to the bishops, and the bishops to Rome. These later attitudes would dominate the American church for the next century and more.

The earlier vision was never completely abandoned, however. Toward the end of the century, a group of Americanist churchmen, inspired by Isaac Thomas Hecker (1819-1888), the founder of the Paulist Fathers, and led by Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul (1838-1918), proclaimed the perfect harmony of Catholicism with the individualism and activism of American life.

But from the early nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth, the experience of the Roman Catholic church in America was shaped less by episcopal preferences than by the fact that it had become the "Church of the Immigrants." The huge influx of Catholics—from Ireland and Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century; from Italy, Poland, and the Balkans between 1880 and 1924; and from Latin America beginning in the 1920s—was the major reason for the church's spectacular growth. It also defined many of the tasks the church had to assume.

Until the 1920s, America did not limit the numbers of immigrants, but its welcome was qualified by the expectation that immigrants would speedily Americanize. To some Americans, Catholicism was one of those foreign traits that immigrants should cheerfully renounce. But most of the newcomers, uprooted from their native culture, clung to their ancestral religion not only because of its spiritual claims but also because it served as surrogate for their personal, familial, and ethnic identity. Catholicism was valued and defended for what made it distinctive, not for those characteristics that might be shown to resemble the traits of American denominations. That European Catholicism was, increasingly in these years, stressing the contradictions between modern culture and genuine Catholicism ensured that the immigrant strain in the American church would generally be supported by European church leaders and especially by Rome. As a consequence, the Church of the Immigrants redoubled its efforts to protect Catholics against an American culture, which, one editor wrote, "exhales an atmosphere filled with germs poisonous and fatal to Catholic life." Catholics needed an array of separate institutions—churches, asylums, schools—to shelter them.

Most strikingly, they needed schools. In nineteenth-century America immigrants encountered a culture that wholeheartedly believed that children could not be satisfactorily educated in the home, the neighborhood, or the church. State after state passed laws requiring all children to attend schools. And state after state established public schools that reflected the values supposedly common to all its citizens. Inevitably, in a largely non-Catholic culture, many of the schools were oblivious to the special heritage, present needs, and future aspirations of Catholics, and some may even have been designed to "grind the Catholicity" out of Catholic children. As a result, Catholics undertook, sometimes reluctantly, to build a separate but equal school system. One bishop after another declared that "a parish without a parochial school is not a Catholic parish"—indeed, that a parish should build a school before it built a church. The fact that at no time did more than half the Catholic children of school age attend parochial schools does not diminish the church's remarkable achievement in providing a school system that would, as far as possible, educate their children in the ways, and to the ends, that they—not American society—desired.

The parish also assumed an increasing number of other obligations. Spiritual societies organized a new, more intense, and more public devotionalism. A Rosary Society or a Confraternity of the Sacred Heart required the regular recitation of certain prayers, regular attendance at Mass, regular reception of Communion. By the end of the nineteenth century, large urban parishes frequently sustained a myriad of additional societies designed to meet "spiritual, recreational, educational, and charitable" interests. For a large proportion of Catholics, the parish was the center of their lives.

A common characteristic of all these activities in the immigrant parish was the dominant role of the priest, who, as one observer wrote, was expected to be "cult leader, confessor, teacher, counselor, social director, administrator, recreation director ... and a social worker." Not surprisingly, priests claimed and were granted enormous authority. Whereas in earlier years, laypeople had sometimes been allowed to help manage parish life, by the mid-nineteenth century priests were roundly condemning lay initiatives as a "trusteeism" contrary to the right ordering of a hierarchical church. In the same spirit, bishops asserted their unqualified right to assign or reassign priests. Taking advantage of American law, bishops constituted themselves "corporations sole," which enabled them to hold all church property in a diocese in their own names. American Catholics, readily deferring to priestly authority, had little difficulty accepting the most extravagant interpretations of papal infallibility.

Most resistance to the exercise (if not the principle) of authority in nineteenth-century Catholicism derived from the presence in many dioceses of a large number of diverse nationalities. Bishops had frequently been willing to create "national parishes," to which all Catholics speaking the same foreign tongue could repair. But when it was not possible to assign a priest of the same nationality, controversies were likely to ensue. German Catholics were less disposed to yield trusting obedience when an Irish Catholic priest was assigned to "their" parish. Bishops almost invariably backed up priests against "disloyal" laypeople. And Rome made clear that in appointing a bishop it would not compromise its authority by deferring to the ethnic predilections of the priests and people in the diocese.

