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Commonalities
The religious histories of Canada, the United States, and Australia belong together. All three were at one time part of the British Empire, English became their national language, and in many ways the British heritage was their dominant cultural influence. Each was officially mission territory until the twentieth century, but each depended on foreign clergy, especially Irish, not primarily to convert non-Christian natives but to care for the huge numbers of Catholic immigrants. With some regional exceptions, bishops of Irish descent were dominant in the three countries until at least the middle of the twentieth century.
Modernity
They were the New Nations because—politically, economically, and socially—they were the first truly modern societies. It was there that the Church first came to terms with a kind of modernity different from that of Europe, learning by trial and error how to exist in a democratic society.
The British Enlightenment
To a great extent, the New Nations were different from Europe because the British Enlightenment coexisted with organized religion. Unlike in Europe and Latin America, there was never any attempt to use the power of the state to suppress Christianity. Anticlericalism, which is mainly a phenomenon of dominantly Catholic countries, was mild.
Toleration
In time, the influence of the British Enlightenment achieved what European Liberalism promised only hypocritically—full religious toleration. Any attempt to suppress religion would have been fatal to the secularist cause, since each of the New Nations was dominated by a strong Protestantism whose hegemony survived until the middle of the twentieth century in Canada and Australia and even beyond that in the United States. Planted in the New Nations were evangelical Anglicanism, Methodism, the Oxford Movement, and Scottish Calvinism. Additionally, in the United States were various indigenous religions and the Puritanism that evolved into Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism.
Religious prejudice merged with chauvinism, so that Catholics were often accused of disloyalty to their adopted countries, but to some extent Catholics’ sheer numbers protected them from the antagonisms of that culture. Catholics in the New Nations endured a great deal of hostility, but no one was ever executed for his faith, very few were killed by mob violence, and few were even imprisoned.
Anti-Catholicism
Anti-Catholic antagonism, as by the Masonic Order, was Protestant in character, not militantly secular or anticlerical. The Protestant ascendancy created a paradoxical situation for Catholics, in that they were often a harassed minority but at the same time the religiosity of the culture meant that Christian belief of some kind was almost a social imperative.
Christianity Assumed
While Catholics were on the defensive toward Protestants, unbelievers were on the defensive toward Protestant Christians, so that Catholics were mostly spared the acids of anti-religious modernity. Christianity was simply taken for granted as the foundation of society, and skeptics were kept on the margins. Unlike in Europe, the governments of the New Nations deputized religious ministers to witness marriage vows that were held binding in civil society and witness the signing of civil marriage licenses. There was seldom any threat to the existence of church schools, rather the major conflicts—sometimes very sharp—were over whether the government should fund such schools. Religious education flourished at all levels, often encouraged by the state.
The Faith of the Immigrant
Unlike other parts of the world, in both the New Nations and the British Isles themselves, immigration—both from abroad and from country to city—did not lead to massive loss of faith, a fact that was especially remarkable in the case of the Irish, most of whom had no experience of urban life prior to migrating. Instead, those urban cultures proved to be supportive of belief, and pastoral methods were successful, so that for the most part it was only in the British Isles and its former colonies that the industrial working class remained practicing Christians.
Canada
The Vikings
The first Europeans to reach North America were a party under the Viking chief Leif Erikson, which reached Newfoundland around the year 1000. After the initial voyages, which led briefly to a settlement, there was no further European contact until 1500, and even then, the European powers were slow to exploit North America, because it did not seem likely to yield great profits.
Quebec
The French founded the trading post of Quebec in 1608, but for a long time, New France was sparsely populated. Its chief economic resource was furs, requiring many of the males to be gone from the settlements for long periods of time living in the wild, and the colony had a reputation for moral and spiritual laxness. Near the midcentury, a group of French Jesuits—among the most heroic saints in the entire history of the Church—came to New France for the purpose of converting the Indians and had some success among the Hurons.
Missionary Efforts
Jogues and Other Martyrs
St. Isaac Jogues (d. 1646) was captured by the ferocious Iroquois (lethal enemies of the Huron) had his fingers chewed off, and was saved from death by being ransomed, in what became New York State, by a Netherlandish Protestant trader. Jogues returned briefly to France where, scrupulous in observing the rubrics, he would not celebrate Mass until he had received a papal dispensation from the requirements concerning the holding of the sacred elements at Mass. He returned to New France and was soon martyred by the Iroquois.
This was followed three years later by the death of five other Jesuits, including St. John de Brébeuf (d. 1649), who had worked among the Hurons for over thirty years. In each case, martyrdom was by a slow process of dismembering and burning, followed by cannibalism.1 Brébeuf was greatly admired for his strength and dedication, and the Indians ate his heart in order to assimilate his courage. But the mission was completely destroyed.
Kateri Tekakwitha
St. Catherine (Kateri) Tekakwitha (d. 1680) was the orphaned daughter of a pagan Iroquois father and a Catholic mother. She lived among the French Canadians and was venerated for her piety and works of charity.
The Missions
Missionary activity among the Canadian Indians was hampered by the fact that they were a semi-nomadic people, which forced the early Jesuits often to follow them on their hunting journeys, sleeping on the ground, and eating their food. Some missionaries attempted, with limited success, to gather the Indians into villages where they could live the sedentary lives of farmers, since experience showed that the converts would abandon the faith if they drifted away from the mission centers.
Jesuit Relations
The missionaries made strenuous efforts to learn the native languages, compiling dictionaries and other written records of those unwritten tongues. Their Relations—detailed reports to their superiors in Europe on the state of the missions—paid close attention to native cultures.
A New Power
As in the Dark Ages of Europe, the missionaries’ credibility rested to some extent on the belief that they possessed powers superior to those of the Indian shamans. The missionaries helped the Indians by their rudimentary medical knowledge, but this was a two-edged sword: when diseases broke out, the missionaries were sometimes blamed for causing them, which they may sometimes have done inadvertently.
Native Religion
The Indians had their own religious beliefs, which the Jesuits tried to use as a basis for proselytization. As always, the problems of inculturation were subtle. The Indians believed in the Great Spirit, but the missionaries were reluctant to apply that term to God, lest potential converts see it as confirmation of their old beliefs. Because some of the Indians practiced cannibalism, the missionaries also did not emphasize the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. As in many other cultures, polygamy was a major barrier to real conversion.
Religion in the Colony
Catholic Leaders
New France was at first under the bishop of Rouen (France), but Quebec was made a diocese in 1674, its first bishop Bl. Franfois Laval (d. 1708). The colony produced some religious vocations. Laval started a seminary; French-born St. Marguerite Bourgeoys (d. 1700) founded the Sisters of Notre Dame of Montreal; and St. Marguerite d’Youville (d. 1771) started the Sisters of Charity of Quebec (the Gray Nuns). The French Ursuline Marie of the Incarnation (d. 1672) migrated to Quebec and taught children while also living the life of a mystic.
The British Conquest
After the British conquest of Quebec in 1763, the new government sponsored an influx of Protestant settlers for the express purpose of ensuring a Protestant ascendancy, and it forcibly deported many of the French (Acadians) living in the eastern maritime districts.2The government also tried to restrict the liberty of Catholics, but when Catholics engaged in passive resistance, then rebuffed an appeal to support the American rebellion in 1776, the crown granted them limited toleration. The relatively few native clergy were for a while supplemented by French priests fleeing the Revolution.
Catholic Loyalty
During the War of 1812, Canadian Catholics once again proved their loyalty to the crown, which therefore removed the remaining restrictions on their freedom. Joseph-Octave Plessis of Quebec (d. 1822), the first Canadian archbishop, greatly expanded the Church’s network of schools and began the policy of urging the peasantry to remain on the land in order preserve their culture.
Religious Division
Canada was officially divided, Protestants predominating in Upper Canada (Ontario) and Catholics in the eastern part of the country, especially Lower Canada (Quebec). But an anti-British uprising by the Québecois in the 1830s, which the bishops opposed, led to reprisals, and in 1840, the two colonies were reunited, which gave Protestants a substantial majority. However, the Catholic minority proved to be politically skillful and managed to retain their full rights, including public funding for their schools.
Growth of the Church in Canada
Canada received its first cardinal, Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau of Quebec (d. 1898), in 1886, and in 1908, the country was officially declared to be no longer a mission territory. Outside Quebec province, there was still considerable anti-Catholicism, often a legacy of the Orangemen of the seventeenth century and often centered in Masonic lodges, but after the united Dominion of Canada was established in 1867, the Church, under mostly Irish bishops, grew and flourished in other provinces besides Quebec, especially because of Irish and eastern European immigration. Catholics became prominent in Ontario, where Toronto eventually became Canada’s major see.
In the more remote western and prairie provinces, Catholics were especially ministered to by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, who had gone to these remote regions earlier in the century to convert the Indians. In the latter part of the century, missionaries from both Canada and the United States began to evangelize the natives of the far North, often loosely called Eskimos. In Alaska, the Jesuits were in the unusual position of being in competition with a group which did not ordinarily proselytize—the Russian Orthodox, who had made a number of native converts while the territory was under Russian rule.
The Culture of Quebec
The culture of Quebec, where Catholics virtually controlled the school system, was of the kind that the Enlightenment had undermined in Europe. Nowhere did Catholicism permeate every aspect of life as it did there: intense piety; a large number of religious vocations; the clergy as the natural community leaders; an unusually high birth rate, with divorce not permitted; and a tenacious attachment to the French language. The Quebecois were sometimes dissenters from national policy, opposing massive immigration for fear that it would dilute French identity and rebuffing the call for volunteers in World War I.
The shrine of St. Anne de Beaupré at Quebec became a major pilgrimage place, as did St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal, which attracted pilgrims because of St. Andre Bessette (d. 1937), a Holy Cross brother whose ill health and lack of education led to his being assigned the most menial tasks but who gained a reputation for holiness and miraculous cures.
Duplessis
Quebec’s status as the most Catholic society in the world climaxed during the premiership of Maurice Duplessis (d. 1959), when its clergy functioned as political and social leaders and its largely rural economy, customs, language, and political loyalties were all intimately tied to religion. Duplessis’ Union Nationale was often corrupt, and it systematically ignored Catholic social teaching, but it protected both French identity and the privileged place of the Church. For a time, the Union Nationale had the tacit support of the Holy See, to the point where Pius XII even removed from office an archbishop who opposed Duplessis.
Liberal Catholics
Effective opposition to the Union Nationale was launched in the early 1960s by a group of Catholic intellectuals who planned the longterm modernization of Quebec society. The group included the future Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau (d. 2000) and was supported at first by Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger of Montreal (d. 1991).
Part of its program was the repeal of laws against divorce, contraception, and pornography, a repeal that, coinciding with the worldwide upheaval dubbed “the Sixties”, produced a powerful hedonistic reaction. Trudeau was the symbol of a new kind of Catholicism that had little regard for doctrinal orthodoxy or traditional morality but understood itself almost entirely in terms of liberal social programs.
Religious Decline
In the years following the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the key signs of religious vitality in Quebec—church attendance, religious vocations, marital stability, and birth rate—declined dramatically, and there was a strong reaction against clerical authority of any kind, as popular culture zestfully embraced hedonistic ways. By 2010, Canada had the lowest birth rate in the Americas and one of the lowest rates of church attendance.
Education
Catholics entered into a distinctive arrangement with the state-sponsored university system, founding their own residential colleges. Laval University at Quebec City and St. Michael’s of Toronto, under the Basilian Fathers, eventually became two of the leading centers of Thomistic philosophy in the world.
Unlike in the United States, Canadian Catholics were successful in getting state support for their schools in most provinces. However, by the twenty-first century, some provincial governments were mandating curricular changes that went against Catholic teaching, especially on sexual morality.
The United States
Ethnic Zones
What would eventually become the United States of America was in colonial times divided roughly into three zones: the Spanish Southwest; the Protestant, chiefly English, East Coast; and the French Mississippi Valley. Each had a quite distinct religious history.
The Spanish
Francisco de Coronado (d. 1554) led an expedition, which included a priest, through the Southwest in 1540, shortly after the Spanish had claimed Florida.
Santa Fe
Santa Fe (“holy faith”) was founded in 1610. Franciscans came to New Mexico late in the sixteenth century, setting up reducciones (gatherings) for the Indians, whose settled way of life in pueblas (villages) enabled the missionaries to enjoy some success. But here as elsewhere, they had to mount opposition to native customs, especially polygamy, and they found the Spanish soldiers as much a hindrance as a help. Unlike the more scholarly Jesuits of New France, the Franciscans seldom learned the Indian languages and instead required their converts to memorize the Latin or Spanish words for the doctrines of the Church.
