In the late 19th century Protestant Americans viewed Roman Catholicism, although the earliest European Christian church, as both an interloper and a latecomer. It was neither. In Florida and in the Southwest its roots in the New World were deeper than those of Protestants, and Catholics were among the first settlers of Maryland in 1634, since it was founded by a Catholic for Catholics. The Catholic Church grew rapidly in the 19th century. There were 200,000 Roman Catholics in the United States in 1829, 3 million in 1860, 7 million in 1880, and 10 million in 1900. Migrants from Ireland and later from eastern and southern Europe accounted for this startling growth. While the church grew, so too did its problems from without and from within. In the 1840s virulent anti-Catholic nativists rioted in Philadelphia and elected a mayor of New York, and their Know-Nothing Party reached its zenith in 1854 and 1855 but disintegrated after 1856. The party disappeared, but Protestant hostility to Catholics remained, surfacing in controversies over public aid for parochial schools raised by the American Protective Association (APA) in the 1880s and 1890s.
There were also differences between American Catholics and their authorities in Rome. Since Catholics were suspected of loyalty to a foreign potentate (the pope), American Catholic leaders from the birth of the United States publicly and eagerly embraced their nation and its democratic values. But Pope Pius IX (1792-1878, elected 1846), as his temporal power eroded, issued his reactionary encyclical Quanta Cura (1864) with its “Syllabus of Errors” that attacked “progress, liberalism, and contemporary civilization,” rejected liberty of conscience and toleration of other religions, and asserted church control of science, culture, and education. Liberal Catholics, who had embraced religious liberty and democracy, were dismayed, and American Catholics did their best to affirm American principles at their 1866 second plenary council in Baltimore. Pius, however, at the nadir of his temporal power in 1870 triumphed at the Vatican Council, which proclaimed the dogma of papal infallibility. But that victory led to struggles with the governments of Germany, France, and elsewhere.
Contending forces beset Roman Catholicism during the Gilded Age. It was ruled by a reactionary authority abroad, it existed in the most democratic country in the world, and it acquired millions of disparate new members from Ireland, Germany, Italy, and Poland. As immigration expanded the church, ethnic divisions were apparent among the laity and clergy, with the Irish resenting the French dominance of the hierarchy early in the century and, later, the Germans resenting the Irish. The Germans, for example, resisted Irish efforts to require English in all parochial schools.
The ideas of Pius IX also clashed with those of the laity, who wholeheartedly participated in the American democratic process, and with the thoughts of two prominent American converts to Roman Catholicism. Orestes Brown-son (1803-76) had moved from Calvinism to Universalism to Unitarianism to Transcendentalism—becoming committed to radical social causes including socialism, abolitionism, and women’s rights along the way—before embracing Roman Catholicism in 1844. From then until his death he worked at reconciling his Catholicism and his natural rights as an American. Only Catholicism, he believed, could discipline the American people sufficiently to make democracy work and to achieve the radical social reforms he continued to hold dear. For Brownson, America and Catholicism were not in conflict and actually were spiritual siblings.
Isaac Hecker (1819-88), the child of German immigrants, who with his brothers owned a prosperous bakery and flour mill, met Brownson in 1841 and under his influence sojourned among Transcendentalists for a year and in 1844 also converted to Roman Catholicism. He studied abroad for the priesthood, was ordained in 1849, returned to the United States as a Redemptorist missionary, and wrote Questions of the Soul (1855) and Aspirations of Nature (1857). In them he merged romantic Transcendentalism with Catholicism, arguing that while basic human aspirations transcended experience, they were reflected in the sacraments of the Catholic Church. Hecker, a proselytizer at heart, recognized that the Redemptorist order, composed primarily of German immigrants, would convert more Protestants if a thoroughly American branch of the order were established. His German superior disagreed, and when in 1857 Hecker went to Rome to plead his case he was tossed out of the order. Pius IX, however, allowed Hecker in 1858 to found the Society of Missionary Priests of St. Paul the Apostle in New York. The Paulists were American and had as their object the conversion of American Protestants, and they used American culture as a positive force conducive to the true Catholic faith. Hecker’s last book The Church and the Age (1887) argued that the church was not at odds but rather at home with modernity.
Another sign of American independence was the creation of the Catholic University of America in 1889 so that American priests seeking advanced study would not have to go abroad. For conservatives, this move entailed the risk of disconnecting priests from traditional and dependable orthodox European authorities. A papal delegate returned from America to Rome in 1892 with a sobering report to the Pope on the state of the church.
The reactionary Pope Pius had been succeeded by Leo XIII (1810-1903, elected 1878), who was conciliatory by nature and is renowned for his Rerum Novarum, which applied Christian principles to the relations between capital and labor, but he was not a liberal. Besieged by nationalism in Italy and beset by anticlericalism in France, Leo perceived that modernism was a threat to the authority of Rome. Quite understandably he found the teachings of Brownson and Hecker disturbing and recognized that the new American university might encourage a drift from Rome. Consequently Leo’s encyclical, Longinqua Oceani (1895), cautioned the American church against attributing its strength to American ideas instead of to God’s mysterious design, lamented the separation of church and state, and admonished Catholics to be more cohesive and obedient. In 1899 following the Spanish-American War, in which the United States defeated a Catholic power, Leo issued Testem Benevolentiae, attacking Hecker’s ideas, Americanism, and modernism directly, warning that they were a mix of heretical notions and that it was wrong to “desire a church in America different from that which is in the rest of the world.” To Leo the tumult of change was a danger, while to Brownson and Hecker in America it was an opportunity. Trusting its long history and durability, Rome chose to stay its usual course and demanded that America heel to. As a result, the American hierarchy became conservative in the first half of the 20th century. And yet while doctrinally and institutionally conservative, there was a pragmatic liberal strain in the American Roman Catholic Church. Isaac Hecker’s belief that America and American culture were ideal situations for the natural growth of Catholicism propelled many liberal Catholics. And the thinking of Hecker, far more than that of Pius IX or Leo XIII, influenced the liberalizing Second Vatican Council (1962-65).
Further reading: Robert D. Cross, The Emergence of Liberal Catholicism in America (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968); Andrew M. Greeley, Catholic Experience (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1967); Thomas T. McAvoy, Americanist Heresy in Roman Catholicism, 1895-1900 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963)
—W. Frederick Wooden
World History
