Americanizing Rome

Americanizing Rome September 23, 2015

In an address to Congress in 1826, Charleston’s Catholic bishop John England declares his allegiance, and the allegiance of his church, to the American polity: “I would not allow to the Pope, or to any bishop of our church, outside the Union, the smallest interference with the humblest vote at our most insignificant balloting box. He has no right to such interference. You must, from the view which I have taken, see the plain distinction between spiritual authority and a right to interfere in the regulation of human government or civil concerns. You have in your constitution wisely kept them distinct and separate” (quoted in Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, 171).

It’s a remarkable statement. The qualifier “outside the Union” seems to acknowledge that national boundaries set the limits of spiritual authority. And the blithe ahistoricity of the statement is breathtaking. I mean no criticism in saying that the Catholic church has regularly breached the “plain distinction” that England defends here.

His goal, he says, is simply to settle Catholicism on a level playing field: “We desire to see the Catholics as a religious body upon the ground of equality with all other religious societies. . . . We consider that any who could call upon them to stand aloof from their brethren in the politics of the country, as neither a friend to America nor a friend to Catholics. . . . We repeat our maxim: Let Catholics in religion stand isolated as a body, and upon as good ground as their brethren. Let Catholics, as citizens and politicians, not be distinguishable from their other brethren of the commonwealth” (172). He wanted to make Catholicism just another denomination. 

Becoming American meant becoming double, compartmentalizing “two spheres of life, the religious and the secular. Catholicism was restricted to the religious sphere, while Americanism was restricted to the secular sphere. American Catholic were Roman Catholics in church and ethnic Catholic Americans in the world” (181; he acknowledges variations on this duality).

According to Casanova, England’s vision wasn’t realized until the 1960s, when Kennedy’s speech to Houston’s Protestant pastors “was almost a replica of John England’s address to Congress” (174). 

By the time Catholics were settling in, though, the church had already gone through “a transformation . . . toward progressively higher levels of generality: from the village community, to the ethnic neighborhood and national parish, to the American Catholic community, to the American national community, and after Vatican II to the world community.” It is one of the ironies of the process that “total commitment to America,” once the index of liberal Catholicism, became one of the defining features of conservative Catholicism. 

In sum, “Precisely at the time when Catholicism had finally become American and American Catholics had become faithful followers of the American civil religion, transformations in world Catholicism offered broader, more universalistic perspectives which challenged the national particularism of the American civil religion” (178)_. Just when Catholics seemed to have achieved denominationalization – that is, Americanization – Catholicism was becoming a global force.

Casanova argues that this experience was unique to Catholics. Protestants didn’t have to compartmentalize public and private “since their goal was to Christianize the republic” (181). But this is only partly true. Protestants were generic American Protestants in public, putting their distinctive theological convictions about baptism, episcopacy, predestination to the side for the sake of the mission. In different ways, the denominational society forced compartmentalization on everyone, Catholic and Protestant, and with compartmentalization, a certain form of secularization.


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