Catholicism in America

Home , Francis Kenrick, Gerald Shaughnessy, James Gibbons, James Whitfield (bishop), Martin John Spalding, Peter Richard Kenrick

33rd Annual Convention

The Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Presents… Catholicism in America

September 24-26th, 2010 Baltimore, MD

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

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 Tcolloquy 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. Many of the Carrolls are still around, and many are still Catholic. I just ran into one at a funeral in Carroll County last week. They still look the same – no kidding. John Carroll was the right man in the right place at the right time. Educated in the clandestine Latin school conducted by the Jesuits up from the swamps of the Bohemia River, he traveled to St. Omers in French Flanders to complete his education in company with his double cousin, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Catholic signatory of the Declaration of Independence and the wealthiest man in the country. John Carroll’s brother Daniel, who came to own literally half of what would become the District of Columbia, would sign the Constitution. After studies at St. Omers, John Carroll entered the Jesuit novitiate, went through the course at Liege and Bruges, and was ordained just as the fortunes of the Society of Jesus were collapsing. He never really got over the ugly ecclesiastical politics he witnessed in Rome at that time. Wisely and providentially, he came back to Maryland just before our Revolution. He was a solid patriot and even served the emerging nation on a diplomatic mission to Canada. When the ex-Jesuits got together at White Marsh near Bowie to chart their future, Carroll emerged as the natural leader. He was also the youngest of the missionaries. The former Jesuits had organized themselves as the “Select Body of Clergy.” In 1784, John Carroll was named prefect apostolic and in 1789 finally named bishop. I don’t think it was true that he was elected bishop. The Select Body did nominate him, certainly, and 8 Baltimore as the Jerusalem of the American Church sent his name to Propaganda. The former Jesuits did select Baltimore as the residence of their ordinary. It was on the main north-south road of the new nation, a bustling seaport, and would remain the country’s third largest city until the end of the Civil War. These were the real halcyon days of Baltimore. In the first century after the Declaration of Independence, Maryland would know three Catholic governors, Thomas Sim Lee, Enoch Lowe, and John Lee Carroll. None of the other thirteen colonies could make such a claim.

The original Catholics of Baltimore town were not English but rather French Acadians who had been exiled from Nova Scotia after the territory changed hands from French to English. Since Catholicism was largely a rural phenomenon, these Baltimore Catholics were attended from priests down at White Marsh or Doughoregan Manor or Conewago, or up at Priestford or Hickory in Harford County. It pained John Carroll to leave his family home and chapel at Forest Glen, but he knew he needed a central location if he was going to serve his massive new see that ran from New England to Georgia and, after 1803, to much of the former Louisiana Territory. Quite a daunting task, and Carroll knew this full well, as is indicated by his sermon on taking possession of his pro-cathedral in November 1791:

In this my new station, if my life be not one continued instruction and example of virtue to the people committed to my charge, it will become in the sight of God, not only useless, but even pernicious. It is no longer enough for me to be inoffensive in my conduct and regular in my manners. God now imposes a severer duty upon me. I shall incur the guilt of violating my pastoral office if all my endeavors be not directed to bring your lives and all your actions to a conformity with the laws of God: to exhort, to conjure, to reprove, to enter into all your sentiments, to feel all your infirmities; to be all things to all that I may gain all to Christ; Rev. Michael Roach 9

to be superior to human respect, to have nothing in view but God and your salvation; to sacrifice to these; health, peace, reputation, and even life itself: to hate the sin yet love the sinner, to repress the turbulent, to encourage the timid, to watch over the conduct even of the ministers of religion – these are now my duties – extensive, pressing, and indispensable duties: these are the duties of all my brethren in the episcopacy and surely important enough to fill us with terror. . . . In God alone can I find my consolation. He knows by what steps I have been conducted to this important station and how much I have always dreaded it. He will not abandon me unless I first draw down his malediction by unfaithfulness to my charge.

Pray, dear brethren, pray incessantly that I may not incur so dreadful a punishment. Alas, the punishment would fall on you as well as myself. My unfaithfulness would rebound on you and deprive you of some of the means of salvation.