In 1680, a major Indian rebellion killed twenty-one Franciscans and many others, temporarily wiping out the Spanish settlements, which were later reestablished. The Penitentes—a confraternity of men who wore hoods and cloaks, carried the cross in procession, and engaged in public acts of penance like scourging—began early in the Southwest and flourished long after the mission era ended.
California Missions
The Italian Jesuit Eusebio Kino (d. 1711) came to the Southwest shortly after the 1680 rebellion, and the bishop of Durango (Mexico) made him “vicar of California”, which then included Arizona. It was Kino who established the first of the California missions.
After the Jesuits were suppressed in the Spanish domains in 1767, Franciscans from Mexico were sent to California to continue missions. Eventually, there was a chain of twenty-one, stretching from San Diego to San Francisco and including at their peak perhaps twenty thousand Indians.
The greatest of the California missionaries was the Spanish Franciscan Bl. Junipero Serra (d. 1784), who founded nine missions, traveling up and down the Pacific coast mainly on foot. Serra was regarded as a saint in his lifetime and practiced penances that may have contributed to his death (for instance, when preaching he expressed repentance for his own sins by repeatedly striking himself hard on the chest with a stone).
The Mission System
The missions were communities from which the Indians, most of whom had been forest-dwellers, were allowed only an occasional “vacation”. They lived communally—married couples together, unmarried men and women in separate houses that were locked at night—all engaged in common agricultural and craft labor.
There were to be no forced conversions, but those Indians who did convert thereby came under the authority of the missionaries. The regime was paternalistic, based frankly on the belief that the Indians were childlike and therefore required both love and a firm hand. (Some Spaniards dubbed themselves “reasonable people” in contrast to the Indians, a designation Serra rejected.)
The missionaries sought to make their communities self-sufficient in every way and to that end implemented a strict daily schedule of prayer, work, and rest. Runaways were forcibly returned, and, as in Europe itself, corporal punishment was inflicted on those who violated the laws. European clothes were worn, churches were built with adobe mud but in the baroque style, and Spanish was the common language, since there were over fifty Indian dialects in California and many Indians could not understand each other.
Liturgy
The Indians were found to love music and imagery, so the friars made use of both for purposes of evangelization, encouraging native artists to compose sacred songs, paint religious scenes, and act out dramas illustrating the life of Christ. The missionaries often preached about the terrors of Hell that awaited the unrepentant.
Pagan Survivals
As had occurred after the conversion of Rome, the missionaries sought to christianize the Indians’ calendar through the observance of holy days in place of pagan feasts. As with every other enterprise of mass conversion in the history of the Church, the Indian converts retained many of their old customs and beliefs, on the border between what was merely social and what was religious. The liturgy on feast days spilled over into fiestas—celebrations that retained pagan elements—and many Indians probably lived in a dual religious world in which the old deities and powers were still real.
The missionaries, who often spoke of their loneliness, scrupulously observed all Church laws. Long before California was a wine-producing area, for example, the failure of wine to arrive from Mexico might prevent the celebration of Mass for long periods.
The End of the Missions
The era of the California missions was relatively brief. Enlightenment influences had caused the Jesuits to be suppressed in Spain, and by the 1770s, the same influences had reached California, causing the government to reorganize the Indians into self-governingpueblas independent of mission control. Serra opposed the experiment, which soon failed.
Around 1800, the Indian population began to decline sharply, because of disease. When Mexico won its independence from Spain, California passed to Mexican rule. In 1833, when only a minority of the missions still had resident priests, the Mexican government decreed their complete secularization and appropriated their lands.
Texas
Missions were established in Texas also in the early eighteenth century, but many were later abandoned. Mission San Antonio became a fort (the famous Alamo).
Florida
On the East Coast, the first permanent settlement in what would become the United States was St. Augustine, in what would later be Florida (1565). Founded by the Spanish, it was eventually taken by the English and lost its Hispanic character.
The English
Maryland
In 1634, Charles I of England appointed a Catholic convert, Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore (d. 1675), to be proprietor of the new territory of Maryland, which was officially named for Queen Henrietta Maria (d. 1669), although Calvert probably intended to honor the Virgin Mary. (The first settlement was called St. Mary’s.)
Maryland was not a Catholic colony, merely a place where Catholics could worship freely. The ships Ark and Dove—the “Catholic Mayflowers”—brought the first settlers, including two Jesuits, although a majority of the settlers were Protestants. Soon an attack by Protestant Virginians burned St. Mary’s and forced the governor and the two Jesuits to flee briefly. Catholic estates were plundered and four Catholics were hanged.
Toleration
Subsequently, the Maryland Toleration Act forbade harassment or persecution of anyone who believed in Jesus Christ, making Maryland the only colony, other than predominantly Baptist Rhode Island, to allow this freedom. Despite the fact that the Calverts were in effect the owners of the colony, events there depended heavily on the English government. The Toleration Act was passed a few months after Charles I was beheaded in a rebellion led by Puritans. Protestants soon seized the government of Maryland and repealed the Act; however, it was reenacted at the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660.
After the Glorious Revolution overthrew the Catholic James II in 1688, Maryland was made a royal colony, the English penal laws against Catholics were declared to be in force, and conformity to the Church of England was required. The laws were enforced somewhat irregularly, but they could be quite stringent, even to the point of requiring Catholic widows to be deprived of their children. Similar laws existed in the other English colonies, although there was some Catholic presence in Quaker Pennsylvania.
Catholic Life
Catholic life in Maryland mirrored Catholic life in England itself, in that it was centered on the estates of the gentry and dependent on the sufferance of the government. Some Catholics remained influential, but there were apostasies, including members of the Calvert family.
The Jesuits
The Jesuits supported themselves by farms of their own which, like those of the gentry, were often worked by slaves. Some effort was made to convert the Indians. The few priests traveled constantly on horseback to visit small communities where Mass was usually celebrated and baptisms, confessions, marriages, and funerals conducted in private homes.
The Carrolls
Charles Carroll of Carrollton (d. 1832) was one of the most important men in Maryland—a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a strong supporter of the American Revolution. His cousin John Carroll (d. 1815) studied in Europe, as was common for upper-class Maryland Catholics, and became a Jesuit. After the suppression of the Society, John returned to Maryland and ministered to the flock who lived around his mother’s estate. At the outbreak of the Revolution, he was part of a delegation (including Benjamin Franklin [d. 1790]) sent to Canada to seek Canadian neutrality, a mission that failed because England had recently granted religious toleration to the Quebec Catholics.
The First Bishop
John Carroll, like Charles, was an ardent patriot, proclaiming Catholic support for the Revolution and the new government. After the war, he was the leader of a group of priests who told the Holy See that it was inappropriate that they should continue under the authority of the vicar apostolic of London. Carroll himself was first made prefect apostolic over the United States, then in 1789, the first American bishop, in effect elected by his fellow priests and confirmed by Rome. There were then about twenty-five thousand Catholics in the thirteen new states—about 1 percent of the population. In 1808, dioceses were established at Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Bardstown (Kentucky), and Baltimore became an archdiocese.
Religious Liberty
Before appointing Carroll, the Holy See queried the fledgling American government as to whether the appointment was acceptable and received the surprising answer that it was of no concern to the government. At that time, and for a long time afterward, the United States was the only country in the world where it was possible for the Church to erect dioceses and parishes, establish charitable and educational institutions, and appoint clergy without at least the formal approval of the government. Most important, in theory, this religious liberty was not conferred by the state but was a natural right enjoyed by all, so that the Church did not have to depend on concessions wrung from unfriendly governments through fragile concordats.
Democratic Ideas
In general, Carroll opposed bringing foreign priests to America, and in keeping with the spirit of the new nation, he at first proposed to the Holy See that bishops in America be elected by the senior clergy, that the United States be free of the authority of the Congregation of Propaganda, and that Mass be celebrated in the vernacular, accommodations that he thought would make the Church appear less foreign and more democratic. But as he began to exercise episcopal authority, he apparently changed his mind about those matters.
Sulpicians
Paradoxically, in order to train clergy for a new country that had been spawned by a revolution, he found it necessary to welcome French Sulpicians fleeing the revolution in their own country. For two generations, the Sulpicians were perhaps the most important religious community in America, with a number of them, including two of Carroll’s successors, serving as bishops. They started St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, which Carroll hoped would be the seedbed of native vocations, although for a long time most students were foreign. The first priest ordained in the United States (1793) was the French Sulpician Stephen Badin (d. 1853).
Religious Women
Native vocations among women were more plentiful—a half dozen new congregations were established around 1800, notably the Sisters of Charity, founded in Maryland by the aristocratic convert St. Elizabeth Anne Seton (d. 1821). Remarkably, the first woman to become a nun from what would eventually be the United States was not a Marylander but Lydia Longley (d. 1758), a Puritan girl from Connecticut who was kidnapped by Indians and taken to Canada, where she was eventually ransomed and entered a convent.
A Free Church
In his famous work Democracy in America, the French Catholic nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville (d. 1859) informed Europeans that the fact that there was no official church in the United States did not indicate irreligion but quite the opposite—nowhere was religion the subject of such interest, and the churches were stimulated to great efforts in order to win free adherents.
Religious Indifference?
But the radical newness of this arrangement raised questions that would take a long time to resolve. Catholic teaching held that the state had an obligation to promote religion and morality. While, in practical terms, it was an immense benefit for Catholics to live in a neutral state, that very neutrality seemed to show that the American state did not accept its responsibility. This was a problem for many Protestants as well. No one proposed an official national church, but until the 1830s, some individual states still retained official churches, and some people were troubled by the absence of any mention of God in the Constitution.
Common Morality
For a century and a half after the Constitution was ratified, the prevailing view was that all religions fostered a common morality that was the necessary basis of a good society. People of all religions were presumed to be able to live harmoniously together under a state that was neutral toward specific religions but not toward religion as such.
The Second Great Awakening
Practically all the Founding Fathers were influenced by the British Enlightenment, and some were Deists. But the views of this elite soon ceased to be the governing spirit of the new nation, as the shift from republicanism to some kind of equalitarian democracy gave greater weight to the beliefs of people who were largely unaffected by the Enlightenment. To the dismay of President Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809) and others, there occurred a great resurgence of Evangelical faith—the Second Great Awakening that stamped on the country a deeply Christian character that survives into the twenty-first century.
Religious Rights
Despite the prevailing anti-Catholicism, Catholics found that their rights were generally protected by the Supreme Court, which at various times confirmed the legal independence of private religious colleges; upheld the right of churches to import foreign clergy (because “we are a Christian nation”); recognized Catholic marriage as satisfying civil requirements; allowed the Church to receive bequests; permitted tax exemptions to religious bodies; held that charitable institutions under religious auspices were not “sectarian” and could receive public money; and found that a monk’s vow of poverty did not violate the constitutional guarantee of personal liberty. A crucial feature of the American legal system was the principle that internal church disputes, if brought before the secular courts, were to be decided according to the church’s own laws, in order to minimize the possibility of governmental interference in internal church affairs.
Education
The environment was so favorable to religious education that in 1844 the Supreme Court seriously considered the claim that prohibiting the teaching of religion in a privately endowed school constituted blasphemy. The court allowed the innovation only because the donor had no malicious intent toward religion.
For a long time, private religious colleges far outnumbered state institutions in the United States, and Catholics took full advantage of the opportunity, eventually founding almost three hundred institutions of higher learning, not including seminaries—vastly more than in any other country. The first, Georgetown, was established by Carroll in 1789, and the Jesuits alone eventually founded twenty-eight such institutions. Over time, colleges were also opened by the Dominicans, the Holy Cross Fathers, and other male orders, while colleges for women were opened and operated by religious sisters.
Lay Trusteeism
The democratic American spirit threatened the integrity of the Church in one important respect—lay trusteeism. Although it had European roots and some of its most ardent supporters were immigrants, lay trusteeism seemed to harmonize with the Puritan ecclesiastical system called congregationalism.
In some cases, parishioners claimed title to the parish property and the right to hire and fire their pastors, even to elect their bishops. But it was not primarily a lay-clerical rivalry. In almost every case, the dispute centered around two rival pastors—one appointed by the bishop, the other by the trustees—occasionally involving public brawls between rival factions. The disputes raged on and off for decades, especially on the East Coast. The Holy See condemned lay trusteeism as a violation of canon law, and bishops sometimes excommunicated dissidents. Some bishops allowed lay trustees in an advisory capacity, so long as the bishop retained title to the parish property and the authority to appoint and remove pastors.