The two dominant notes of the nineteenth-century church—the Church of the Immigrants—were a heightened authority of the clergy and hierarchy and a pronounced public, communal devotionalism for the laity, both of them conducing to a preoccupation with specifically Catholic culture. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Catholics in this era participated only gingerly in the American society of which they were an increasingly numerous part. They publicly celebrated their patriotism. In New York City, parochial schools installed an American flag in their classrooms before the public schools did. They did probably more than their share of the fighting in the Civil War, World War I, and even the Spanish-American War (which some Europeans saw as an assault on Catholic Spain). But they took no active role, as Catholics, in politics. Priests and bishops in large cities with substantial concentrations of Catholic voters no doubt benefited from the deferential attention paid them by machine bosses. But the clergy generally abstained from public partisanship. Most of them recognized that Catholic political action was all too likely to engender anti-Catholic outbursts. They also sensed that the political process was likely to require compromises.

In a century when many Americans were enthusiastic reformers, most Catholics chose to remain on the sidelines. Contemporary culture was undoubtedly sinful, but it was unlikely to be redeemed by social action. Although consistently preaching the virtue of temperance, Catholic leaders were disenchanted when the temperance crusade focused increasingly on political measures. The church sympathized with the plight of the disproportionately large numbers of Catholics in the working class, but it was the exceptional priest or bishop who condoned unions or supported labor legislation. Pope Leo xiii, in 1891, issued an encyclical on the condition of labor, but for a generation American Catholics pointed more enthusiastically to his criticism of socialism than to his demand that the church support the legitimate aspirations of the workers. When the National Catholic Welfare Conference (formed to foster the war effort in 1917) sponsored a program of postwar social reconstruction, the response of the bishops was lukewarm. The Church of the Immigrants would not easily abandon its traditional social conservatism.

By the middle of the twentieth century, however, the Catholic church in the United States had changed considerably. Although new Catholic immigrants continued to flood in—particularly from the Caribbean and Latin America—most American Catholics were no longer immigrants in fact, in memory, or in outlook. By the criteria of wealth, education, and occupational status, they outdid, as a group, American Protestants. They no longer had to fear discrimination; the election of John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, as president in 1960 corroborated the growing conviction that American culture was not innately hostile; the church need not be preoccupied with sheltering Catholics from the age. And American Catholics found in the papacy of John xxiii and in many of the conclusions of the Second Vatican Council reason to believe that Rome would not disapprove of a more confident, more activist stance in the American church.

The laity was encouraged to participate in new ways in the life of the parish. With much of the liturgy in English and with the priest facing the congregation and praying with them, not for them, laypeople were invited to sing hymns and exchange greetings of peace with each other. Increasingly the devotional spirit found expression less in parish missions than in meetings where Catholics could respond more personally and individually to the leadings of the spirit.

Fears of trusteeism abated sufficiently for many parishes to establish councils in which lay members could help shape policy. A sharp decline in vocations to holy orders made it almost inevitable that the laity would take on more responsibilities in the work of the church. The traditional conception of the priesthood was sometimes challenged by proposals—not yet accepted by the hierarchy—that women or married men be consecrated as priests. These developments did not constitute a challenge to the authority of the church, but rather an assertion that laypeople were, as much as the clergy, "people of God" with gracious freedoms as well as duties. Although the popes, generally supported by the American hierarchy, continued to proclaim that artificial birth control was a sinful violation of natural law, increasing numbers of American Catholics claimed, as Catholics, the right to act as their consciences dictated.

Many Catholics came to feel not only free but obliged on occasion to call on the nation to reform. Invoking both American traditions and Catholic principles, clergy and laity gave strong support to the civil rights movement, and a few were prominent critics of the Vietnam War. Many were particularly outspoken in demanding social justice, even to the point of casting doubt on the essential morality of the American capitalist system. And Catholics, deploring abortion, have taken a leading role in demanding that the government guarantee "the right to life."

It is no doubt premature to conclude that these striking developments of the latter part of the twentieth century defined the contours of a "new Catholicism." Considerable numbers of American Catholics did not welcome the new departures in liturgical practice, or the new roles of clergy and laity, or the provocative witness of the church against some of the failings of American culture. And the American church's options continued to be limited by its loyal membership in the world church. The pontificate of John Paul ii made it clear that the plans of American Catholics remained subject to authoritative criticism (as well as endorsement) from Rome.

Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (1985); James Hennesey, S.J., American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (1981).

Robert D. Cross

See also Abortion; Birth Control; Coughlin, Father Charles E.; Day, Dorothy; Ethnicity; Missionaries; Religion; Serra, Junípero.