I love to hear bishops talk that way! Brother Thomas Spalding calls this whole epoch the “Carroll Church.” It actually lasts beyond Carroll’s 1815 death, almost into the 1840s. I suspect the greatest joys of Carroll’s episcopal years came from the establishment of any number of Catholic educational institutions. Even though he chose not to join the partially restored Society of Jesus, he kept their passion for education. You know his quotation about Georgetown: “On this academy on the Potomac, I base all my hopes for the Church in the Republic.” Two years later, in 1791, the Sulpicians, avoiding the Terror, arrived in Baltimore to establish St. Mary’s Seminary, free of charge and even bringing some seminarians with them. That was an offer you couldn’t refuse! By 1808 a petit seminaire was founded by another French émigré up at Emmitsburg, John Dubois. He would affiliate with the Sulpicians but would soon admit lay students. Women’s education was not 10 Baltimore as the Jerusalem of the American Church neglected. By 1799, some proto-Visitandines – known first as the Pious Ladies – began a convent school at Georgetown enduring till today as Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School. John Carroll’s cousin and successor, Leonard Neale, was their mentor. These Visitation Academies became so popular that the Archdiocese of Baltimore was second only to Paris with its five Salesian schools. Of course, Mother Seton was a little later but has had better press. You know the story: upon conversion she became something of an outcast in New York society. I believe it was the good Fathers Cheverus and Matignon in Boston who advised her to come to Baltimore, the most Catholic city in this new nation at the time. She followed their advice, packed up her family and sailed down to Baltimore aboard the Shepherdess in August of 1808. The Sulpicians welcomed her warmly and gave her a home on their property on Paca Street. Though her Baltimore school went well, her family was not doing too well. She wrote to her friend Julianna Scott up in Philadelphia, “It’s awfully hard to be good in Baltimore.” A rather eccentric sea captain turned seminarian, Samuel Sutherland Cooper, offered Mother Seton $10,000 to buy a more fortuitous location up in the country, in a remote and hauntingly beautiful valley just down from Father Dubois’s mountain college. Here the community thrived, but she lost family member after family member with the old Seton malady, consumption. Before her death in 1821, she had sent her sisters out to start branch houses in Philadelphia and New York, and had plans for others in Frederick and Baltimore. Of course, I can’t neglect the order of women religious who were not involved in teaching – the Carmelites. While Bishop-elect Carroll was over in England awaiting his consecration, he heard from his cousin, Mother Ann Hill, over in the Low Countries. She was sending a group of four nuns, three of them Maryland natives, to Rev. Michael Roach 11 establish a Carmel in Maryland. They arrived in 1790, settling in Charles County near Port Tobacco.