Finances
The democratic character of the church in the United States was also reflected in the fact that it was heavily dependent on the free-will offerings of the faithful. Despite poverty, Catholics built often imposing churches and funded charitable institutions of all kinds, which, since most Catholics were poor, required a large number of small contributions. A common method of parochial support was pew rental (sometimes pew auction), which allowed the better-off people to sit in the most desirable locations for Sunday Mass and left the majority to find whatever places they could.
The French
De Soto
In the second of the three ethnic-religious zones that became the United States, a Spanish expedition under Hernando de Soto (d. 1541) got beyond the Mississippi. A Franciscan member of that party, Juan de Padilla, remained to convert the Indians in what is now northeast Kansas, soon becoming the first North American martyr (1542).
Marquette and Joliet
In the later seventeenth century, Jesuits from Canada began doing missionary work throughout the Great Lakes region. Based on Indian stories about a great river, the Jesuit Jacques Marquette (d. 1675) and the layman Louis Joliet (d. 1700) rediscovered the Mississippi and traveled much of its length. They originally named it the Immaculate Conception, but the name did not stick. The French eventually reached the Gulf of Mexico and claimed the entire Mississippi Valley.
Indian Missions
The Jesuits penetrated south from the Great Lakes, establishing a series of Indian missions throughout the upper part of the Mississippi Valley and also ministering to the few French settlers attracted to the area by the lure of furs. (The parish of Cahokia [Illinois], opposite St. Louis, claims to be the oldest continuous parish in the United States, having been founded as an Indian mission in 1699.) There were some missionary martyrs.
The Plains Indians were nomadic hunters, which hampered the missionary efforts, and polygamy was once again a great obstacle to conversion. It was common among the Indians, and the French trappers often took Indian concubines, an arrangement that was considered objectively sinful but that also often served as the missionaries’ entry into Indian society. In the eighteenth century, the Franciscans and the Society of the Foreign Missions of the Seminary of Quebec also began sending priests into the territory. Lead and other minerals were discovered on the west side of the Mississippi, bringing an influx of settlers into what would later become Missouri.
New Orleans
New Orleans was founded in 1718, and from there, French settlements were established to the north along the Mississippi, so that in time there was a continuous, albeit sparse, chain extending from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. The first academy for Catholic girls in what would become the United States was established by the Ursulines at New Orleans in 1727.
The Upper Mississippi
Following the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), France had to cede the “Illinois Country” to England and transfer the west side of the Mississippi to Spain, although the majority of the white inhabitants of the valley were still French in origin. The territory ceded to Spain was placed officially under the diocese of Havana, but in practice it remained under Quebec, which, since England now ruled Canada, also had jurisdiction over the Illinois Country. The transfer of the territory to Spain led almost immediately to the expulsion of the Jesuits and therefore to an acute shortage of priests.
“The Americans”
During the American Revolution (1775-1782), rebel forces advanced into the Illinois Country, and Pierre Gibault (d. 1804), who was virtually the only priest left in the territory, persuaded his mostly French parishioners to welcome the Americans. After being returned to France under Napoleon, the Louisiana Territory was sold to the United States in 1803, giving the new nation unlimited access to the rest of the vast continent. After the Louisiana Purchase, the territory was quickly settled by “Americans”—easterners of mainly British Protestant stock—and its French character was diluted.
Louisiana
The diocese of Louisiana was established in 1815, but the Creole clergy in the state of Louisiana were said to be Gallicans who resisted the reform programs of their bishops. The first bishop, the Sulpician Louis DuBourg (d. 1833), a native of Santo Domingo, was essentially driven out of New Orleans by the clergy and moved his seat to St. Louis, which became a diocese in 1826. Despite its heavily Catholic character, Louisiana never exerted proportionate leadership in the Church nationally.
The Upper Mississippi
Bishop Benedict J. Flaget of Bardstown (d. 1850), a French Sulpician, found the Catholics of the upper Mississippi Valley, who had been without priestly guidance for years at a time, to be also extremely lax, but around 1820, an influx of missionaries began a revival. Flemish Jesuits, French Sacred Heart Sisters, and a multinational group of Vincentians arrived in Missouri almost simultaneously, originally committed to evangelizing the Indians but increasingly devoted to the pastoral needs of white people.
St. Rose-Philippine Duchesne (d. 1852), superior of the Sacred Heart Sisters, established schools for girls throughout the Louisiana Territory. The Vincentians and the Jesuits both established seminaries barely a hundred miles apart, and the Jesuits took charge of a school that eventually became St. Louis University, the first university west of the Mississippi.
Badin was an intrepid missionary in Kentucky and territories farther west, as was the Flemish Sulpician Charles Nerinckx (d. 1824), who founded the Sisters of Loreto at the Foot of the Cross to establish schools on the frontier. In the new state of Michigan, the French Sulpician Gabriel Richard (d. 1833) was a major figure in civic life: a founder of the state university and Michigan’s first Congressman. (Ironically, he was in jail for debt when he was elected.)
Eclipse of the French
The Irish Bishop (later Archbishop) Peter Richard Kenrick of St. Louis (d. 1896) discouraged French priests from serving in his see when he first arrived in 1841. A few years later, the first bishop of Little Rock, the Irishman Andrew Byrne (d. 1862), arrived with a contingent of Irish priests, whereupon all the French priests departed.
The Indians
The relentless westward push of white settlers led to the repeated seizure of Indian lands, the forcible relocation of their occupants, and the frequent breaking of treaties by the federal government. During the 1830s, the Jesuits from Missouri began extensive evangelization of the Indians, following the Missouri River all the way to Montana and establishing a chain of missions across the northwestern tier of the country. Missionaries were almost the only white people involved with the Indians whose motives were not mercenary, and the famous Flemish Jesuit Pierre de Smet (d. 1873) attempted, with limited success, to represent the Indians’ interests.
Mission Rivalries
Another obstacle to Catholic missionary activity was aggressive competition with Protestants. As the Indians came under the authority of the federal government, the various tribes were assigned to different churches, usually favoring the Protestants, the only instance in American history when the Church’s pastoral activity was restricted by law. For educational purposes, the government provided financial support for the missions and tended to overlook the fact that a major part of that education was religion.
Westward Movement
After 1840, the new nation began to advance westward into the Hispanic areas of the continent, beginning with the “Anglo” Texans’ rebellion against Mexico, which led to the Mexican War that brought Texas into the Union. The gold rush of the 1840s brought many people to California, including many Catholics, and fostered the popular image of California as the “promised land”. Temporarily leaping over most of the territory between the eastern Rocky Mountains and the western Sierras, the United States accepted California into the Union in 1850. The Holy See established a vicariate for Texas and dioceses in Los Angeles and Santa Fe and solidified the ecclesiastical organization of the vast country by making Oregon City (later Portland) and St. Louis into archdioceses.
Eclipse of the Spanish
As it had done in the Mississippi Valley, the westward movement diluted the older ethnic character of California Catholicism, so that in time Hispanics found themselves outnumbered by the Irish and under the authority of mainly Irish bishops. The survival of Hispanic culture was strongest in New Mexico, but the celebrated Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy of Santa Fe (d. 1888)3 was a Frenchman who considered the conduct of his Hispanic priests and the folk piety of his flock less than satisfactory. He ignored the classic Spanish mission style of architecture and built a cathedral in Romanesque style, in order to emphasize the European heritage.
An Immigrant Church
From the beginning of the new nation, there was continuous immigration, much of it by Catholic Irish. But the great age of immigration began shortly after 1840, coinciding exactly with the beginnings of the great westward push. The Irish were by far the largest Catholic immigrant group, with over four million in the period 1820 to 1920. Germans were the largest immigrant group overall—five and a half million—but only a fifth of them were Catholics.
Thus the religious and ethnic character of both the East and the Midwest (as the region between the Alleghenies and the Rocky Mountains came to be known) altered substantially. People of British ancestry gradually ceased to constitute a majority in the East, while, paradoxically, Catholics in the former Louisiana Territory now constituted a much smaller percentage of the population but grew hugely in terms of total numbers.
“Americans”
The fact that Carroll came from a distinguished aristocratic family had much to do with public acceptance of his faith and conversions to the Catholic Church from the upper echelons of society. Since the Holy See sought to appoint native bishops when possible, throughout the nineteenth century, a disproportionate number of bishops—two of them Carroll’s successors at Baltimore—were drawn from the ranks of converts, usually former Episcopalians.
There was some dissatisfaction with the French clergy, especially bishops, who were considered autocratic and were accused of not bothering to learn English, although the first bishop of Boston, Jean de Cheverus (d. 1836), was respected even by Protestants. (He was in a sense the first American cardinal, achieving that honor as archbishop of Bordeaux.)
The Ethnicity of Bishops
Most bishops were Irish, if for no other reason than that they spoke the dominant language. But most of the earliest Irish bishops were not even working in the United States when appointed and were sent from abroad specifically to assume the office. (The first two bishops of New York were Irish Dominicans stationed in Rome, the first of whom got no closer to New York than Naples.)
French bishops were sometimes suspected of Gallicanism, while the Irish bishops were strongly Ultramontane. A rare Czech appointee, St. John Nepomucene Neumann (d. 1860), the Redemptorist bishop of Philadelphia, became the only canonized member of the American hierarchy.
John England
Paradoxically, Carroll’s “Americanist” ideas were especially kept alive by one of the immigrant Irish bishops, John England of Charleston (d. 1842), who had been a strong supporter of the independence of his native land and who extolled the American idea of liberty as the hope of the world. England promulgated a “constitution” for his diocese, including an elected body of laymen to advise the bishop, although all matters pertaining to the faith remained under the authority of the clergy.
Architecture
Carroll’s idea of Americanization was reflected in the dominant early style of church architecture. His cathedral in Baltimore was designed by Benjamin Latrobe (d. 1820), who also designed the new Capitol in Washington, D.C., as well as the cathedrals in Bardstown and Cincinnati. Like his civil buildings, all of Latrobe’s churches were built in the Federal, or Greek revival, style favored at the time, though it was not distinctively religious. But by the time of the Civil War, American Catholics’ increasing links to Europe were reflected in the revival of Romanesque, Gothic, and Baroque styles, which predominated in church architecture until World War I.
Growth
By 1870, the number of Catholics had increased to 4.5 million—12 percent of the total population. Until 1914, the United States allowed almost unlimited immigration, a policy that especially favored Catholics from southern and eastern Europe: Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Slovaks, and others. With this increase in the Catholic population in 1875, came the appointment of the first American named a cardinal while holding an American see—Archbishop John F. McCloskey of New York (d. 1885). After that, the country was never without a representative in the Sacred College: two in 1910, four in 1924, five in 1946.
Anti-Catholicism
Both the elite and the masses in the Mississippi Valley were mostly Catholic at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, and Catholics there were never treated as outsiders, even as “Americans” poured into the territory. But in the East, especially New England, the Anglo-Saxon elite openly regarded Catholics as interlopers who had to be kept in their place, while in the West and Southwest the native Hispanic population was often treated as a conquered people. (During the Mexican War of the 1840s, American troops sometimes desecrated Catholic churches, which provoked some of the Irish in their ranks to desert to the Mexicans, who named them the San Patricio Brigade.)
“Know-Nothings”
Prior to the Civil War, when massive immigration was still new, antiCatholic violence—collectively dubbed the Know-Nothing Riots after a loosely organized secret society—erupted in several cities of the United States. A convent school was burned to the ground near Boston, a papal nuncio was mobbed in Cincinnati, and a stone sent by Pius IX for the new Washington Monument was dumped into the Potomac. The fraudulent memoir of a supposed nun—I Leaped over the Wall—spread the most lurid tales of convent life. While some of this antiCatholic hostility was “nativism”—hatred of foreigners—at its core it was religiously motivated. Some immigrants, especially Germans, were “freethinkers” who fomented anti-Catholic prejudice against the Church as the principal enemy of civilization.
Elite Prejudice
The crudity and violence of popular anti-Catholicism was sometimes condemned by the Protestant elites, but those elites harbored their own kind of prejudice, which was a combination of the classic Protestant view of Catholicism as a distortion of Christianity and the Enlightenment claim that it was repressive superstition. Elite opinion deplored the Syllabus of Errors and the definition of papal infallibility and favored both Italy’s seizure of the Papal States and Germany’s Kulturkampf. For a time, Harvard Law School would not admit graduates of Jesuit colleges, on the grounds that their education did not qualify them.
