Posted on 05/29/2013 11:28:22 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
With his new book, “American Church: The Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall, and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America” (Ignatius Press), mild-mannered Russell Shaw has become the bull in the china shop of U.S. Catholic history, knocking heroes off pedestals and overturning conventional story-lines—all in aid of trying to understand why the Church in America is in precarious position today vis-à-vis the ambient public culture and the government.
Shaw’s answer: we’re in deep trouble because of a longstanding U.S. Catholic determination to be more-American-than-thou—to disprove ancient charges of Catholicism’s incompatibility with American democracy by assimilating so dramatically that there’s no discernible difference between Catholics (and their attitudes toward public policy) and an increasingly secularized, mainstream public opinion. Shaw mounts an impressive case that Catholic Lite in these United States has indeed taken its cues from the wider culture, and as that culture has become ever more individualistic and hedonistic, the historic U.S. Catholic passion for assimilation and acceptance has backfired. Moreover, Shaw’s call to build a culture-reforming Catholic counterculture is not dissimilar to the argument I make about the Church and public life in “Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church.”
But on a second reading of Shaw’s book, I began to wonder whether he’s gotten the question of the moment quite right.
To read the history of the Catholic Church in the United States as a centuries-long struggle for assimilation and acceptance certainly sheds light on one dynamic in the development of the Church in America. Yet too close a focus on the question, “Is it possible to be a good Catholic and a good American?” is to argue the question of Catholicism-and-America on the other guy’s turf. Once, the “other guy” challenging Catholics’ patriotic credentials was militant Protestantism; now, the other guy is militant secularism. To play on the other guy’s turf, however, is to concede at the outset that the other guy sets the terms of debate: “We (militant Protestants/militant secularists) know what it means to be a good American; you (Catholics) have to prove yourselves to us.”
That’s not the game, however. It wasn’t really the game from 1776 through the 1960 presidential campaign — when militant Protestantism was the aggressor — and it isn’t the game today. The real game involves different, deeper questions: “Who best understands the nature of the American experiment in ordered liberty, and who can best give a persuasive defense of the first liberty, which is religious freedom?”
The 19th-century U.S. bishops and intellectuals whose enthusiasm for American democracy Russ Shaw now views skeptically (and, yes, they did go over the top on occasion) did get one crucial point right: the American Founders “built better than they knew,” i.e., the Founders designed a democratic republic for which they couldn’t provide a durable moral and philosophical defense. But the long-despised (and now despised-again) Catholics could: Catholics could (and can) give a robust, compelling account of American democracy and its commitments to ordered liberty.
Mid-20th-century Catholic scholars like historian Theodore Maynard and theologian John Courtney Murray picked up this theme and made it central to their reading of U.S. Catholic history. Murray presciently warned that, if Catholicism didn’t fill the cultural vacuum being created by a dying mainline Protestantism, the “noble, many-storied mansion mansion of democracy [may] be dismantled, leveled to the dimensions of a flat majoritarianism, which is no mansion but a barn, perhaps even a tool shed in which the weapons of tyranny may be forged.”
That is the argument the U.S. bishops have mounted in their challenge to the Obama administration’s demolition of civil society through the HHS mandate on contraceptives and abortifacients: What is the nature of American democracy and the fundamental freedoms government is created to protect? Who are the true patriots: the men and women who can give an account of freedom’s moral character, an account capable of sustaining a genuine democracy against a rising dictatorship of relativism, “in which the tools of tyranny may be forged”?
The argument today isn’t about assimilation. The argument today is about who “gets” America.
The same thing can be said of Abraham Lincoln and Richard Nixon.
Then you're not reading what I wrote. I didn't say Hispanic Catholics are uniformly liberals and caucasian Catholics are all conservative. What I said I was GENERALLY speaking, non-hispanic Catholics TEND to LEAN conservative, and hispanic-Catholics TEND to LEAN liberal. Their countries of origin and their voting patterns in the United States reflect this. Obviously, there are NUMEROUS exceptions to this general rule. Nobody would claim Ted Kennedy is right-wing or Augusto Pinochet was a socialist, for example.
Not at all, they were not the "end" of America, the election of JFK in 1960 doomed America, the future has no America in it, the name will remain for a long time, but America is gone, never to return.
The death of federalism under Lincoln, when these united States became the United States, and an illegal military action against the states, set into motion the forces that are destroying our country.
It was Nixon who implemented wage and price controls, established the EPA, OSHA, Clean Air Act, minimum tax, normalized relations with China, abandoned POWs and MIAs in Vietnam and was the first president to spent more on welfare than defense.
JFK, who was to the right of both Bush's, was just another milestone on the road.