I have mentioned cousins so many times, I should also mention the limited gene pool of the early Catholics in Maryland. Our first two ordinaries, Archbishops Carroll and Neale, hailed from a huge extended family whose members even included, through the Lloyds of Wye House, Frederick Douglass. My other favorite story on this theme is that one-third of the nuns at Port Tobacco were related to each other, one-third of the nuns at Georgetown Visitation were related to each other, and one-third of the nuns at Port Tobacco were related to one-third of the nuns at Georgetown Visitation. If you think this is only a phenomenon of the past: two nights ago I was at the Forty Hours at Sacred Heart, Conewago, just over the Mason–Dixon line, and the scholarly pastor, Father Larry McNeill, told me perhaps 40 percent of his parishioners are related! There was an easy alliance between the old English Catholics and the French émigrés who came to the Port of Baltimore, fleeing the revolution in their mother country. But even more refugees came from the slave rebellion in Santo Domingo. Strong Catholic families like the Chatards, the Ducatels, the Fleurys, the Raphels, and the Monmoniers contributed mightily to the good of the Church from the time of their arrival. Of course, the French clergy were an incomparable blessing. So many priests of St. Sulpice had come over that there was not work enough for them in the Baltimore seminary. They were utilized in pastoral work on the Eastern Shore and even teaching and administrative posts at Georgetown. And when the time came for more episcopal appointments with the early growth of the Church in the republic, there was no question but these French clerics would fill such posts well: Simon Brute to Vincennes, Louis William Valentine Dubourg to New Orleans and later St. Louis, Benedict Joseph Flaget, the patriarch of the West, to Bardstown. The 12 Baltimore as the Jerusalem of the American Church transition to French leadership in Baltimore was not at all rocky. Our third archbishop, the learned Sulpician Ambrose Marechal, had come to the United States with the second wave of Sulpicians and had known assignments in various parts of Maryland. In the 1820s, a minor rival appeared on the scene in the feisty young bishop of Charleston, South Carolina, John England. He was fresh from the political wars of occupied Ireland and was enchanted with democracy, hoping to breathe it into the Church. God delivered Ambrose Marechal from the fray by taking him home to heaven in 1828, but change was in the offing. Just as the new English-born Archbishop James Whitfield was settling into office, a group of Catholic women of color were coming together to form the Oblate Sisters of Providence. This would prove to be the first and largest community of religious women of color in the land. Their foundress, Mother Mary Lange, is now ranked as a Servant of God. In antebellum days, Baltimore was known as the black capital of the nation. There were more African-American freedmen here than any other city. The oldest black Catholic community in the nation, St. Francis Xavier, traces its origins back to 1793. The school the Oblate Sisters of Providence opened in 1829, St. Frances Academy, is not only the oldest extant school for black Catholics in the country, but it is the oldest of all the twenty Catholic high schools remaining in the archdiocese. Baltimore, along with New Orleans and Washington, are the three main centers of African-American Catholic life. Nothing is quite as destructive as a civil war. Our American Civil War remains as the greatest domestic disaster our nation has experienced. Of course, this had to affect American Catholicism since we were largely a southern institution prior to the war. Of course we include the border states of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri when we speak of the South. The best seminaries and colleges, the finest convent schools and academies, the most Rev. Michael Roach 13 influential Catholic families would have been found in the border states and tidewater South. The devastation wrought by the war was indescribable. To add to the ecclesiastical confusion, the sixth archbishop of Baltimore, Francis Patrick Kenrick, died the same week as the Battle of Gettysburg. There was a delay of some ten months in the installation of a new ordinary, it is said, because the federal government was concerned that the nominee was a Kentuckian. Once they were convinced he was not a Confederate sympathizer, objections were lifted and Martin John Spalding became seventh archbishop of Baltimore. He became known as the “Lion of Baltimore.” He took great initiative in remedying the social ills of Baltimore, bringing up the Good Shepherd Sisters and the Xavierian Brothers to start the famed St. Mary’s Industrial School – alma mater, it is said, of such diverse characters as Babe Ruth, Al Jolsen, and Mr. Bojangles. He also did his best to evangelize the newly freed slave population. His great allies would prove the Mill Hill Fathers, Herbert Cardinal Vaughn’s band of missionaries. In time they would evolve into the Josephite Fathers, whose sole apostolate would be the evangelization of American blacks. By the way, their archives up on Calvert Street are indispensable for any in the field, thanks to the late, great Father Pete Hogan. Let me just jump back to the close of the Civil War, and specifically to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Anti-Catholic bigots sometimes suggest there was a great deal of Catholic involvement in the plot. I think the evidence is a bit contrived. Indeed, Mary Surratt was a Catholic convert. Her son John was a minor seminarian at St. Charles and taught briefly for the Charities in Emmitsburg, but it’s all a stretch. Though I have to confess I wasn’t delighted to read in Asia Booth’s biography of her brother that she believed John Wilkes Booth had become a Catholic in his last months. Some want to throw Dr. Samuel Mudd under the bus as well, but the nature of his involvement with Booth is still debated. 14 Baltimore as the Jerusalem of the American Church