Ethnic Parishes
Irish bishops in the United States, in contrast to the efforts of the Quebec hierarchy to preserve French culture, found the immigrant culture of their non-English-speaking flocks troublesome. Ethnic parishes were ubiquitous but were often sources of tension.
Germans
There were few German bishops except in the state of Wisconsin, where St. Francis de Sales Seminary at Milwaukee was the principal training ground for German American priests, and after 1880, there were practically no bishops except Irish and German. German Catholics lived in all parts of the country but especially in the German Triangle stretching between Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. During the 1880s, the movement called Cahenslyism—named after a German layman who was head of a society to fund the American missions—complained to the Holy See that German Americans were treated as second-class citizens and asked that they be given more German bishops, a plea that was rebuffed.
Schism
Other ethnic groups considered themselves to have even less influence. The only schism in the history of the United States, the Polish National Church, was founded in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1896 by Poles unhappy with their Irish bishop. It remained small and marginal.
The Language Issue
Strictly speaking, there were no Irish parishes as such, merely parishes where English was the language of confessions and sermons, and ethnic parishes were regarded as concessions. (In St. Louis, for example, large and imposing churches built by German Catholics were officially considered mere “chapels of ease” of English-speaking parishes.)
Ethnic parishes were sometimes considered obstacles to the assimilation of immigrants into American culture, but the reality was more complex. They allowed immigrants to ease into the culture over time and minimized culture shock, preserving the old languages and customs even as the second generation became “Americanized”. Germans in particular were devoted to parish schools, as places where their language and customs could be passed on along with their religion.
The Fidelity of the Immigrants
Some bishops in the United States thought it was urgent that the immigrants settle in rural communities, and a few, such as the otherwise modern-minded John Ireland of St. Paul, even sponsored projects for reestablishing the European pattern of farming communities, with the Catholic faith at their center. But ironically, it was precisely certain rural areas that turned out to be dangerous to the faith, as the sheer size of the country made it difficult to provide priests for much of the South and West, and many immigrants became Protestants. By contrast, the Church was highly successful in providing for the pastoral needs of her mushrooming urban flock. While there were many thriving Catholic agricultural communities, especially in the Midwest, American Catholics became a predominantly urban people. Overall, the immigrants kept their faith, and the system of ethnic parishes had much to do with that fact.
Education
Parochial Schools
The “common schools”, which began to spread after 1850, were objectionable to Catholics because they were essentially Protestant, requiring prayers and readings from the Protestant Bible, often led by ministers, and punishing Catholic children for not participating. Catholics began establishing their own schools in large numbers around the time of the Civil War, and the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore (Baltimore III, 1884) mandated that all parishes sponsor them. A decade later there were four thousand throughout the country, enrolling seven hundred and fifty thousand children. Baltimore III also authorized what came to be called the Baltimore Catechism, which was used in Catholic schools for the next eighty years.
The bishops were not in total agreement about educational strategy. Some agitated to make the public schools religiously neutral, but that effort succeeded only in Cincinnati, where it was promoted primarily by “freethinkers”, with Catholic and Jewish support, and was criticized by some Catholics for making public education secular. Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul (d. 1918) for a time promoted a cooperative arrangement between Catholic and public schools, a proposal that some other bishops opposed and that public-school officials also eventually rejected. In 1925, the Supreme Court, pronouncing, “The child is not the mere creature of the state”, overturned an antiCatholic Oregon law requiring all children to attend public schools. But the Church was rarely successful in getting tax support for her schools.
The Catholic Schools
Partly because of the perceived Catholic sympathy for slavery, the Republican Party after the Civil War increasingly exploited anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant feeling. President Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877) seemed to give in to such prejudice in urging that no public funds be given to Catholic schools, and a Republican effort in Congress to initiate a constitutional amendment to that effect failed in a purely partisan vote.
Politics
Brownson
Virtually the only Catholic intellectual of substance in nineteenth-century America was Orestes Brownson (d. 1876), a spiritual seeker who passed through Calvinism, liberal Protestantism, Unitarianism, agnosticism, and the utopian Brook Farm experiment before becoming a Catholic. Brownson thought the time had come for the United States to lead the world spiritually, but it could do so only if it abandoned a weak and compromised Protestantism for an unwavering Catholicism.
Sternly orthodox, Brownson was nonetheless suspect because for a time he also made common cause with liberal Catholics in Europe, such as Montalembert and Acton. He extolled American democracy and opposed the establishment of Catholic schools, proposing instead that Catholics serve as leaven in the public schools. His great critic, and perhaps the most influential American Catholic journalist of the nineteenth century, was also a convert—James A. McMaster (d. 1886) of the New York Freeman’s Journal, who strongly opposed every liberalizing tendency in the Church.
Eventually, Brownson came to mistrust pure democracy, as tending toward a kind of philosophical relativism, and he supported a theory—held especially by many Southerners—whereby the individual states could nullify an act of the federal government. But unlike many other advocates of states’ rights, Brownson was also vehemently anti-slavery (McMaster was equally anti-abolitionist) and supported the Union in Civil War.
“Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion”
Due to the Republican opposition to funding Catholic schools and other reasons, Catholics, especially the Irish, flocked to the Democrats, demonstrating their power in 1884, when a Protestant minister’s sneer that the Democrats were the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion” cost the Republicans New York City and thereby the presidential election. In the northern cities, Catholics partly coped with discrimination by mastering the arts of democratic politics (with both a small and a large “D”), taking advantage of their constantly growing numbers to elect their own people to office. The Irish were especially skillful at urban politics, putting together the “machines” that survived into the 1960s and beyond.4
Labor Unions
Catholics’ adherence to the Democratic Party also owed much to their status as mostly laborers, since the Republicans, in both image and reality, were the party of business owners. Catholics became leaders in the emergent labor movement. The Holy See condemned the Knights of Labor, an early union headed by the Catholic Terence V. Powderly (d. 1924), calling it a “secret society” akin to the Masons, because it kept its membership secret and required its members to take an oath, but Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore (d. 1921) persuaded the Vatican to lift the ban.
Catholic Life in America
The Sisters
The Church’s mission was heavily dependent on the labor of sisters, who greatly outnumbered priests and who, besides teaching, were the chief ministers of charity in hospitals and orphanages and in the personal care of invalids and the destitute. They worked heroically during the frequent epidemics, lived among the very poor in the cities, endured the most extreme hardships and dangers on the frontier, and often died young.
Many foreign orders came to the United States, notably the Sisters of Mercy from Ireland, the Daughters of Charity from France, and the School Sisters of Notre Dame from Germany. The Italian immigrant St. Frances Xavier Cabrini (d. 1918), who founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart to work in hospitals and other institutions, in 1946 became the first American citizen to be canonized. Congregations also continued to be established in America. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (d. 1926), the convert daughter of American author Nathaniel Hawthorne (d. 1864), founded a community of sisters primarily to care for indigent cancer patients.
Lay Organizations
Possibly because of the democratic, “voluntaristic” character of American society, religious organizations of all kinds flourished: the Holy Name Society for men, the Altar and Rosary Society for women, the St. Vincent de Paul Society to help the poor, and ethnic organizations of all kinds. An Irish priest in Connecticut, Michael McGivney (d. 1890), founded what became the largest and most important of these—the Knights of Columbus, its name chosen to recall the Catholic origins of the nation. Each of these groups had a predominantly religious purpose, but they also served as social organizations and provided life insurance and aid to members in need. Along with the church and the school, they constituted a complete Catholic world.
Piety
As in Europe, devotions of all kinds—the rosary, novenas and shrines to various saints, the Forty Hours’ Devotion—were extremely popular, as was the parish mission in which visiting priests, especially Passionists or Redemptorists, preached every night for a week. These missions were the Catholic equivalent of the Protestant revival, aiming at personal conversion, with exhortations to greater piety and severe warnings against common sins like drunkenness. American Catholics were very faithful in going to confession, with long lines on Saturdays and before great feasts.
Slavery
Few Catholics were involved in the anti-slavery movement, and many regarded the movement as a malign effort by extremists to undermine the social order with a concept of “liberty” that had proven to be destructive in Europe. (Daniel O’Connell lost influence among some American Catholics because of his denunciations of slavery.) On the other side, some abolitionists, such as the Presbyterian minister Elijah P. Lovejoy (d. 1837), who was murdered by a mob in Illinois, were as much anti-Catholic as they were anti-slavery.
Papal Condemnations
Since the fifteenth century, the popes had condemned the slave trade, and one of the ways in which a self-consciously “American” Catholicism diverged from Rome in the nineteenth century was precisely on the slavery issue. Bishop England was pro-slavery, and most of the Catholic elite of Maryland and the lower Mississippi Valley, Bishop Carroll among them, owned slaves, with little apparent crisis of conscience. Some religious communities owned slaves, and one Maryland superior was removed by the Jesuit general for having allowed slave families to be broken up through sales.
Pro-Slavery Catholics
The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, holding that slaves had no rights, was written by Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney (d. 1864), a Marylander who achieved the highest office held by any American Catholic prior to 1961. Several Maryland Catholics were implicated in the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, although the extent of their involvement is unclear.
Despite the repeated papal condemnations of slavery, few clergy called for emancipation, a rare exception being Archbishop John B. Purcell of Cincinnati (d. 1883). The only American textbook of moral theology, by the Irish Archbishop Francis P. Kenrick of Baltimore (d. 1863), justified the institution and, citing St. Paul’s Letter to Philemon (see verses 8-22), even defended the highly controversial Fugitive Slave Law, which required that runaway slaves be forcibly returned to their masters.
The Civil War
Catholics fought on both sides in the Civil War, although Louisiana was the only Confederate state that had a large Catholic population. There was an impression at the time that most Irish tended to be pro-Confederate and most Germans pro-Union, and Irish Catholics were among the chief perpetrators of the Anti-Draft Riots in New York City, during which more than a hundred people, mostly blacks, were killed on the streets.
Bishop Patrick N. Lynch of Charleston (d. 1882) was sent as a Confederate emissary to Pius IX to persuade the Pope to recognize the Confederacy officially. The Pope’s response is uncertain. It was rumored that he was open to recognizing the Confederacy if slavery were abolished. Meanwhile, Bishop Michael Domenec of Pittsburgh (d. 1878), a Spanish Vincentian, attempted to promote the Union cause in Europe.
Reconstruction
Southern Catholics resisted Reconstruction, and Bishop William H. Elder of Natchez (d. 1904), who later succeeded Purcell in Cincinnati, was briefly jailed for disobeying the orders of the occupying Union army. By a narrow margin, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction of a Missouri priest who, under orders from Archbishop Peter Kenrick (Francis’ brother and a former slave owner), refused to take an oath of loyalty to the Union.
“Wage Slavery”
Some Catholics, such as Archbishop John J. Hughes of New York (d. 1864), criticized the North in the same way that some Southerners did, arguing that the plight of the industrial laborer was, if anything, even worse than that of the slave—who was often cared for throughout his entire life by his master—because the factory worker was trapped in an entirely heartless and impersonal system that, caring only for profit, often paid him less than he needed to live.
Black Catholics
Despite widespread racial prejudice among American Catholics, Augustine Tolton (d. 1897), who was born a slave in Missouri, became the first black priest in the United States. Rebuffed by various American seminaries, he completed his studies at the College of the Propaganda in Rome and worked in black parishes in Illinois. James A. Healy (d. 1900) of Portland, Maine, the son of a white father and a slave mother, was the first black bishop in the United States and until the 1960s the only one.
Religious Orders
The Josephites, an offshoot of the English missionary Mill Hill Fathers, were a male community founded primarily to work among blacks. Elizabeth Lange (d. 1882), a Cuban immigrant of Haitian ancestry, and a New Orleans black woman, Ven. Henriette DeLille (d. 1862), both founded communities of black sisters: the Oblates of Providence and the Sisters of the Holy Family, respectively. St. Katharine-Mary Drexel (d. 1955), daughter of an aristocratic Philadelphia family, used her fortune to establish the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, who worked among black and Indian women and welcomed their membership. She also founded the nation’s only black Catholic university, Xavier of New Orleans.
