Catholicism in America

33rd Annual Convention The Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Presents… Catholicism in America September 24-26th, 2010 Baltimore, MD CATHOLICISM IN AMERICA CATHOLICISM IN AMERICA Proceedings from the 33 rd Annual Convention of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars September 24-26, 2010 Baltimore, Maryland Edited by Elizabeth C. Shaw Copyright © 2012 by the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars All rights reserved. Published by the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS Baltimore as the Jerusalem of the American Church Rev. Michael Roach ...............................................................3 Satire, Sin, and Joy in the Works of Flannery O’Connor (1925-64) and Walker Percy (1917-90) Sue Abromaitis .....................................................................19 The Church Universal and the Americanist Movement James Hitchcock ...................................................................41 “For All Who Live in a Strange Land”: Reflections on Being Catholic in America Glenn W. Olsen ....................................................................79 Americanism and Catholic Intellectual Life Christopher Shannon...........................................................101 Nature, Grace, and the Public Sphere Stephen Fields, S.J. .............................................................123 The Monastic Quaerere Deum: Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America David L. Schindler ..............................................................139 Catholic Relief Services (CRS): An American Catholic Presence in International Civil Society? Joseph S. Rossi, S.J.............................................................189 Life in the Late Republic: The Catholic Role in America after Virtue Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap. ..........................................211 Appendix – Fellowship of Catholic Scholars ..................................223 Baltimore as the Jerusalem of the American Church Rev. Michael Roach Mount St. Mary’s Seminary O Jesu, vivens in Maria O Jesus, living in Mary, come and live in your servants, in the spirit of holiness, in the fullness of your power, in the perfection of your ways, in the truth of your virtues, in the communion of your mysteries. Overcome every oppressing force, in your Spirit, for the glory of the Father. Amen. HIRTY YEARS AGO , as I was leaving graduate work at the Catholic University of America, the department held a T colloquy with me. They asked if I had any questions. I asked if I should take any education courses. John Tracy Ellis was horrified and said, “Absolutely not.” The faculty then discussed the merits of dry-as-dust historical works versus the popular books. “Well,” they said, “at least people read the popular stuff.” Finally, the scholarly and always elegant Dr. Annabelle Melville noted, “If you’re going to make Church history interesting, it has to be entertaining, fun. At times you have to stand on your head!” About twenty-six years ago, the Nashville Dominicans came to Catonsville to take over a venerable old Visitation academy. Their own quarters not ready, they went over to the Little Sisters of the Poor for hospitality. When the aged sister portress answered the door to let them in, she took a look at them and said, “Allies.” It’s good to be among allies. 4 Baltimore as the Jerusalem of the American Church It’s true that I am unabashedly parochial, but my talk is not as jingoistic as the title might indicate. “Baltimore as Jerusalem of the American Church” is lifted from the silver jubilee sermon the late bishop of Sioux Falls, Dr. Thomas O’Gorman, delivered for the beloved pastor of Montgomery County, Father Charles Oscar Rosensteel. Outside of the Dakotas, if you know of Bishop O’Gorman, you might remember him as a learned historian at Catholic University in the 1890s. He was on the wrong side of the endless internecine battles at CUA in those early years. He was an Americanist when the tide turned against them by 1895. He possessed sterling credentials as an Americanist. He had been a Paulist for a while and was a schoolmate of Archbishop John Ireland, “the consecrated blizzard of St. Paul.” They were both Kilkenny men. If you know any other quotation from Dr. O’Gorman, it may be this – “I fear I must resign myself to being the routine bishop of an unknown western diocese.” It may have been Monsignor John Tracy Ellis who taught me, “Academics are like fish-mongers’ wives. They brawl constantly!” In any event it was a wonderful sermon, back in 1909, that Dr. O’Gorman gave for Father Rosensteel, who really was the pioneer priest of so much of the area north of Washington, D.C. He made his rounds on a horse and buggy, later a bicycle, and later still a motorcycle. To understand Dr. O’Gorman’s reference, you must know that Father Rosensteel’s charge included St. John’s Forest Glen, now Silver Spring, where Father John Carroll had started his American priestly work out of his mother’s