Pope Leo XIII on America and Americanism

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Jul 03, 2026 | In Magisterium of Leo XIII

This is part of a series of articles and podcast episodes surveying the magisterium of Pope Leo XIII.

As we prepare to celebrate the 250^th anniversary of our nation’s founding, it’s fitting to recall the first two letters ever written by a pope to the United States. A little over a century since the founding of both the nation and the American episcopate, with the American Church having received a major boost from immigration in the 19^th century, it was a good time for Pope Leo XIII to evaluate the state of the Church in the nation and the state of the nation in regard to the Church.

When people think of Leo XIII writing about America, the word that often comes to mind is the condemned error of “Americanism.” This was indeed discussed in Leo’s second letter, but his engagement with American Catholicism was overwhelmingly positive. He was writing to America, he said, “because We highly esteem and love exceedingly the young and vigorous American nation, in which We plainly discern latent forces for the advancement alike of civilization and of Christianity.”

Longinqua: on Catholicism in the United States (1895)

Having already read Leo’s teachings against excessive liberty and in favor of the State confessing the true faith, we might expect him to take a somewhat dour view of the American founding. Instead, while he is not free of concern about those matters, he is strikingly positive about the American system and gives not the slightest hint of disapproval of our war for independence. He makes a point of the fact that our freedom was gotten with help from Catholic nations. He also praises “the great Washington” and his alliance with Catholics such as John Carroll, the first bishop in the United States, taking their friendship as a providential sign that America and the Church “ought to be conjoined in concord and amity.”

Of course, he also does not fail to mention the earlier Catholic history of the New World, with Columbus, the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits, bringing the faith to the Americas.

Coming to his own time, he describes at length the flourishing of the Church in America—parishes, schools, pious organizations, monasteries, convents, all manner of religious organizations—and attributes this not only to the clergy, “but in no slight measure also, to the faith and generosity of the Catholic laity.” I note this because the energy of the laity remains today a special mark (even if sometimes also a liability) of American Catholicism.

The most significant passage of the encyclical, in which Leo expresses both praise and reservation about the American model of Church-State relations, is as follows:

…thanks are due to the equity of the laws which obtain in America and to the customs of the well-ordered Republic. For the Church amongst you, unopposed by the Constitution and government of your nation, fettered by no hostile legislation, protected against violence by the common laws and the impartiality of the tribunals, is free to live and act without hindrance. Yet, though all this is true, it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced. The fact that Catholicity with you is in good condition, nay, is even enjoying a prosperous growth, is by all means to be attributed to the fecundity with which God has endowed His Church, in virtue of which unless men or circumstances interfere, she spontaneously expands and propagates herself; but she would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority.

One more thing worth mentioning in this encyclical is Leo’s call for a proliferation of well-formed Catholic journalists. He also admonishes journalists on two points which are extremely relevant today:

They who desire to be of real service to the Church, and with their pens heartily to defend the Catholic cause, should carry on the conflict with perfect unanimity, and, as it were, with serried ranks, for they rather inflict than repel war if they waste their strength by discord. In like manner their work, instead of being profitable and fruitful, becomes injurious and disastrous whenever they presume to call before their tribunal the decisions and acts of bishops, and, casting off due reverence, cavil and find fault; not perceiving how great a disturbance of order, how many evils are thereby produced.

Four years later, Leo would write his apostolic letter to Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore, addressing the errors of “Americanism.”

Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae: Concerning New Opinions, Virtue, Nature and Grace, With Regard to Americanism (1899)

If those who invoke “Americanism” sometimes seem a bit hazy on what it actually is, they cannot entirely be blamed. Leo himself identifies a diverse range of errors associated with this term, but also says that “Americanism” is nothing wrong if it simply means the political condition, laws, and customs of the United States, or the cultural dispositions of Americans.

Not only that, but Leo mentions that he does not even know if the false ideas going by “Americanism” are actually common in America. The sense one gets from the letter is, “If Catholics in America think this way, they should stop, but I’m not saying they actually do.” To this day it is debated to what extent Americans actually did hold these ideas.

The origins of the controversy over Americanism actually seem to be European. Leo mentions that the concerns began with a French translation of an American biography of Fr. Isaac Hecker, founder of the Paulist order. The introduction to the translation was written by a liberal French priest, and this is where the errors were explicitly introduced.

