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Catholicism and American Freedom
Catholicism and American Freedom: A History by John T. McGreevy Norton, 2003 431 pp. $26.95 |
I can't remember the details of my first encounter with the Roman Catholic Church. This is because it happened shortly after I was born, in a Yokohama army hospital, where the Catholic obstetrician in charge of my introduction to the world performed a convenience baptism on the spot. But I encountered it soon enough in more recognizable forms, since my grandfather was born Irish, Catholic, and South Philadelphian, and that translated into large networks of Catholic kin and frequent funeral masses for the elders.
Not that my grandfather was insistent on having me pay attention to Catholicism. He had left the Church decades before, a quiet, skeptical, good-humored paperhanger who bridled at the notion of submitting to the dictates of the parish priest. My grandmother was a fervent Protestant, raised a Methodist by an immigrant Swedish father, who himself had been converted under Dwight L. Moody. She was just as fervent an anti-Catholic, and by her dismissive reckoning, Catholics (with almost no exceptions) were loutish, drunken, conscienceless pigs. But attendance at the funerals could not be negotiated. At age eight, I was planted on a sofa in a funeral parlor while a room packed with black-draped mourners for my 100-year-old Irish great-grandmother tonelessly chanted Hail Marys and Our Fathers and Seven Sorrowful Mysteries. All of which fell on my stripling ears like so much gobbledygook, and after that, I was on my grandmother's side. Catholics were pigs.
It gave me one of the great shocks of my life, a decade later, when the girl I was then deeply enamored of—a Catholic—laughed out loud when I told her I thought Catholics must be liberals. After all, they drank, smoked, danced, fornicated, ran to the confessional to belch it all away, and then returned to their behavioral vomit for more. She told me I didn't know what I was talking about, that Catholics were the most ultra-conservative, strait-laced, buttoned-up people on the earth's wide face. They led lives of guilt and penance, and I had only seen the worst of them because all of the best had betaken themselves to the priesthood or the convent. When it turned out that the high-school disciplinary officer was also a Catholic—his daughter was another girl I fell for—the epiphany was complete. I've been confused about Catholicism ever since.
But so, by John T. McGreevy's new account of the Catholic experience of Americanization, have American Catholics. Catholics gained their first beachhead in British North America in the 1630s, first in a short-lived colony on Newfoundland, and then in Maryland. But they did so as a proscribed sect in the English-speaking realms, and the consciousness of needing to tread quietly shaped pre-Revolutionary Catholicism into an unobtrusive and largely eccentric club of minor gentry whose loyalties to the Roman Church were distant and flaccid. This might not have prevented the overwhelmingly Protestant and deistical Revolutionaries from using them as whipping boys anyway, except that it became necessary for the Continental Congress to court alliances, first with French Catholic Canada (in 1775) and then with France and Spain (in 1777). Tolerance of Catholics became a virtue, partly because the virtue was a diplomatic necessity, and partly because the Catholicism of the American Catholics (like Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the longest-lived of the signers) had grown so genteel and domesticated.
All this changed at the point where McGreevy's story really begins, with the influx of a new brand of Catholics among the great waves of northern European immigration between 1800 and 1860. Not only were these new Catholics foreign—and therefore more likely to inflate their loyalty to the Church as a mechanism for resisting assimilation—but they were also the subjects of a revival of Catholic devotion, born out of the vicious conflicts of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars, and romanticized by Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Rene de Chateaubriand. "Historians have only begun to investigate the revival's disruptive effects," McGreevy writes, but that ignorance has been deadly to a serious understanding of Catholicism in America. By the late 19th century, the ultramontane revival had collected under its mozetta "the rehabilitation of philosophy in the tradition of Saint Thomas Aquinas, a more intense piety focused on the suffering Jesus and the miraculous"—the rosary, the cult of Mary, the bleeding Jesus, Lourdes, benediction of the blessed sacrament—"and an emphasis on Catholic parishes, schools and organizations as refuges from an increasingly secular, even hostile, world." It was the Catholicism I encountered at my great-grandmother's funeral. And just on those terms alone, the new Catholicism had everything it required to become an object of suspicion and loathing among America's Protestant majority.
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