Roman Catholicism Comes to America (in waves and waves)
The first presidential election I remember much about was 1960. My parents were not politically inclined, though they voted. One clear memory was that many in our Baptist circles were oh-so anxious about John F. Kennedy being elected because he was Catholic, and being Catholic meant Washington DC might become an outpost for the Vatican and the Pope. If Kennedy was President, he would hand it all over to the Pope. That anxiety was, if anything, a clear reflection of a long history of American colonialists and their anti-Church-of-England, their Puritanism, and their love of autonomy and freedom. Baptist polity, let’s be honest, is as American as it gets.
The story of Catholics and America is told by Elesha Coffman in her new book, Turning Points in American Church History: How Pivotal Events Shaped a Nation and a Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2024).
Question: How much anti Catholicism have you observed or experienced in your life?
Ah, nothing more American than Ben Franklin and he played a role both in a botched conference with some Canadian French Catholics and the United States, and then when he was in France he moved to help Catholics find a spot in the USA.
What they needed was a bishop, which means what they needed was institutional recognition that the USA was a nation and each nation needed its Catholic national church.
The key figure was John Carroll who advocated for a distinctively American version of the Catholic Church. He was American born and that helped his status. He became the bishop of Baltimore and was in charge of the entire nation’s Catholics (for a short while).
What made Catholicism American? Coffman sketches what many of us have observed in our life about Catholicism:
the hierarchical, structural order that needed to be shaped;
the governance, and here Carroll kept the Pope at bay in the official liturgies and prayerbooks;
he formed what she dubs “congregational parishes,” which were more Protestant than European Catholic;
lay trustees wanted a say in who their priest was;
they built a seminary (St Mary’s in Baltimore where Michael Gorman now teaches) and a prep school, which is now Georgetown University.
Noticeably, Carroll wanted English language in churches and implemented it some (Latin was the lingo until the 1960s), and he promoted an English language translation of the Bible that countered the KJV.
These make Catholicism Catholic. Right?
But new dioceses were formed in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Kentucky.
Before long the Americanist ways were being challenged, and those ways were challenged even more with the waves and waves of emigrants coming to America from Europe with very European sensibilities about how Catholicism worked and looked in church services.
Ethnicities formed into ethnic churches and parishes. The major ethnic group shifting the essence away from Americanist ways were the Irish, led by a rather belligerent fellow named John Hughes. He was “pugnacious,” esp about public education’s bias against Catholics. Most of us know that Catholic schooling has influence in shaping the next generation of Catholics. Our village has a large Catholic church with a Catholic school and a Catholic high school. Not to ignore the amazing St Mary of the Lake Seminary across the property from the Catholic high school.
Back to the previous centuries: Nativist reactions (American, Protestant, white) formed and at times it got very very ugly.
She finds some new practices meant to stimulate Catholic churches and the spiritual life of the parishioners, including “parish missions,” which were a Catholic analogy to revivals but were more concerned with reviving the faith of lapsed Catholics. There was a profound sacramental (“Blessed Sacrament”) devotional revolution that was seen in behaviors – genuflection, prostration, prayers, crossing oneself – during services. These practices galvanized Catholics into an identity formation over against Protestants. Orestes Brownson notwithstanding, the Americanist ways were more or less defeated by Rome’s decisions.
I was baptized a Roman Catholic as an infant when I didn't have any say in the matter. I was later a devout little kid who folded my hands like the nuns taught us with all my fingers pointing to Heaven when I took my first Holy Communion. I said my two "Our Fathers" and three "Hail Marys" after my puny, immature Confessions to the screened face of a priest in the box confessional, which few prayers always seemed too little penance even for the measly sins that I'd just confessed. I did my Confirmation at age twelve, taking on my earthly father's first name to add to my first and middle names, became an altar boy, aspired to the priesthood, noticed the budding beauty of my female classmates, spent my teenaged years all but abandoning my faith to a near deadly combination of sex, drugs, and rock & roll, ran smack dab hard into the Rock of Jesus Christ, at age twenty, got baptized in the Salt River northeast of Phoenix, Arizona, with my Roman Catholic parents watching on the shore with the "born-again" believers from my evangelical church watching with them, my parents just grateful that the prodigal son had finally returned home, even if he was now a Protestant. But if you asked my mother who is now with Jesus in Heaven if I was still a Roman Catholic, she would have told you that I most certainly was. And who knows? Maybe Mom is right. She almost always was.
Thank you Scott. Growing up Roman Catholic I understood this part pretty well. We had a Jesuit priest in our family. The parishes like she writes were pretty much ethically based especially in the city of Chicago, in the suburbs were more either all white or all Hispanic.