residence near Rock Creek. He rode circuit out of there into Virginia and what is now West Virginia, but Forest Glen was the mission center. Its chapel could be called “the Bethlehem of the American Church.” It is where our first bishop began his ministry. He concludes it in Baltimore almost four decades later – whence “the Jerusalem, the holy city of the American church.” It was such a great image that Dr. O’Gorman used it again Rev. Michael Roach 5 when he preached at the dedication of the new St. John’s Forest Glen more than a decade later. In truth, the sober John Carroll, would be fairly embarrassed by such an analogy! As every historian knows, you have to go beyond the obvious causality, so we delve into the background of the original Catholics who brought the faith to these shores of Maryland. Less than half of the original colonists who betook themselves to Maryland on the Ark and the Dove in 1634 were Roman Catholic, but they came from that singular group that hung on so tenaciously to their ancient faith in England. We call them Recusants. This was the group whom Blessed John Henry Newman called a gens lucifugata , a “group that flees from the light.” They had learned to practice their Catholicism very discreetly, quietly – never wearing it on their sleeves or “in your face.” Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, wanted to make sure his Catholic colonists continued their religious practice in a nonconfrontational way. He wrote to his brother Leonard, who actually accompanied the voyage to be extremely cautious about religious display or dispute, lest the Protestant colonists lodge complaints in Virginia or back in London. Now some interpret these words as cowardice! They are not. That is just how the Recusants were accustomed to operate in order to survive. The Calverts knew that full well. Then there is that endless debate over whether the Maryland colony was named in honor of Queen Henrietta Maria, the Stuart king’s Catholic consort, or Mary, the Queen of Heaven. Most sources, even the Catholic ones, generally come down on the side of the former. But I prefer the opinion of the venerable historian and literateur Dr. Theodore Maynard, who posits that the colony’s title was really something of a pious double-entendre. The Recusants knew full well that it was for Mary. To make that case stronger they named their first settlement St. Mary’s as well, as they did the river it was located upon and the first county in the state. 6 Baltimore as the Jerusalem of the American Church Along with two other Jesuits, Father Andrew White, S.J. was the spiritual leader of the colony. White was an unbending Thomist, and his peers were not sad to see him go from Liege and Louvain. He made a marvelous missionary full of that Counter-Reformation zeal that marked the epoch. He loved the Anacostans and Piscataways and would gladly spend more time among them than with the colonists. He wrote a catechism in Piscataway. Even when Father White had been sent back to England in chains after a Protestant incursion from Virginia in 1644, he tried till the end of his days to get back to these shores. But for all of this, by the 1720s a great sign of vitality appeared: dozens of sons and daughters of Maryland families traveled to Europe to pursue Catholic education and, often, religious vocations in monasteries and convents on the Continent. The Maryland Catholics seemed to favor the Jesuits, the Benedictines, the Dominicans, Augustinian canonesses, and most especially the Teresians, as the Carmelites in the Low Countries were called. In two or three generations, a number of these Marylanders would be returning to the colonies and new nation to evangelize and give potent witness to Catholicism. So many leaders of the Church in the colonial republic came from these early Maryland families: the Carrolls, the Neales, the Brents, the Brooks, the Fenwicks, the Matthews, the Spaldings, the Abells, the Elders. These families also supplied the nucleus of many Catholic communities of the South and the West. I think of the Jenkins, the Mattinglys, and the Spaldings in Kentucky; the Semmes in Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama; the Elders as far out as Kansas, Missouri, and Texas. Many of those Elders come back to Emmitsburg for periodical reunions – there’s one this summer. In fact, they are hoping to celebrate the Extraordinary Form in the family cemetery. The original Catholic mission in Georgia was at Locust Grove, started by Catholics who had emigrated from southern Maryland. The Maryland influence would continue into the twentieth century in Rev. Michael Roach 7 Georgia. My old friend and incomparable archivist, Sister Felicitas Powers, R.S.M., told me that the wealthiest Catholics in Savannah were the Semmes family. They helped to pay for the education of their niece, Mary Flannery O’Connor – certainly a good investment! But I am getting ahead of myself. Certainly, the premier Catholic family of the colonial period were the Carrolls.

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