Dr. Mudd came from one of those remarkable southern Maryland families that can count over ninety priests and nuns among its extended members down till today. I need to speak for a moment about the Anglo-Catholic presence in Baltimore and how it played out. I might venture to say that the Oxford Movement in America thrived in Baltimore more powerfully than in any other city except New York. Alfred Curtis, second bishop of Wilmington, from a remote part of the Eastern Shore, who became rector of the very high church parish of Mt. Calvary on Eutaw Street, was waffling over becoming a Roman Catholic. So he traveled to the Birmingham Oratory to see Blessed John Henry Newman. Father Newman asked him if he believed in the Fathers of the Church. When he responded, “Most emphatically yes,” Father Newman said, “You should be a Catholic,” and after a few days of retreat, received him into the Church. Another member of Mt. Calvary was a Confederate veteran, John Bannister Tabb. He had been a prisoner of war down at Point Lookout, where the Potomac meets the Chesapeake. This camp had been the northern equivalent of Andersonville. There he forged a friendship with the noted poet, Sidney Lanier. Tabb also became a poet. After his conversion and ordination, he wrote and taught for decades at St. Charles, Ellicott City. I should also mention Francis Asbury Baker, a popular curate at St. Luke, Carey Street, the largest Episcopal parish in the diocese. He entered the Church partly through friendship with Augustine Hewit. They both became pioneer members of the Paulists. You may know of our great joy last year when the All Saints Sisters of the Poor entered into full communion with us. They had come to Baltimore in the nineteenth century to serve the needy, black and white, at Mt. Calvary parish. Finally, let me mention Cardinal Gibbons for a moment. He symbolizes the rich, golden twilight of Baltimore hegemony in the American Church. He was born in Baltimore in 1834, about six Rev. Michael Roach 15 blocks due east of here, but his family took him back to Ireland early on, to their native County Mayo, where he received his early education. He returned to the U.S., but to New Orleans where he was clerking in a shop. During a fiery Redemptorist mission, he decided to go to the seminary and subsequently entered St. Charles, Ellicott City, and later St. Mary’s, Paca Street. Ordained in 1861, he was sent to the east side to minister to St. Patrick’s and St. Brigid, and he rowed across the harbor to St. Lawrence O’Toole, Locust Point. He caught the attention of the powers-that-be and was soon transferred to the cathedral. Only seven years ordained, he was sent to North Carolina to shepherd the entire state as vicar apostolic. He wrote his classic book, Faith of Our Fathers , to introduce and clarify Catholicism to this almost completely Protestant state. Young Gibbons did so well that in 1872 he was elevated to Richmond as their bishop, and only five years later returned to Baltimore as ninth archbishop. He reigned in Baltimore for some forty-four years. Confidant of several presidents, one newspaper called him the most influential private citizen in the nation. He established the reputation of the American Church as the friend of the laboring man. He dissuaded Rome from condemning the incipient labor movement as secret societies. He was a strong advocate of the Catholic University of America. During his years, many a Baltimore priest became a bishop in the land. Some thirty- three sees have seen Baltimore bishops, from Denver to St. Augustine to Bridgeport to Santa Fe to Cuba to Paraguay to China. Of course, not all of these were in Gibbons’s time. It is rank heresy to say anything even mildly critical of Cardinal Gibbons. It must be said, however, he was an Americanist and anti- ethnic, especially, anti-German. He put the Redemptorists out of St. Alphonsus, known as the German cathedral. (You must see it. It is only three blocks from here.) St. John Neumann was rector there, and was consecrated bishop of Philadelphia in that splendid sanctuary. But the Redemptorists wouldn’t give up their German- 16 Baltimore as the Jerusalem of the American Church language services and preaching, so they had to go. Also, the cardinal lived to be eighty-seven. Much was neglected in his last years. His methodology had always been a masterly inactivity with a watchful eye. By the time of the First World War, even that was fading. It was said that the new code of canon law was not enforced in Baltimore! While Cardinal Gibbons was an Americanist, he was not a modernist. In fact, he did battle with one of the few identifiable American modernists, Father John R. Slattery, superior general of the Josephites from 1898 to 1904. Eventually, Slattery left the priesthood, apostatized, and left all his money to the New York Public Library. Let me mention two priests ordained in Cardinal Gibbons’s time. Monsignor Sigorney Fay was a convert from Episcopalianism. He actually named the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and ran diplomatic missions for the cardinal. Perhaps most important, he served as a model for Monsignor Darcy in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. Monsignor Fay had been a potent father-figure for Fitzgerald. By the way, I’ve taught oral history for three decades at the seminary in Emmitsburg. When a student can’t find anyone to interview, I tell him to go across the road and talk to one of the venerable, old Daughters of Charity. In one of these interviews the sister, originally from Rockville, concludes by saying, “You know, I had a cousin who wrote books, I think, he was denied burial in the cemetery at St. Mary’s, Rockville, but it was resolved a couple of years ago and now he’s buried there.” “I think he wrote books”! Her cousin was F. Scott Fitzgerald, of course. Full name, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. The other priest was the Harvard-educated William Howard Bishop, who became the founder of Glenmary Missions. He loved the rural apostolate, but Maryland wasn’t exactly “no priest country.” So he got permission to go to Ohio, and this great work thrived for the home mission field. The archbishop who gave him his exeat was Michael J. Curley, our outstanding tenth archbishop, Rev. Michael Roach 17 who was called by his sparring partner, Archbishop McNicholas, “the warrior prelate and the almoner of the poor.”

I had a cousin who was a Speaker of the House down in Annapolis. He told me that one of the sons of St. Alphonsus at the parish there told him, “There are fools, darn fools, and Irish Redemptorists.” We know there are liars, darn liars, and statistics. Let me give an example: Prior to World War II, all but five percent of Catholics in the South lived in the Archdiocese of Baltimore. Now, only five percent of all Catholics in the South live in this archdiocese. Finally, for Peter Ryan, S.J., who insisted we mention Abram Ryan, the poet priest of the Confederacy, who was born a bit to the west, over South Mountain in Hagerstown:

Furl that banner, for ‘tis weary, Round its staff is drooping dreary, Furl it, fold it, it is best. For there’s not a man to wave it And there’s not a sword to save it And there’s not one left to lave it In the blood which heroes gave it. Furl it, hide it – let it rest.