What, then, is the error of Americanism? Leo describes it in a few different ways. Most broadly, it is the view that the Church needs to get with the times, not only in customs but also in doctrines. More specifically, it is the view that “the Church in America [ought] to be different from what it is in the rest of the world.” The condemnation of Americanism is not a condemnation of the American system, but of erroneous applications of the American system and culture to ecclesiastical and spiritual matters—such as the idea that the Church in America should be more democratic and individualistic.

The more specific errors Leo corrects all seem to relate to false methods of reaching out to the world, and this is where they remain relevant to today’s Church (and not at all limited to America). In general, Leo warns against excessive emphasis on activity, individualism, liberty, and independence in the spiritual life.

First, and certainly widespread today, is the error of trying to make the Church too much like the surrounding culture in order to appeal to it. Leo writes in a passage that speaks directly to today’s ecclesiastical culture:

We cannot consider as altogether blameless the silence which purposely leads to the omission or neglect of some of the principles of Christian doctrine, for all the principles come from the same Author and Master… Let it be far from anyone’s mind to suppress for any reason any doctrine that has been handed down. Such a policy would tend rather to separate Catholics from the Church than to bring in those who differ. There is nothing closer to our heart than to have those who are separated from the fold of Christ return to it, but in no other way than the way pointed out by Christ.

Second, some were advocating that Church discipline be loosened to allow people to follow their own preferences: “They are of opinion that such liberty has its counterpart in the newly given civil freedom which is now the right and the foundation of almost every secular state.” I suppose one might, if one wished, connect this to some disciplinary anomalies in the American Church today, such as the loosened rule of Friday fasting.

Leo also warns against the false freedom of speech which he had earlier condemned in Libertas: “the confounding of license with liberty, the passion for discussing and pouring contempt upon any possible subject, the assumed right to hold whatever opinions one pleases upon any subject and to set them forth in print to the world.”

Another error of “Americanism” is the view that external guidance from Church authority becomes unnecessary for more advanced souls, and is only needed for beginners. Leo says on the contrary that “as experience shows, these monitions and impulses of the Holy Spirit are for the most part felt through the medium of the aid and light of an external teaching authority.”

Finally, in an error still quite relevant to American culture, the natural virtues were extolled over the supernatural virtues, and the contemplative over the active life. “Americanists” divided virtues into active and passive, with the former superior to the latter. Leo responds that there is no such thing as a passive virtue.

This error led to a disregard of the evangelical virtues, and contempt for religious life—including a critique of religious vows as inappropriate for modern man, as too limiting to liberty, and as detracting from personal initiative. To this Leo responds that many the greatest heroes in the Church’s history were bound by religious vows, which, so far from enervating them, strengthened and focused their spirits, placing them on the vanguard of Christ’s army.

Finally, Pope Leo XIII does affirm some of the methods used by Fr. Isaac Hecker, who was known for evangelizing Protestants through friendly relations rather than polemics. Leo first says that it would be wrong for the Church to neglect one mode of evangelization in favor of another—rather, different modes are perhaps appropriate for different states of life. The laity properly save the souls of their neighbors by performing the duties of their state, and by living upright, holy, and prayerful lives. More proper to the clergy is the authoritative teaching of the Catholic faith, both by word and by “the pomp and splendor of ceremonies.”

However, Leo also supports those who wish to try then-new strategies of evangelization—which the Church today likes to call “dialogue.” But this ought to be done in prudent and responsible way, with a commission from the Church:

But if, among the different ways of preaching the word of God that one sometimes seems to be preferable, which directed to non-Catholics, not in churches, but in some suitable place, in such wise that controversy is not sought, but friendly conference, such a method is certainly without fault. But let those who undertake such ministry be set apart by the authority of the bishops and let them be men whose science and virtue has been previously ascertained. For we think that there are many in your country who are separated from Catholic truth more by ignorance than by ill-will, who might perchance more easily be drawn to the one fold of Christ if this truth be set forth to them in a friendly and familiar way.

For a good deal more historical context on these letters, especially with regard to the intense assimilationism of the Irish-American Catholics, the anti-assimilation of the German-American Catholics, and the relation of this controversy to French Catholic politics, see my interview with Timothy Flanders: