The American Century

by Russell Shaw

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As anniversaries go, the 100th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's condemnation of "Americanism" probably isn't right at the top of everybody's list. But the issues of a century ago are still very much with us.

Pope Leo condemned Americanism on Jan. 22, 1899, in an apostolic letter named — apparently without ironic intent — Testem Benevolentiae ("Witness to Good Will"). It was addressed to Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore, the head of the American hierarchy, but aimed at a wider audience.

The Pope challenged the idea that, in order to evangelize, the Church had to come to terms with modernity and accept "opinions and theories . . . which have recently been introduced."

Some people think this way even on matters of faith, he said. To win people over, they urge treating some religious doctrines as "of lesser importance," or watering them down so much "they do not retain the same sense as the Church has always held."

Pope Leo spelled out some of the ideas that troubled him:

• That the Church's teaching office is no longer needed because the Holy Spirit enlightens people directly these days.

• That natural virtues fit modern times better than supernatural ones.

• That active virtues are better than "passive" virtues such as poverty, chastity and obedience.

• That religious life and its vows are outmoded.

• That old ways of evangelizing must be abandoned and replaced by new.

Americanism sometimes has been called a "phantom heresy." Who, if anyone, actually thought this way?

There is a family resemblance between some of these ideas and those of people such as Father Isaac Hecker, the visionary American founder of the Paulists. Still, after the Pope's letter appeared, prominent Americanists denied that anybody in the United States held such notions.

Surely, though, the ideas weren't figments of Pope Leo's imagination. In fact, the immediate occasion for his letter was the French edition of a biography of Father Hecker by an American Paulist, Father Walter Elliott, and especially its introduction by a French priest, Abbe Felix Klein.

Abbe Klein—who called Americanism a phantom heresy in the memoirs he published many years later — was a neighbor of the biblical exegete Alfred Loisy. For his part, Loisy was the leading figure in the Modernist movement Pope St. Pius X was to condemn in 1907. Americanists may not have been Modernists, but this was probably not so obvious at the time — nor, in all cases, is it obvious now.

obscure though the background of Testem Benevolentiae undoubtedly was, it did have clear results. For a time, it put a stop to overt efforts to push the collection of ideas it called Americanism.

But it failed to blunt the main thrust? of the Americanist movement. Indeed, in the 20th century most American Catholics have come to take Americanism in a general sense — if not exactly in the sense of Pope Leo XIII—as conventional wisdom.

More than just good-hearted love of country, the essence of it is acceptance of American secular culture and belief that this culture is compatible with Catholicism. Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul, the most prominent Americanist of his day, summed it up in an address full of patriotic jingoism delivered to a French audience in 1892:

"The future of the Church in America is bright and encouraging. To people of other countries, American Catholicism presents features which seem unusual; these features are the result of the freedom which our civil and political institutions give us. . . .

"By word and act we prove that we are patriots of patriots. Our hearts always beat with love for the republic. Our tongues are always eloquent in celebrating her praises. Our hands are always uplifted to bless her banners and her soldiers."

Six decades later, the Jesuit theologian Father John Courtney Murray polished central tenets of Americanism to a sophisticated high gloss. In his influential 1960 book "We Hold These Truths" (Sheed and Ward, $16), he argued that not only was the Catholic Church at home in America, but its natural law tradition was the very basis of the American political system. But Father Murray was far from naive.

Although he died in 1967, he lived long enough to see breakthrough victories of the cultural revolution of that era. And he foresaw the dire consequences if moral relativism came to take the place of a moral consensus grounded in natural law.

If that happened, he wrote, then civil law would come to be treated as "a pure instrumentality whereby lawmakers and judges, recognizing the human desires that are seeking realization at a given moment ... endeavor to satisfy those desires with a minimum of social friction."

Leaving aside the question of social friction," that is a good shorthand description of what already has occurred on the issue of abortion. Now the bourgeois libertarian ethic of "choice" is pushing to make it happen on issues such as assisted suicide, euthanasia, homosexual "marriage" and many others.

To the extent American Catholics have become part of mainstream American secular culture, they have no great difficulty adjusting to the culture's espousal of such values. This process of main-streaming, called cultural assimilation, has occurred on a massive scale since World War II.

Opinion polls show that Catholics today think pretty much like most other Americans when it comes to contraception, divorce, extramarital sex and even abortion in so-called hard cases. Steep declines in Mass attendance and vocations to the priesthood and religious life are further evidence of assimilation, as is the rise of "cafeteria Catholicism" that takes what suits it from the Catholic tradition and discards the rest.

The American bishops spoke of this problem last November in their much-praised pro-life statement, "Living the Gospel of Life."

"American Catholics have long sought to assimilate into U.S. cultural life," they said. "But in assimilating, we have too often been digested. We have been changed by our culture too much, and we have changed it not enough."

Of course, the story has another side. Poll data show that churchgoing Catholics (and Protestants) are far more likely to hold traditional religious and moral views — the views that the secular culture rejects — than those who seldom or never go to church. But assimilation has weakened even the churchgoers' faith.

Does that mean the Catholic Church is hopelessly locked in conflict with contemporary America? There is no simple yes or no answer.

Catholics live in the midst of a larger phenomenon — a culture war — as does everyone else as well. This is a deep-seated conflict about beliefs and values and standards of conduct, as well as about the laws and public policies appropriate to protect and express them.

The conflict engages the energies of two large bodies of citizens: on the one hand, those who hold traditional religious and moral views and, on the other, those who embrace the libertarian ethic of choice. There are plenty of American Catholics in both camps.

Obviously, the Catholic Americanists of the late 19th century did not foresee how things would look a century later. No one did.

Yet running through Pope Leo's Testem Benevolentiae is this message: Don't be in a rush to join the secular culture, and don't adopt its standards too quickly—for, in time, the culture may become the enemy of Catholic faith.

"Those opinions cannot be approved by us, the sum total of which some indicate by the name of Americanism," the Pope told Cardinal Gibbons. "For it raises a suspicion that there are those among you who envision and desire a Church in America other than that which is in all the rest of the world."

Pope John Paul II also is much interested in culture — and in America. Sounding a theme familiar to Father Murray, he often has urged American Catholics to work to restore the ethical consensus regarding natural rights and duties on which the American system is based.

"I speak of your founding documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights," he said during his U.S. visit in 1995. "These documents are grounded in and embody unchanging principles of natural law."

Father Murray would have agreed with that. So, presumably, would Pope Leo XIII. Unfortunately, it isn't clear that American Catholics generally now get the point.

Shaw is Our Sunday Visitor's Washington correspondent

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