“Americanism”
Bishop Domenec, although he was Spanish, gave offense at the First Vatican Council by predicting that Catholics in the United States would not only soon outnumber those in Italy, but they would also be better Catholics. It was a speech that foreshadowed the greatest crisis in the history of the Church in the United States—“Americanism”.
The exact nature of “Americanism” was vague. A few people advocated a vernacular liturgy, the abandonment of distinctive habits for nuns, and a respectful ecumenical dialogue with Protestants, but on the whole, the movement was merely a rather uncritical enthusiasm for American society. The leaders were often impulsive and given to battle cries such as “Church and Age Unite!”; sometimes they demanded that the American political system be followed everywhere.
John Ireland
Archbishop Ireland, who was dubbed “the consecrated cyclone”, was the leader of the Americanist bishops. He dismissed the contemplative monastic life as unsuited to American culture and was an almost frenetic champion of the greatness of the nation, seeing himself as engaged in a great battle for the direction of the American church. Despite his enthusiastic belief in the principle of separation of church and state, he often meddled in politics to promote his ecclesiastical agenda.
Assimilating the Immigrants
Although Ireland championed labor unions, he got on well with some of the leading businessmen of the “Gilded Age” and was unusual among Catholics in being an ardent Republican, seeing Catholic loyalty to the Democratic Party as a further sign of their failure to enter fully into American society. The American church of his day was all too obviously a community of immigrants, and on one occasion Ireland exclaimed in exasperation that he would welcome a return to the conditions of John Carroll’s day, when the flock was much smaller but was also truly American.
Temperance
Ireland was also embarrassed that the Irish immigrants had a reputation for drunkenness and criminality, and he urged “temperance” (total abstinence from alcohol) on his people. (An Irish Franciscan, Theobald Mathew [d. 1856], promoted the temperance movement with evangelical fervor, considerable episcopal support, and some success.)
Gibbons
Gibbons served as the Americanists’ protective patron, no one doing more than he to establish the image of the Church as completely at home in American society. A bishop for over half a century, Gibbons appeared to the public as a simple, kindly, humorously self-deprecating man imbued with the democratic spirit. He was routinely called upon to offer public prayers on patriotic occasions and, although the Church did not allow official ecumenical activities, regularly appeared alongside non-Catholic clergy, with whom he seemed to enjoy cordial relations. Although the war of 1898 was fought against Catholic Spain, and although many Catholics for various reasons opposed American entry into World War I, Gibbons epitomized the patriotic spirit, giving proof that a Catholic could be a loyal American.
Catholic University
The Catholic University of America was founded in 1888 directly under the hierarchy and intended to be mainly a graduate institution for clergy. Some of its founders—Bishop John Lancaster Spalding of Peoria (d. 1916) and its first rector, Bishop John J. Keane (d. 1918)—were Americanists who also intended it to be a more “modern” institution than the Jesuit schools they considered reactionary. Keane insisted that little emphasis be placed on the study of the Middle Ages.
Apostolic Delegation
The Apostolic Delegation was established in the United States in 1893, mainly because of complaints to Rome by American priests that they were being mistreated by their bishops.
The most famous case was that of Fr. Edward McGlynn (d. 1900) of New York City, who was excommunicated by Archbishop Michael A. Corrigan (d. 1902)—the leader of the anti-Americanist bishops—for espousing radical social ideas like the “single-tax movement” and for denouncing Corrigan as a tool of wealth. (Ironically, most of the “Americanist” bishops had been born in Ireland, whereas Corrigan was a native of New Jersey.) The first apostolic delegate, Archbishop Francesco Satolli (d. 1910), reinstated McGlynn and was for a time friendly to the Americanists. Later he seemed to ally himself with the conservative wing of the hierarchy led by Corrigan.
Vatican Involvement
Although it had been building up for decades, the Americanist crisis erupted primarily because of the first religious community for men founded in the United States—the Paulists (Congregation of St. Paul). The community was started just before the Civil War by Isaac Hecker (d. 1888), a convert from Methodism who, like Brownson, was briefly associated with the utopian Brook Farm experiment. Hecker became a Redemptorist but was dismissed from that community after a dispute with his superiors. Also like Brownson, Hecker believed that the United States, as a land of innovation and hope, was ripe for conversion to Catholicism, because the Church affirmed human freedom and the possibility of natural virtue. He emphasized the presence in each person of the Holy Spirit, inspiring and guiding good actions. In contrasting Catholicism with the theological pessimism of classical Calvinism and Lutheranism, he appeared not to notice the growth of a liberal Protestantism that was even more optimistic than Catholicism.
Without his saying so explicitly, Hecker’s hope seems to have been that the United States could be converted through its social elite, who had first to be shown that Catholicism was not a foreign entity but something that resonated with American culture at the deepest level. A number of the early Paulists were converts, some from prominent families, one an astronomer at Harvard.
The crisis came to a head at the end of the century in a roundabout way—through a French translation of a biography of Hecker written by one of his priests. Based on the book, liberal French Catholics claimed to discern certain distinctive progressive features of American Catholicism, a claim that, along with reports to Rome from the United States itself, prompted a Vatican investigation.
Pope Leo XIII sent two letters to the American bishops—Longinqua Oceani (Wide Expanse of the Ocean) and Testem Benevolentiae (Witness of Good Will)—arguing that, while separation of church and state was tolerable, it need not be adopted everywhere and that the state should give positive support to religion. The Pope’s diplomatic rebuke urged American Catholics not to exalt their own culture at the expense of the universal Church or value the natural over the supernatural virtues and the active over the contemplative life.
The “Phantom Heresy”
Americanism has been called “the phantom heresy” because it was in no sense a real heresy (Leo did not say that it was), merely a set of attitudes that, carried far enough, might have become heresy. The Americanists submitted to the papal warning, with Gibbons saying that he knew of no one who actually held any of the censured opinions. Because of Americanism, Keane was replaced as rector of the Catholic University.
Modernism in the United States
Pius X’s condemnation of Modernism a decade later raised the question of whether Americanism was a species of the same thing. But the connections were tenuous. Although Ireland once offered Alfred Loisy a professorship in the St. Paul seminary, the Americanist leadership seemed to have little understanding of the doctrinal issues at stake with Modernism. When Ireland and Spalding visited France, Loisy was disappointed that they did not seem interested in the questions that exercised him.
Insofar as Modernism was an issue in the United States, it was in the still-gray area of modern biblical criticism. The Paulist William Sullivan (d. 1944) was deeply affected by that criticism, concluding that the true meaning of the Gospel lay in its moral teachings and excoriating the Church because of her dogmatic tradition, which, he charged, was completely out of step with American democracy. He left the Church and became a Unitarian minister.
Five other Paulists resigned from the priesthood because of the condemnation of Modernism, as did the Jesuit theologian William Fanning (d. 1920) and John R. Slattery (d. 1926), the general of the Josephites. John Zahm (d. 1921), a Holy Cross father, was censured by the Holy See for cautiously espousing the theory of evolution. The New York Review, published at the New York archdiocesan seminary, was suppressed after it published articles on biblical criticism and summaries of modernist theology. Henry Poels (d. 1948), a Netherlander who was professor of Scripture at Catholic University, was forced to resign and, although the Americanist bishops sometimes presented the issue as one of academic freedom, they in turn forced the resignation of a German priest-professor whom they regarded as their enemy.
The American Church Matures
Growth
Just as Catholic intellectual life in Europe was by no means thwarted by the condemnation of Modernism, so the Catholic Church in the United States flourished in the sixty years following the warning against Americanism. Over the next sixty years, American Catholics came to be considered exceptionally loyal to the Holy See. Even after immigration was severely restricted, the American church continued to grow exponentially—from ten million members in 1914 to forty-five million fifty years later. Its various institutions multiplied, religious vocations were plentiful, and there was a high level of Mass attendance.
Foreign Missions
The United States ceased officially to be a mission country in 1907; and, while it would continue to receive priests from abroad, it would increasingly send its own sons and daughters to the most distant parts of the world. In 1911, two Boston priests founded the Foreign Mission Society of the United States, commonly called Maryknoll, which became one of the most important missionary groups in the Church, especially for its services in China.
Monasticism
Another sign of the maturing of American Catholicism was the slow development of contemplative monasticism. In the 1840s, Trappist houses were established in Kentucky and Iowa. For many decades, most of the monks were from Europe, but in the twentieth century, Americans too began to join.
The Church and Social Issues
The Social Apostolate
Rerum Novarum was well received in the United States, even by some secular liberals, and there was a strong sense of “social Catholicism” fostered in particular by German Americans influenced by the work of von Ketteler and others. The Zentral Katholik Verein(Central Catholic Bureau) functioned as both a fraternal organization and a movement to propagate the German school of Catholic social thought.
Labor Unions
It was not obvious, however, how European corporatism fit in America, and in practice, Catholic social thinkers settled for the more pragmatic stance of supporting labor unions and condemning both unrestrained capitalism and Socialism, which for a time had a large following in the United States. A Minnesota priest, John A. Ryan (d. 1945), was the leading exponent of this “social Catholicism”, integrating all aspects of Catholic social thought by emphasizing the crucial importance of the family and society’s obligation to support its integrity.
The Restoration of Society
Immediately after World War I, the bishops, advised by Ryan, issued a proposal for the “restoration” of society that resembled in many ways the programs of the secular Progressives of that era, albeit arrived at by an entirely different philosophical route. The proposal called for public works projects to stimulate employment, freedom for trade unions, minimum-wage laws, compensation for the unemployed and the disabled, and heavy taxes on great wealth.
The Catholic valuation of community was contrasted with modern “individualism”. Faced with the growing claim that poverty required some families to practice birth control, Ryan insisted that the solution was the “just wage” and various kinds of public support. The bishops exhorted women to withdraw from the work force, in order to devote themselves to their families, and some bishops opposed child-labor laws, on the grounds that they constituted undue interference with the autonomy of the family.
The New Deal
Based on the bishops’ 1919 statement, the New Deal of President Franklin Roosevelt (1933-1945) seemed to Ryan and others to be the fulfillment of Catholic social teaching. Bishop Francis Haas of Grand Rapids (d. 1953) served on several government commissions, and Roosevelt’s policies were also strongly supported by Cardinal Mundelein and a few other prelates. Because of this seeming episcopal endorsement, and because of their own working-class status, American Catholics were among the strongest supporters of the liberal “welfare state”.
Coughlin
During the New Deal, neither Ryan nor Mundelein was the most audible Catholic voice on social questions. A Canadian priest living in Detroit, Charles Coughlin (d. 1979), for a few years had a national radio program and published a magazine, both of which attracted a wide following by no means exclusively Catholic. Coughlin offered highly provocative judgments about a range of issues. Starting from an orthodox Catholic base, his criticisms of the free market soon led to passionate condemnations of capitalism itself, which he claimed was essentially a conspiracy whereby a few plutocrats controlled the world by manipulating governments. At the same time, he rejected Socialism. He offered, however, no clear alternative to the systems he condemned.
At first, Coughlin strongly supported the New Deal and saw Roosevelt as a kind of savior. But he soon condemned Roosevelt as himself a servant of wealth, and he increasingly identified Jews as the principal malefactors in international affairs. His attacks on Roosevelt and his anti-Jewishness led to strong criticism in Catholic circles, and at the beginning of World War II, he was forced to give up his public career, at the instigation of the Vatican.
Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker
A very different kind of Catholic social witness was that of Dorothy Day (d. 1980) and her Catholic Worker movement. Although the movement never attracted more than a small handful of people, it was widely known through its newspaper (“a penny a copy”), which pricked the consciences of many middle-class Catholics and attracted considerable secular notice as well.
Day was a convert from Communism in the fevered world of the New York radicalism of the Great Depression. She started the Catholic Worker in 1933, at the beginning of the New Deal, in order to witness to the Gospel by living a life of voluntary renunciation and dedication to the poor, an idea she considered far more radical than Marxism or other materialist doctrines.
The Worker movement, which defined itself as nonviolently “anarchist”, considered capitalism an inherently unjust and exploitative system, but Socialism too as materialistic and giving too much power to the state. The Worker solution to social problems was a fundamental conversion of heart by which people would overcome greed and selfishness and live simply, according to the Sermon on the Mount.
The movement eventually included thirty “houses of hospitality” throughout the country, places where all who appeared at the door were fed, and sometimes housed, without question. The permanent residents of those houses—many of them of middle-class origins—intended to exemplify the authentic Christian way of life, living very simply, sharing everything in common, and serving the poor. Day thought that communal, self-sufficient farms were the most authentic expression of the Gospel, and several were established, although without great success.