But I prefer his lines:

My name is nothing And my songs are less. Fame is the echo Of one’s nothingness.

May God be praised. 18 Baltimore as the Jerusalem of the American Church

Father Michael Roach is a priest of the Archdiocese of Baltimore who was ordained in 1971 after studies at Loyola College and St. Mary Seminary, Roland Park. He did graduate work in Church History at the Catholic University of America. Since 1978 he has taught Church History at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary, where he is now chair of the department. He also serves on the adjunct faculty of Christendom College and Catholic Distance University. Father Roach serves as pastor of St. Bartholomew Parish, Manchester, Maryland, and lectures frequently on various aspects of local history, civic and ecclesiastical. Satire, Sin, and Joy in the Works of Flannery O’Connor (1925-64) and Walker Percy (1917-90)

Sue Abromaitis Loyola University Maryland

ITERATURE IS A SERIOUS ENDEAVOR , one that has cosmic implications. Just as philosophers who speculate about the L primary world and theologians who study the queen of sciences through the power of their God-given intellects are acting in harmony with God’s will for man, so also are those who create the secondary worlds of literature through the power of their God-given imaginations. Only at great peril does one dismiss the significance of art, in this case literary art whose medium is the word, that mediator between the seen and the unseen. Through the words of the author who aspires to communicate his Catholic vision that must be, perforce, sacramental, the reader is led into a world which “is charged with the greatness of God.” 1 In his defense of Marchen , fairy tales, C. S. Lewis expresses the hope that they would “steal past” the modern “watchful dragons” of resistance to piety and reverence. 2 Similarly, those who create any literature informed with the sacramental vision can infiltrate the redoubts of the modern world from whose towers these dragons, enemies of objective truth and moral absolutism, propose autonomy as the proper goal of mankind, exemplify solipsism, and deny the intrinsic and infinite worth of human beings. However, there is the problem of the 20 Satire, Sin, and Joy author’s language. Percy describes how often the

words of religion tend to wear out and get stored in the attic. . . . So decrepit and so abused is the language of the Judeo-Christian religions that it takes an effort to salvage them, the very words, from the husks and barnacles of meaning which have encrusted them over the centuries. Or else words can become slick as coins worn thin by usage and so devalued. One of the tasks of the saint is to renew language, to sing a new song. The novelist, no saint, has an humbler task. He must use every ounce of skill, cunning, humor, even irony to deliver religion from the merely edifying. 3

Flannery O’Connor, in a 1963 lecture at Sweetbriar College, notes that “nothing in this world lends itself to quick vaporization so much as the religious concern.” 4 She contends that in our time, “religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental,” 5 emotions that reflect the devaluation of the feelings and the words that render those feelings. At the same time, literature is not theology. Doctrinal formula- tions are not the province of the novelist. This difference does not imply that the author’s belief does not influence his storytelling. All art reflects the artist’s sense of the real. O’Connor insists:

It makes a great difference to the look of a novel whether its author believes that the world came late into being and continues to come by a creative act of God, or whether he believes that the world and ourselves are the product of a cosmic accident. It makes a great difference to his novel whether he believes that we are created in God’s image, or whether he believes we create God in our own. It makes a great difference whether he believes that our wills are free, or bound like those of the other animals. 6

Another misconception that needs correction is the too-frequent confusion of a Catholic author’s novel with a handbook on morality. Story by its nature deals with human beings; the plot, characteriza- Sue Abromaitis 21 tion, language, theme, and style of stories thus reflect morality. But fiction is not catechism. It illuminates on its own terms. And the terms of the stories that O’Connor and Percy tell emerge from their stories and in the expository writing that each does. In “The Teaching of Literature,” O’Connor contends that “[i]t is the business of fiction to embody mystery through manners, and mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind.” 7 She continues: “[T]he fiction writer is concerned with mystery that is lived . . . ultimate mystery as we find it embodied in the concrete world of sense experience.” 8 In “The Church and the Fiction Writer,” she insists that

[t]he Catholic sacramental view of life is one that sustains and supports at every turn the vision that the storyteller must have if he is going to write fiction of any depth. . . . [T]he Church, far from restricting the Catholic writer, generally provides him with more advantages than he is willing or able to turn to account. . . . The fiction writer presents mystery through manners, grace through nature, but when he finishes there always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for by any human formula. 9