As long as we were we, we could go back and forth, have ebbs and flows, historical cycles, and change within our own nation and people, but JFK’s election led to the left totally taking over all of the government and the passing of his immigration laws to replace the American people, we will never recover from that, and we already don’t recognize but traces of America even now, already America has been largely permanently erased and put away.
I get it, the issue isn't actually about conservatism, it's about xenophobic anti-Catholicism.
Funny—my New York Irish grandparents, all four of them, were Republicans; but THEIR parents (their fathers, anyway) were Democrats (two involved in Teapot Dome), and I’d agree with your grandfather. But I’m not sure the D-R split came as late as the 60s. Sen. Taft began the separation that defined the conservative-liberal split, and he was early 50s. Then came the split among Republicans—McCarthy/Taft wing vs. the Eisenhower/Rockefeller wing in the mid-fifties which unfortunately resulted in the JFK/LBJ debacle. Because Nixon had creds on both sides of the liberal-conservative Republican split in 1960 (even without Eisenhower’s long-withheld support), he was the GOP’s best hope but still lost, perhaps through fraud. Finally elected in ‘68, he was a better president than any we’d had in the 50 preceding years, the first to understand communism (THE defining Conservative-Liberal discriminator).
What a weird post, of course it is about conservatism, read my posts again if the loss of the United States means anything to you, and you want to learn how it happened.
Protestants of all shades. The old Puritanism had divided into several camps, and the new evangelical movement, led by men like John Wesley, tried to straddle the theological fence between Calvinism and liberalism, or if you like bridge the theological divide by converting the masses to meaningful worship though appeals to piety. The national elite hung onto to the old broad church, lattitudinal solution associated with the Church of England without endorsing any single body. When they did use the term “religion,” they WERE thinking of Protestantism. However, thecentral government they created was designed not to be like the European monarchies. No king, no titled aristocracy, no state church. But the dual sovereignty they established did allow the state to support a particular body such as the Congregational church in Connecticut. Eventually all the state church disappeared paradoxically as the evangelical movement managed to bring the majority of the people into the several sects, now called denominations. One historian has spoken of protestantism in 1860 as the “unofficial established church of the United States.”
Do you mean the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, introduced in Congress by the Jewish Emanuel Celler and signed into law by the Disciples of Christ Protestant Lyndon B. Johnson? You must, because Kennedy never signed any immigration law.
It doesn't completely fit with your usual Catholic-bashing meme, I know. The real world is often more complex than just scapegoating one particular group.
Your defense of the left is inadequate.
Democrats wrote a law to replace the American voter.
From unionizing government, to Vietnam, to the 1965 Immigration Act, JFK was the end of us.
“However, if there is one man who can take the most credit for the 1965 act, it is John F. Kennedy. Kennedy seems to have inherited the resentment his father Joseph felt as an outsider in Boston’s WASP aristocracy. He voted against the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and supported various refugee acts throughout the 1950s. In 1958 he wrote a book, A Nation of Immigrants, which attacked the quota system as illogical and without purpose, and the book served as Kennedy’s blueprint for immigration reform after he became president in 1960. In the summer of 1963, Kennedy sent Congress a proposal calling for the elimination of the national origins quota system. He wanted immigrants admitted on the basis of family reunification and needed skills, without regard to national origin. After his assassination in November, his brother Robert took up the cause of immigration reform, calling it JFK’s legacy. In the forward to a revised edition of A Nation of Immigrants, issued in 1964 to gain support for the new law, he wrote, “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies.” Sold as a memorial to JFK, there was very little opposition to what became known as the Immigration Act of 1965.”
The following statements were declared false and in error by Pope Pius.
15. Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true. -- Allocution "Maxima quidem," June 9, 1862;
18. Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which form it is given to please God equally as in the Catholic Church. -- Encyclical "Noscitis," Dec. 8, 1849
24. The Church has not the power of using force, nor has she any temporal power, direct or indirect. -- Apostolic Letter "Ad Apostolicae," Aug. 22, 1851.
55. The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.
26. The Church has no innate and legitimate right of acquiring and possessing property. -- Allocution "Nunquam fore," Dec. 15, 1856;
76. The abolition of the temporal power of which the Apostolic See is possessed would contribute in the greatest degree to the liberty and prosperity of the Church.
77. In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship. -- Allocution "Nemo vestrum," July 26, 1855.
78. Hence it has been wisely decided by law, in some Catholic countries, that persons coming to reside therein shall enjoy the public exercise of their own peculiar worship. -- Allocution "Acerbissimum," Sept. 27, 1852.
Are American Catholics sympathetic to Pius and his Syllabus?
Why, or why not?
Belated "Presbyterian Rebellion Day" ping!
Catholic Monarchists.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.