The roots of the Worker philosophy lay in French Catholic thought of the earlier twentieth century as explicated by Charles Péguy, Léon Bloy, and Jacques Maritain. Day herself was unquestionably Catholic, saying that she would close her movement if ordered by her bishop to do so. (In fact, she had at least passive support from otherwise conservative prelates.) Over a period of fifty years, the Worker movement attracted a good deal of praise and some obloquy but little emulation, precisely because of its disarmingly simple radicality. (Day was a pacifist, and some of her early disciples broke with her at the beginning of the Second World War.)
The Church in the Modern World
Anti-Catholicism
Perhaps because the Church’s growth seemed to threaten an eventual Catholic dominance, anti-Catholicism remained strong. The Know-Nothings were succeeded by the American Protective Association and the Ku Klux Klan, the latter starting as an anti-black vigilante group after the Civil War that revived after the First World War with anti-Catholicism and anti-Jewishness on its agenda as well. In 1928, the Catholic governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith (d. 1944), was decisively defeated as the Democratic candidate for president, a defeat in which overt anti-Catholicism played a major role.
In his public statements, Smith minimized his religion as much as possible, and Americanist Catholics sometimes seemed to underestimate the degree of this anti-Catholicism, thinking that it could be defused by demonstrations of good will and moderation. Gibbons had discouraged the formation of an organization to defend the Church, although after the First World War, the bishops set up the National Catholic Welfare Council (NCWC) to represent Catholic interests in public life and began to hold annual meetings.
Popular Culture
Despite this hostility, American Catholicism began to blend into popular culture, a process of inculturation to American mores that took place half-instinctively, without much conscious reflection. There were, however, sources of tension between Catholicism and the forces of secularization.
Alarmed over mounting complaints about morality in entertainment, the film industry chose a Jesuit, Daniel A. Lord (d. 1955), to write a code that would govern Hollywood productions for almost forty years, a code whereby sexual subjects were to be handled with restraint and good would always triumph over evil. During the 1940s, priests were highly sympathetic characters in a series of popular films—Boys’ Town, Fighting Father Dunne, Going My Way, The Bells of St. Mary’s, and The Miracle of the Bells. The first two films were about actual priests, one of whom—Edward Flanagan (d. 1948) of Boys’ Town in Omaha—attained a legendary status for his pioneering efforts to reclaim delinquent boys through trust and love rather than through severe discipline.5 (On a visit to his native Ireland, Flanagan openly criticized the treatment of troubled boys by Catholic institutions, condemning the kind of brutality that would become a public scandal fifty years later.) Ironically, however, this popular adulation of the priest in one way did little to make Catholicism more comprehensible to non-Catholics, since his sacramental role was treated merely as a kind of ceremonial adjunct to his real work of helping those in need. Taken at face value, such films denied the reality of sin (“There is no such thing as a bad boy”) by portraying apparent evil as merely the result of misunderstanding or neglect.
Beginning in 1920, the football team of the University of Notre Dame—hitherto a relatively obscure Midwestern school—was perennially among the best in the nation, attracting a huge following among Catholics who had never attended college and even many non-Catholics. The close link between religion and football—players said they were honored to play for “Our Lady’s School” and received Communion before every game—made Catholic piety seem normal and manly to people who might have otherwise thought of it as strange and superstitious.6
Catholics in the Wars
Nativists accused Catholics of being disloyal to their adopted country, but in both world wars, heavy Catholic participation, and stories of heroic chaplains, refuted the charge. Catholics’ patriotism was further demonstrated by their fervent anti-Communism during the Cold War of the 1950s, which was motivated by the atheism and religious persecution perpetrated by communist regimes in Eastern European countries to which many American Catholics traced their ancestries. Encouraged by their spiritual leaders, American Catholics prayed for the conversion of Russia at the conclusion of every Mass and saw history as climaxing in a titanic struggle against godlessness, in which America’s chief enemy was also the chief enemy of the faith.
Sheen
Catholic radio programs of various kinds began to multiply during the 1930s, and, unpredictably, during the 1950s, one of the most popular figures in the new medium of television was a bishop who was a veteran of Catholic radio. Fulton J. Sheen (d. 1979), the national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, produced weekly telecasts that actually drew audiences away from variety shows and situation comedies.
Sheen was famous for bringing well-known converts into the Church (the author and ambassador Clare Booth Luce [d. 1987], for example), and his lectures and books effectively expressed the spirit of the 1950s in their philosophical critique of secular culture, their anti-Communism, and their insistence that faith in God was the only answer to both personal and social problems. Sheen was a kind of ecumenist, in that he refrained from criticizing Protestantism, and he attracted many non-Catholics. To Catholics, he spoke warmly of such things as Marian devotions and the pope, but to more general audiences he offered a message that the God of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews would bring peace of soul and comfort from the trials of modern life.
A Flourishing Church
The two decades following the Second World War were, in measurable terms, the peak of American Catholic history, with a high rate of church attendance, abundant religious vocations, and a strong sense of loyalty to the Holy See. The United States was generous in sending both people and money to the foreign missions, and the maturing of its religious life was proven by the growing attraction of the contemplative life for which Archbishop Ireland had seen little value—the Trappists could scarcely build monasteries fast enough to accommodate the influx of vocations.
Suburbia
With almost total success, the Church also faced a new material challenge—the massive movement of people from cities to suburbs, requiring the sudden establishment of many new parishes, or the expansion of old ones, in the same way that massive immigration from Europe had been accommodated in the previous century. In an era of large families, the typical new suburban parish built its school first and held services in the gymnasium until it was possible to build a church that, when finished, was often so utilitarian that it was indistinguishable from many other buildings.
The move from city to suburb was also successful from a spiritual standpoint, in that the communal life of the new parish, in a new suburb lacking traditional institutions, was if anything more intense than in the city. The parish school was the key, the place where parishioners came to know one another, cooperated on fundraising projects, and participated in sports (the usual variety for the children, bowling for their fathers). Adolescents gathered in the gymnasium to pray the rosary in front of a statue of Mary, followed by a chaperoned dance, while the Ladies’ Sodality and the Holy Name Society sponsored both social and religious functions for adults.
Priests seldom left the parish grounds except in black suits and Roman collars, but on the grounds, they commonly wore sport shirts and at parish picnics drank beer and joined in the games (including games of chance), successfully blending an easy approachability with a sacerdotal character of which the laity remained highly respectful.
Episcopal Leadership
The American hierarchy had long been governed by what were sometimes called the “brick-and-mortar bishops”, men whose chief skill was in administration and fundraising, a skill on which the postwar suburbanization placed a premium. In a different way from Sheen, Cardinal Francis J. Spellman of New York (d. 1967) epitomized the American church of the era—a consummate brick-and-mortar bishop who wielded considerable political influence and was taken very seriously when he spoke on public issues.
Liberal Anti-Catholicism
But while the identification of the Catholic Church with anti-Communism and sound moral values did much to overcome animosity at the popular level, anti-Catholicism among the intellectuals if anything increased, as Catholics’ undoubted patriotism was now taken as proof that they had blind loyalties and did not appreciate real freedom. Film censorship and laws prohibiting the dissemination of contraceptives (although most such laws had been enacted by Protestant legislators) were cited as proof that Catholicism was a repressive and dangerous religion. For most American liberals, the Spanish Civil War was a holy crusade in the opposite way it was for many Catholics.
John Dewey (d. 1952), the most influential of all American philosophers, thought that education should inculcate a “religion of democracy” as a deliberate substitute for traditional faiths, and liberal intellectuals in general disapproved of Catholic schools as engaged merely in indoctrination. During the 1950s, the writings of the professional antiCatholic Paul Blanshard (d. 1980) attracted a good deal of attention, including the endorsement of leading Protestants such as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (d. 1971). Logically, the claim that Catholicism was a religion of authoritarian superstition applied to much of traditional Protestantism and Judaism as well, but Catholics were the largest and most influential religious group and therefore bore the brunt of the attack.
Religious Liberty
Most Catholics were as much bewildered as offended by the charge that they did not accept democracy, but there was a theological problem of which most were also unaware—officially the Church had never accepted the idea of religious liberty as it was understood in the modern West. The standard teaching remained that, while it would be imprudent to establish Catholicism as the official religion of a country where many people were not Catholic, it was appropriate, perhaps even obligatory, to do so where Catholics were a large majority. The ideal state could not be religiously neutral or indifferent.
After World War II, that doctrine was reexamined by the Jesuit John Courtney Murray (d. 1967), who justified religious liberty not on the basis of indifference to truth but out of respect for the dignity and freedom of the individual, something that made coercion improper. Murray believed that the Founding Fathers of the United States accepted the idea of natural law, so that the state had to follow correct moral principles, independent of particular religious teachings. (Abortion, he thought, could never be justified, given the fundamental right to life asserted by the Declaration of Independence.) But prevailing theological opinion was against Murray, and for a time, he was forbidden to write or teach on the subject.
Racial Justice
As distinct from the attitudes of Catholics in general, official Catholic support for racial equality had been clear for a long time. During World War II, the Jesuit John LaFarge (see Chapter Eleven above, p. 382), an aristocratic convert, founded the Catholic Interracial Council, the first organized effort to bring black and white Catholics together. After the war, some bishops took strong stands in favor of racial integration: Bishop Vincent Waters of Raleigh (d. 1974); Archbishop Joseph F. Rummel of New Orleans (d. 1964), who excommunicated white Catholics for defying his authority; and Archbishop (later Cardinal) Joseph E. Ritter of St. Louis (d. 1967), who faced down resistance by threatening to do the same.
The Civil Rights Movement
But the civil rights movement of the 1960s brought new complications. Priests and nuns were in the front ranks of those who poured into Southern towns to march for racial equality, and the hierarchy made the Church’s official position clear. But when the same marchers appeared in heavily Catholic neighborhoods in Northern cities, they were sometimes pelted with rocks by “ethnic” Catholics who thought they were being pressured to surrender their old neighborhoods. “White flight” greatly accelerated the Catholic move to the suburbs, and many old city parishes were either closed or became in effect mission centers for work among inner-city blacks, few of whom were Catholic.
Hispanic Immigration
While European immigration practically ended before World War II, after the war there was a substantial influx of Mexicans into California and the Southwest, and of Puerto Ricans into New York City. These Catholics required new pastoral strategies, beginning with priests learning Spanish. As with earlier immigrant groups, the Church was often the vehicle for the preservation of Hispanic cultures, and some bishops, notably Archbishop Robert Lucey of San Antonio (d. 1977), were champions of Hispanic rights. There was considerable clerical support for the United Farm Workers, which was composed mainly of Hispanic immigrants.
Kennedy
In 1960, John F. Kennedy became the first Catholic to be elected president (1961-1963), although he encountered religious prejudice almost as strong as Smith had faced in 1928. Kennedy sought to overcome that prejudice by denying that his religion could or should have significant influence on public policy, and many Catholics, ecstatic at finally having one of their own in the White House, accepted that claim.
The Catholic Left
But in one of the great ironies of history, within five years of Kennedy’s death, after many attempts over many decades to show that Catholics could be good Americans, the Church suddenly came under criticism from the opposite direction. Kennedy authorized American military intervention in the Vietnam War, an involvement that rapidly expanded after his death. Before long, that war, along with the civil rights movement and the amorphous but potent “counter-culture”, fused into the greatest upsurge of radical agitation in American history.
The moral legitimacy of the Second World War had been questioned by very few Catholics—some bishops even claimed that Catholics could not be conscientious objectors. But the Jesuit moralist John Ford (d. 1988), who later proved to be the most staunchly orthodox of theologians, thought that the bombing of cities by the Allies, especially the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was immoral. Most Catholics paid little attention to Ford, and Murray thought he was mistaken.
But in the new American “mainstream”, the patriotism and concern for personal morality that had made Catholics acceptable were now embarrassments, and the Catholic New Left, almost invisible up to that time, was suddenly thrust into the center of national attention. It was led by the Berrigan brothers—the Josephite Philip (d. 2002), who soon left the priesthood, and his Jesuit brother Daniel. They accused the government of perpetrating an immoral war and accused bishops like Cardinal Spellman, who made regular visits to military bases, of abetting that injustice. The Catholic New Left’s distinctive tactic was to engage in symbolic, almost liturgical, acts—pouring blood on draft records and denting the nose cones of rockets—differing from the secular left in its religious roots and its professed philosophy of nonviolence.
