In 1864, Pope Pius IX issued Syllabus Errorum, outlining heresies opposed to Catholic Church teaching. One error was the American separation of church and state, which had drawn the attention of continental conservative clerics. A few decades later, a biography of American priest Father Isaac Hecker made it clear that Hecker and the Paulist Brothers had been reaching out to American Protestants, an early form of ecumenicism, and that Hecker had used such terms as “natural virtue,” which was interpreted as classical liberalism. The Vatican was opposed, and what was understood as Americanism gained no approval.
American bishops walked on eggshells.
The issue is still with us, if a pastoral letter from our local priest is proof; he recently argued to his parishioners that they are Catholics first and Americans second, which presumes an external authority apart from America’s founding documents and an unequivocal argument for self-government under law. His point? The teaching of the church is presumed a powerful corrective against Americanism, which is a clear and present danger to the Catholic faith.
What, then, might the history of the Catholic Church in America look like in the years following World War II and the years following Vatican II? This is the subject of D. G. Hart’s American Catholic: The Politics of Faith During the Cold War.
Context will be helpful here. On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill stressed the need for the United States and Britain to act as guardians against the Soviet Union. The metaphor Churchill coined was that an “iron curtain [had] descended across the continent.” His talk at Westminster College acknowledged that the United States was at a pinnacle of world power that would require policing the expansionist policies of Stalin.
Two phrases entered the vocabulary: Iron Curtain and Cold War.
What followed was an American-vilified depiction of Communism compared to a moral justification of Americanism at war with the Red Scare. America’s role is well recognized but, as Professor Hart makes clear, what is less so is the religious and political role of American Catholic intellectuals, a coalition of anti-Communists, traditionalists, and classical liberals. The problem they faced was not only church-state relations but how to reconcile the American form of government and the dynamics of modern society, anathema to the Roman Catholic Church since the First Vatican Council.
Professor Hart’s story traces how “Roman Catholics became such prominent players in conservative circles” and, as he writes, allows the reader to “understand the affinity and tension between national and Roman Catholic tradition and ideals.” More striking is “the way [American] Roman Catholics” defended “the United States’ founding, history, and influence.” It is the history of how Americanism created a space for itself within the “Roman” Catholic tradition.