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Book Review
| Catholicism and American Freedom: A History. By John T. McGreevy. (New York: Norton, 2003. 431 pp. $26.95, ISBN 0-393-04760-1.)
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| The usual story about Roman Catholicism and American democratic impulses begins with the Puritan castigation of Catholicism as superstition and falsehood. It tracks a growing anti-Catholicism, based on the Protestant conviction that loyalty to the pope is treasonous devotion to a foreign prince. Standard accounts point to the burning of the Ursuline convent outside Boston in the 1830s to symbolize an anti-Catholicism that periodically swelled and receded at least until the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency. |
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John T. McGreevy's probing of this
tangled web is more nuanced. He sketches in broad strokes the Protestant
ambivalence toward Catholicism, forcefully proclaimed by Paul Blanshard
in the mid-twentieth century, but he also paints a detailed picture
of profound Catholic ambivalence about democracy and American moral
values shaped by Protestantism. He reminds us that Catholic approaches
reflect the church's international character; teaching on particular
moral, political, economic, and social issues betrays how enmeshed
Catholicism had become in European life long before there was an
American Catholicism.
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In the mid-nineteenth century, powerful American Catholic voices, such as those of the converts Orestes Brownson and Isaac Hecker, argued not only that in principle Catholic belief and democratic polity were compatible but also that democracy nurtured an environment where Catholicism could flourish. The prevalence of a democratic individualism shaped by Protestant notions made it difficult for church leaders in Rome to understand their position. As well, the overt anti-Catholic nature of the democratic revolutions that rocked Europe in the late 1840s and the movements toward German and Italian unification, which were often buttressed by popular hostility to the Catholic Church as an institution, skewed the official perspective. As McGreevy demonstrates, Rome more easily discerned threats at hand in Europe than the struggles on the American side of the Atlantic. Nor did the United States ever have a political party that directly identified with the church and its moral teaching, as was the case in Europe. |
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In the nineteenth century, pressing issues often concerned the Protestant character of the developing public schools, a matter exacerbated by the rapid expansion of the Catholic parochial school network after the Civil War when immigration swelled the ranks of the Catholic faithful. McGreevy argues that at heart a commitment to what later generations called family values and the moral dimensions of education, now bywords of conservative Protestant angst about public education, fueled Catholic concern. |
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In an instructive chapter, McGreevy unravels the dilemma American Catholics faced regarding slavery. If some Catholics affirmed the moral critique of slavery, the way abolitionists equated chattel slavery with presumed Catholic enslavement to superstition and popery rendered the American ethos problematic for the faithful. When abolitionists engaged in virulent anti-Catholicism, few Catholics were willing to plunge into the political debates rocking the nation. |
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Equally significant was the complicated posture of the church regarding organized labor as a laissez-faire capitalism drove American industrial expansion at the end of the nineteenth century. Leo XIII's landmark encyclical Rerum novarum (1891), as McGreevy carefully explains, was clearly more a response to conditions in Europe than to those facing U.S. Catholic workers. Even John Ryan, long claimed by Protestants as trumpeting a Social Gospel, based his calls for a living wage on a traditional, Thomist understanding of the commonweal, on providing adequate support for families. |
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