But in the fevered atmosphere of the time, “nonviolence” was an elastic concept. The Berrigans served as character witnesses for a terrorist who set off a bomb that killed a young father, and the Berrigans and several of their associates served prison terms for a botched plot to kidnap government officials. In St. Louis, a Carmelite friar—praised by his confreres as a man of deep spirituality—went to prison for a failed attempt to get money for radical causes by robbing a Catholic rectory at gunpoint.
The counter-culture, which was an integral part of the New Left, posed a severe problem for Catholics, as issues of personal morality came to outweigh politics. Some of the Catholic Worker communities, for example, were fractured by violations of Dorothy Day’s rule that drugs and extramarital sex were not be permitted on the premises. Ford, despite his judgment about the immorality of bombing, was effectively ostracized by his fellow Jesuits because of his continued stand against contraception. The leftistNational Catholic Reporter supported radical politics and the sexual revolution in about equal measures.
Catholic Republicans
But as some American Catholics moved sharply left, many others took the equally unusual step of moving away from the Democratic Party. To some extent, this was because, as they grew more prosperous, they became more Republican in their economic philosophy, but the move also resulted from the Democratic Party’s shifting left and repudiating, among other things, the socially conservative, strongly anti-communist stance of many Catholics. Blue-collar workers deserted the party, and Catholic labor leaders in the traditional mold, like George Meany (d. 1980) of the American Federation of Labor—Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), were excluded from its inner circles. The Democrats came to embrace a secular agenda in which abortion was defined as a fundamental “right”, thereby making it a defining issue even for liberal Catholic politicians.
Bernardin
After the Second Vatican Council, the NCWC was reestablished as the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB), which functioned, among other things, as a lobbying organization. The key figure was Bishop Joseph L. Bernardin (d. 1996), general secretary of the organization and later cardinal archbishop of Chicago. Under his leadership, the NCCB continued, as it had long done, to favor liberal economic programs. Bernardin urged a “consistent ethic of life”, which meant embracing support for programs that help the poor while opposing abortion and the death penalty. But few politicians accepted his invitation, and liberal economic programs often subsidized contraception and abortion for the poor. (The NCCB was renamed the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops [USCCB] in 2001.)
Abortion
More and more Catholics in public office supported legal abortion. John Kennedy’s younger brother Edward (d. 2010) served in the Senate for decades and, advised by Jesuit theologians, was a staunch supporter of legal abortion. The Jesuit Robert Drinan (d. 2007) served for ten years as a passionately pro-abortion Congressman, until finally required by the Holy See to relinquish his seat. Kennedy, Drinan, and other Catholics acquiesced in the secularist claim that abortion was a purely “sectarian” issue and promised that they would not “impose” their religion on others.
Anti-abortion Catholics invoked Murray’s claim that the practice was forbidden by natural law, which did not rest on religious authority. The pro-life movement demonstrated its potency by enacting whatever limits on abortion were still legally possible after the Supreme Court in 1973 found it to be a constitutional “right”: a ban on federal funding; electing pro-life politicians to public office at all levels; and simply keeping the issue alive, to the point where after almost four decades, a majority of Americans favor limiting the practice.
American Catholics in the Twenty-First Century
The administrations of Presidents George W. Bush (2001-2009) and Barack Obama (2009—) divided Catholics sharply. Liberals condemned the American invasion of Iraq and Bush’s economic policies and denied that his position on abortion and other issues justified Catholic support. The division deepened because of Obama’s successful enactment of a national health-care program that the bishops opposed and that required Catholic institutions to provide insurance for their employees that included contraception (including abortifa-cients) and sterilization.
One result of the Catholic shift to the Republicans was that in 2010 six of the nine justices of the Supreme Court were Catholics (one appointed by Obama). Three were Jewish and none Protestant, something that would have been unthinkable even twenty years before.
While “mainline” American churches were declining numerically in the early twenty-first century, the Catholic Church experienced a slight increase, attributable mainly to the immigration of Hispanics, who by now constituted a third of American Catholics. Many of the immigrants entered the country illegally; and, while a large majority of Americans favored enforcement of the immigration laws, the bishops urged that all immigrants be made welcome.
In 2010, the United States had the fourth largest Catholic population in the world—almost seventy million. Estimates of regular church attendance varied between a third and a half of self-identified Catholics.
Australia
Penal Origins
The continent that would become Australia was discovered by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century but was not settled by Europeans until 1788 when, unique among the nations of the world, it was established by Great Britain primarily as a penal colony on what would become New South Wales on the mainland and an island called Van Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania).
A quarter of the convicts were Irish, both from Ireland itself and from England, including a few convict priests. A minority of the prisoners had been convicted of political offenses, but most were common criminals whom the chaplains found to be virtually incorrigible—given to drink, sexual license, and violence and seldom open to religious influence.
The English Benedictine William Ullathorne (d. 1889), who came to Australia in 1833, reported that conditions of convict life were so intolerable that those who were sentenced to death rejoiced and those who were reprieved wept. He lamented that the few priests were morally not much better than those they served.
Catholicism
The first Mass ever celebrated in Australia was at Sydney in 1803, the celebrant being a convict Irish priest. But after an insurrection a year later, the government disallowed further priestly ministrations and required all convicts to attend Anglican services. According to legend, the reserved Blessed Sacrament was left behind when the last priest was deported from Sydney, and for several years it was the center of devotion for the handful of free Catholics living there.
Catholic chaplains were restored in New South Wales in 1820, their salaries paid by a British government that weighed the hope that religion would reform the prisoners against the fear that priests might stir up further resistance. Catholic services were not allowed in Van Dieman’s Land until the 1840s. Official policy vacillated with each governor. For a time, for example, all orphan children were placed in Anglican institutions, to be raised in that faith, and priests were not allowed to visit Catholic soldiers in military hospitals. But eventually these and other restrictions were lifted.
The End of Transportation
Convicts who had served their sentences were ordinarily freed and could seek to enter the mainstream of society. Transportation of convicts to New South Wales ceased in 1840 and to Tasmania in 1854. Free settlers began immigrating from Europe—a great many from Ireland—but they tended to be very poor, a fact that, combined with the convict legacy, made the overall tone of Australian society, as many of the clergy saw it, uncivilized and irreligious.
Polding
The church in Australia was first under the vicar apostolic of London, then under the vicar apostolic of the French colony of Mauritius. In 1834, the diocese of Sydney was established, its first bishop being the Benedictine John Bede Polding (d. 1877), who had been Ullathorne’s teacher in England. Ullathorne became Polding’s vicar general, handling administrative matters for the bishop (who was constantly traveling) and serving as the target for numerous attacks by disgruntled priests and laity. Before long, Ullathorne returned to England, where he became a prominent bishop.
The Monastic Dream
For some years, Polding’s apostolate was governed by a unique dream—that the church in Australia would be organized on the basis of Benedictine monasticism, which, as in the Dark Ages, would serve as the spiritual center radiating outward. But the dream was not well suited to the actual conditions of the continent, and even Ullathorne came to think it was impractical. The monastery Polding founded in Sydney had its own troubles, leading some of the monks to leave the community, and the diocesan clergy strongly resisted the monastic idea, which was eventually abandoned. During the 1840s, several new dioceses were established, and Polding was made an archbishop.
A Scattered Flock
Polding himself tacitly admitted its impracticality by his own heroic, almost ceaseless, pastoral work—traveling vast distances on horseback, visiting remote settlements that had not seen a priest in years, living away from his monastic community for long periods. Most of his flock were Irish and increasingly, against his better judgment, he began importing priests from Ireland, a policy that soon produced another kind of tension.
The practice of the faith was also hindered by the number of people who left the coastal cities for “the Bush”, where the shortage of priests made it difficult, even impossible in some cases, to provide adequate pastoral care. Priests who did serve in those remote areas, away from episcopal oversight, might themselves fall prey to alcohol or lax sexual mores. Some managed to get control of substantial tracts of land, including land that was supposed to belong to the Church, forcing bishops to battle both lay trusteeism and pastors who claimed personal ownership of their parish property.
Aborigines
Pius IX reminded the Australian bishops of their responsibility for the Aboriginal (“from the beginning”) natives, and Polding considered their treatment a disgrace, an instance of “civilized” Europeans perpetrating barbarism. The Spanish Bishop Jose Serra (d. 1886) of Western Australia succeeded in obtaining legislation to protect a people who in some cases were victims of what amounted to genocide. For the most part, however, the laws remained unenforced, and mission efforts among a largely nomadic people had only limited effect.
The Irish
Also during the 1840s, large numbers of Irish began arriving in flight from the Potato Famine, and a gold rush in Victoria in the 1850s brought many more. The condition of the immigrants was often miserable. Polding undertook to meet each arriving ship, in order to aid in a transition to a new life, and a widow, Caroline Chisholm (d. 1877), did heroic work among the immigrant children. (Attacked by Protestants as an agent of the pope, and distrusted by some Catholics for being English, she eventually returned home, where she died in poverty.)
The Irish were unshakable in their ethnic identity, of which religion was a crucial part, but bishops judged that for some ethnicity was by far the more important part of their identity, such that Irish who were fiercely loyal to their religion might also be extremely lax in its practice. One estimate placed the rate of regular church attendance at less than a quarter, and many parents did not bother to ensure that their children received religious instruction.
Irish Clergy
As time went on, most of the men appointed bishops in Australia were Irish, many of them sent out directly from their homeland; a large majority of the lower clergy were also from Ireland. The first native Australian priest was ordained in 1867, but vocations remained relatively few. Irish bishops sought to reproduce in Australia the ecclesiastical patterns that prevailed in their homeland, where the clergy were the natural leaders of an oppressed people. In Ireland, Catholics almost always married Catholics, for example, so that in Australia the hierarchy officially forbade “mixed marriages”, a rule that was often evaded or ignored.
Polding believed that part of the Church’s mission was to civilize what he considered a semi-barbarous people, and he found many of the Irish priests to be an obstacle to that goal because they were crude, poorly educated, and of dubious morality. He particularly denigrated the alumni of All Hallows College in Dublin, whom he thought the Irish bishops were eager to get rid of. Perhaps because of the popular conviction that all prisoners brought to Australia had been victims of English injustice, opposition to authority was strong, often directed at the hierarchy by both laity and clergy, and accompanied by abusive rhetoric.
Many of the Irish priests disliked Polding simply because he was English, and for others, his monastic ideal and his cultured personality seemed, despite his undeniable pastoral zeal, snobbish and out of touch with the needs of the flock. On the other hand, Irish bishops and priests complained that Englishmen in general, and Archbishop Polding in particular, were unsuited to lead what should be an Irish church, a position that was effectively represented in Rome by Paul Cullen (see Chapter Eleven above, p. 352).
Irish bishops were known for their authoritarian ways, an extreme example being John Brady (d. 1871) of Perth, who summarily expelled a community of Spanish Benedictines from his diocese (among them the future Bishop Serra), forcing them to embark on a three-day journey on foot during Holy Week, carrying the cross as they went. Brady was removed by the Holy See in 1850 but refused to recognize the decree and, supported by a mob, at one point scuffled with his appointed successor in the sanctuary of a church. Excommunicated, he returned to Ireland still considering himself bishop of Perth.
Vaughan and Moran
When Polding died, he was succeeded by another English Benedictine, Roger Vaughan, bishop of Hobart, Tasmania (d. 1883), whose appointment was strongly opposed by the Irish bishops. When Vaughan died on a visit to England, his successor was Patrick Moran (d. 1911), a bishop in Ireland who was Cullen’s nephew and had served as his secretary. Such were the prevailing ethnic feelings that Moran coldly informed Vaughan’s brother, the future Cardinal Herbert Vaughan (d. 1903) of Westminster, that there was no interest in Australia in returning Roger’s body for burial in his cathedral, something that did not happen until 1946.
Barely a year after his appointment, Moran was made the first Australian cardinal, an honor that was rumored to be compensation for his having been passed over for the archbishopric of Dublin, a surmise given credibility by the fact that after Moran’s death no other Australian prelate received the red hat for thirty-five years.
Sectarian Strife
Sectarian strife was intense well into the twentieth century, with both Protestants and Catholics engaging in extreme polemics. Protestant immigrants from Northern Ireland were numerous and were especially bitter in denouncing the Church and demanding that Australia be a Protestant society. Catholics were characterized as drunkards and gamblers, ignorant slaves of a false religion, while Catholics condemned Protestantism as itself a false religion that glorified private judgment and thereby led to the moral breakdown of society. Religious and ethnic loyalties were often the basis of bitterly fought election campaigns, and as early as 1830, a few Catholics managed to attain public office in the new colony of Victoria, which was not a penal colony.
Education
Next to basic pastoral work, education was seen by the bishops as the key to sustaining the faith in a hostile environment. For a time, the colonial government provided subsidies for all church schools, of whatever denomination, but these were gradually withdrawn. Despite losing this support, the Catholic schools remained under the official scrutiny of government with respect to their level of educational quality. Poor Catholics had a great deal of difficulty supporting their own system, and for almost a century, the bishops campaigned for the return of school subsidies, in the conviction that state schools, which tended to have a Protestant character, were a danger to the faith.
An official Australian “Penny Catechism” was issued in the 1880s, almost simultaneously with the Baltimore Catechism in the United States. Also like the Baltimore Catechism, it remained in use until the 1960s.
Schools Run by Religious
St. Mary McKillop (d. 1909), Australia’s first canonized saint, founded one of the numerous female communities called the Sisters of St. Joseph. Her sisters followed poor laborers into the Bush especially in order to educate their children, an act of independence for which she was briefly excommunicated by the bishop of Adelaide. The Jesuits opened a few secondary schools, but their classical system of education was less popular with the laity than the more practical instruction provided by the schools of the Irish Christian Brothers (distinct from the followers of de la Salle) and the French Marist Brothers.
Higher Education
For a long time, relatively few Catholics attended universities, but Catholic colleges were nonetheless founded at the universities of Sydney and Melbourne, as places where Catholic students could live among their own, under supervision, taking general courses in the secular university but receiving instruction in their colleges in sensitive subjects like philosophy By the year 2000, there were three independent Catholic institutions of higher learning.
Protestantism
The Catholic hierarchy successfully opposed making the Anglican church the official religion of Australia, urging instead that all religions remain on an equal footing. In 1901, Moran, after having strongly supported Australia’s entry into the British Commonwealth, refused to attend the official ceremony because the Anglican archbishop of Sydney was given precedence over him.
Australian Protestantism was in measurable decline by 1900, something that Catholic leaders often pointed out in predicting that Catholicism was the religion of the future. Perhaps partly because of this Protestant decline, religious antagonisms did not abate. The newly formed Australian Protestant Defense Association was countered first by the Australian Catholic Truth Society, then by the Catholic Federation. Moran, however, hoped that Catholics would gain full acceptance in Australian society, and on the whole, he did not pursue aggressive policies. But he did speak of Australia as part of “the Irish spiritual empire”, and Irish identity remained strong, despite increasing immigration from other countries. In 1870, half of all Australian Catholics were from Ireland, but by 1908, Irish were only a fifth.
The Labor Party
Because most Catholics were of the working class, and because the more conservative parties were seen as dominated by Protestants, by 1900, the Labor Party was attracting most of the Catholic vote, a trend that Moran encouraged. Inspired by Rerum Novarum, he publicly supported strikes and, even though the bishops were at pains to insist that the Labor Party was not socialist, once urged that the coal industry be nationalized. But as a minority, most Catholic Labor politicians were reluctant to champion the bishops’ demand for the restoration of subsidies for Catholic schools, and some Laborites of a radical bent were even hostile to the Catholic presence in the party.
Mannix
Moran was succeeded by Michael Kelly (d. 1940), rector of the Irish College in Rome, but the leadership of the Australian church actually passed to Daniel Mannix, archbishop of Melbourne from 1917 to his death—at almost 100—in 1963. Mannix, who was president of the Maynooth Seminary in Ireland at the time of his appointment, was perhaps the single most important figure in Australian Catholic history and one of the most remarkable prelates anywhere in the modern Church. He was unequaled in his boldness and possessed great rhetorical skills, especially a sharp wit, traits that kept him in the public eye continuously for fifty years.
World War I
Especially because of their Irish tradition, Australian Catholics tended to have only conditional loyalty to the British Empire. Many favored the Netherlanders of South Africa against the British in the Boer War of the late 1890s, and World War I, which was regarded in Ireland as merely a defense of British imperialism, was equally unpopular with Catholic Australians.
Mannix, who through half the war years was still only a coadjutor bishop, stopped just short of urging Catholics not to enlist in the military, and other bishops endorsed such service only with the reminder that Catholics were fighting for an Australian government that unjustly denied them their right to school aid. Mannix vigorously opposed military conscription, which was twice defeated in popular referenda in which he played a role. (The labor unions were also opposed.) Catholic passions were aroused when a German-born priest who made inflammatory remarks was first imprisoned, then deported from Australia.
Mannix was increasingly critical of the war itself, to the point of provoking Protestant demands that he too be deported. But after the war, in a characteristically bold gesture, he confounded charges of disloyalty by riding in a St. Patrick’s Day parade in an open car, accompanied by fourteen Catholic recipients of the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest award for bravery in battle.
Irish Ties
Australian bishops with close ties to Ireland took a great interest in the mother country and openly favored Irish independence. They condemned the abortive Easter Uprising of 1916 and the atrocities that accompanied the rebellion after the war, but they held the British government primarily responsible for poisoning the atmosphere.
Mannix was completely dedicated to the cause of Irish independence, and in 1920, he embarked on an extended journey in its support. After making a triumphant tour of the United States, he set sail for Ireland itself, where his mother was still alive. But the British government announced that he would not be allowed to land, intercepted his ship, and took him to England, apparently under arrest. In London, he was allowed considerable freedom by an increasingly embarrassed government, and he used that freedom to make speeches, give interviews to the press, and administer the last rites to an Irish nationalist dying in jail in a hunger strike. (Mannix blamed the government’s callousness for the man’s death.)
Mannix supported the Republican movement under De Valera, which rejected the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1922. As a result, Mannix was denied an official welcome by the archbishop of Dublin while leading a pilgrimage to Ireland a few years later, because he declined to promise that he would not speak about politics. (Mannix later successfully counseled De Valera to swallow his misgivings and enter politics.)
Coming of Age
The Vatican established an Apostolic Delegation in Australia just before the First World War, perhaps primarily because of complaints that Irish bishops disregarded canon law and ruled in arbitrary ways. But Australia did not cease officially to be a mission territory until 1976, the year after the first Aboriginal priest was ordained.
Australian Catholicism showed itself vigorous in many ways. The Holy Name Society flourished, as did popular devotions. The Sydney archdiocese started its own radio station, and Leslie Rumble (d. 1975), a Missionary of the Sacred Heart, gave radio talks that sold seven million copies when published. Catholic young men’s groups were conspicuous participants in the national passion for football.
Native Clergy
By the 1920s, four-fifths of Catholics in Australia had been born there, and the Irish influence was waning. An organized group of clerical alumni of the Sydney archdiocesan seminary—St. Patrick’s at Manly—openly urged that ties with Ireland be loosened, an idea accepted by the Vatican in accord with its general policy of encouraging native vocations. Kelly’s first coadjutor bishop was an Irish priest from Rome, but when the old archbishop finally died in 1940 he was succeeded by a native Australian, Norman Gilroy, who later became Australia’s second cardinal. (Mannix was perhaps too controversial to be given the red hat.)
Catholics in Social and Political Spheres
In the post—World War I period, Australian Catholics were to some extent divided along class lines. The growing middle class and the few wealthy sought integration into society, while the large working class saw that society as essentially hostile. The first group sometimes found Mannix an embarrassment, and some openly criticized him. Sectarian conflict flared up again as a result of wartime experiences. In New South Wales, there was a proposal in effect to shut down Catholic schools and to punish priests who upheld the ban on mixed marriages. The Knights of the Southern Cross, modeled after the Knights of Columbus in the United States, were founded to defend Catholic rights.
Catholics were coming of age politically. The first Catholic prime ministers of Australia were the Laborite James Scullin (1929-1931) and the Liberal Joseph Lyons (1931-1939), neither of whom, however, moved on the perennial Catholic issue of public aid to private schools.
Intellectual Stirrings
In the 1930s, Australian Catholicism experienced its first significant intellectual stirrings, in a culture that was sometimes thought of as philistine.
Frank Sheed (d. 1984) was one of the most important Catholic laymen in the world during the first half of the twentieth century. Trained as a soap-box orator by the Catholic Evidence Guild in England, he undertook the same apostolate in his native Australia, and became a popular author. He and his wife, Maisie Ward (d. 1975), who was also an author, founded Sheed and Ward, which for decades was the most important Catholic publishing house in the English-speaking world, with offices in London and New York.
In Melbourne, a handful of laymen formed the Campion Society—named for the Elizabethan Jesuit martyr—for the purpose of studying Catholic literature, especially the English Catholic intellectual revival then in full flower. Although small, the group had considerable longterm influence.
B.A. Santamaria
Melbourne Catholicism in the 1930s also gave birth to a unique phenomenon that eventually had an impact on Australian society of a kind without parallel in any other modern country. Shortly after Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Worker movement in New York, a miscellaneous group of laymen from the Campion Club started a Catholic Worker group in Melbourne as well, publishing their own Catholic Worker newspaper, edited by a young law student named B. A. Santamaria (d. 1998). The paper’s circulation eventually reached a remarkable seventy thousand.
Soon, however, Santamaria left the Catholic Worker, which in time became his severe critic. With the full support of Mannix, he and several others undertook to establish a formal program and a national office for Catholic Action suited to the Australian situation. There was difficulty from the beginning, in that some bishops thought Catholic Action should be under direct episcopal control, while Mannix wanted its lay leaders to be essentially independent.
Mannix was a strong critic of capitalism, and in that spirit, Santam-aria and his colleagues sought to transform Australian society in fundamental ways—establishing a pervasive Christian spirit of morality and using politics for the purpose of implementing Catholic social teachings, such as Distributism, subsidiarity, and the family wage. At first, they worked within the Labor Party, but many in the party looked on them suspiciously, as ideologues enamored of utopian ideas rather than pragmatic political goals.
“The Movement”
During World War II, communists managed to gain a significant foothold in some Australian labor unions, and thereby in the Labor Party itself, and after the war, again with Mannix’ full blessing, Santamaria embarked on an organized campaign to expel the communist influence, employing the same tactics of secret organization and infiltration that the communists themselves used. There were five thousand members of this Catholic Social Study Movement, which came to be called simply “The Movement”. In 1945, the archdiocese of Sydney suspended its support for the official Catholic Action body of which Santamaria was an official, and The Movement, now calling itself the National Civic Council, went its own way, without official approval.
In 1954, a prominent Labor Party leader denounced The Movement in the strongest terms, implying a Catholic plot to take over the party, as a result of which many Catholics withdrew from the party and others were expelled. The Movement then proved capable of influencing so many voters that for almost two decades the Labor Party was kept out of office at the national level. This split in the Labor Party accelerated a trend whereby Catholics, as they entered the ranks of the middle class, moved away from Labor and toward the Liberal Party, which had long been thought of as a Protestant bastion. Only a few months before Mannix’ death, it was the Liberals who enacted what the Australian bishops had so long sought, and what Labor had so long failed to deliver—public aid to private schools.
The Movement’s influence was primarily in Victoria, since from the beginning Archbishop Kelly, and later Cardinal Gilroy, considered the Melbourne version of Catholic Action far too independent and both The Movement and Mannix himself far too confrontational. Gilroy presented his case in Rome, and the Vatican ruled that Catholic Action groups should not engage in politics, a ruling that was allowed to stand despite Mannix’ personal appeal to Pius XII. Thus events of the postwar period opened a split between Melbourne and Sydney Catholicism that persisted for decades.
Growth
In 1935, only 17 percent of Australians were estimated to be Catholics—half of them regular churchgoers—a decline from earlier times that was due partly to a drift away from the Church. But substantial Catholic immigration occurred after World War II, raising Catholics’ proportion of the population to 27 percent.
The Future of the New Nations
Although weaker than it had been fifty years before, Catholicism in the United States in the third Christian millennium was in many ways healthier than anywhere else in the Western world. Ironically, this may have been due mainly to the continued vitality of conservative Protestantism, which helped sustain an overall social climate favorable to religion. By contrast, neither Canada nor Australia had a significant movement that could be called Evangelical or Fundamentalist and, as those countries became less Protestant, in a sense they also became less Catholic.
The Church everywhere in the West faced the question of what, if any, presence she could have in a pluralistic society. The history of the New Nations, which had wrestled with that question from their beginnings, provided perhaps the best guidance.