When readers reflect on O’Connor’s fiction that communicates, often satirically, the fact of sin and, subtly, the mysterious promise of joy, they cannot evade the common humanity of her grotesque characters. Percy contends that she

saw the enemy clearly, namely a certain sort of triumphant humanist, and . . . could discern the orthodox virtues of backwoods preachers and of assorted nuts and murderers. She knew where the devils were. 10

As the reader moves through O’Connor’s canon he sees the 22 Satire, Sin, and Joy evidence for Percy’sjudgment. In her two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), O’Connor presents violent characters and actions that startle the reader and force him to set aside first impressions and to work at an accurate reading of the stories. Like Percy she sets her fiction in the South, a place in which she is grounded even as she is not quite of it. In Georgia, O’Connor was part of the two percent of the population who were Catholic, and the only story she wrote that had a Catholic theme is “Temple of the Holy Ghost.” In all of her narratives she creates concrete characters because the “concrete details of life . . . make actual the mystery of our position on earth.” 11 This anti-Gnostic vision of the integration of body and soul informs her analysis of the Manichean modern spirit that has “infected” the modern sensibility and made it resistant to real fiction that is by its nature “an incarnational act.” 12 Her fiction does present characters who are incarnate beings, but they are quite different from those met in everyday experience by most people. O’Connor attributes these grotesque characters to prophecy in fiction and explains “why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks”:

[B]ecause we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, Theological. . . . [W]hile the South is hardly Christ- centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. 13

However, when writing to an audience with the dominant modern sensibility of Gnosticism that expresses itself paradoxically in qualities that seem to be opposite, angelism and/or bestialism,

[t]he novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life dis- Sue Abromaitis 23

tortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take every violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. . . . [Y]ou have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures. 14

When readers reflect on O’Connor’s take on the modern world, they are more receptive to Hazel Motes, Francis Tarwater, the Misfit, and other men and women who people her Christ-haunted South. Hazel Motes preaches the “Church Without Christ” in Wise Blood .15 A grotesque, violent, impulsive, and monomaniacal protagonist, he nonetheless forces readers to examine their concept of Christ. Motes is consumed by a sense of sin that he continually denies and by the sense that he must be a prophet; he will not accept Christ as redeemer of mankind, 16 and calls Jesus a “trick.” 17 Honest readers fear that they may not have any essential difference from this fanatic who eventually destroys his sight by burning his eyes with lye. Following this horror, Motes does not live long. But there is a hint of joy in the final depiction of the dead man: a “stern and tranquil” face that is “composed.” 18 Similarly, fourteen-year-old Francis Tarwater in The Violent Bear It Away rejects the Christ who feeds the multitudes the loaves and fish, imagining a boring heaven where one sits on a river bank and eats loaves and fish. Violence begins with his burning down the home of his great-uncle, Mason Tarwater, after his death. In doing so the boy is defying his uncle’s injunction to bury him ten feet deep with a cross at the head of his grave, just as he intends to defy the commission from his born-again uncle that young Tarwater be a prophet and baptize sinners, particularly his retarded cousin Bishop, the son of the boy’s militantly atheist uncle Rayber. Mental warfare between the backwoods boy and his psychologist uncle unleashes a battle of wills resulting in Tarwater’s baptizing/drowning Bishop. At 24 Satire, Sin, and Joy first Tarwater embraces the idea that he drowned the child, believing that he has successfully refused his great-uncle’s injunction to baptize Bishop. He flees back to his rural home. Before arriving there, Tarwater is drugged and raped, nongraphically but nevertheless horrifyingly. When he awakens and recognizes his state, he burns the place where was violated and continues to set fire to the forest as he moves through it. Even as he continues with his violent path, he has a realization and a vision:

aware at last of the object of his hunger, aware that it was the same as the old man’s and that nothing on earth would fill him. His hunger was so great that he could have eaten all the loaves and fishes after they were multiplied. 19

He now obeys the command, “GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY.” Despite “envision[ing] the fate that awaited him . . . he moved steadily on . . . toward the dark city where the children of God lay sleeping.” 20 Terrible as the events that were, are, and probably will be, nonetheless there is a sense of Tarwater’s redemption in his final movement. The dragon that O’Connor cites from St. Cyril of Jerusalem, always wanting to devour mankind, is what “the stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell,” and she attributes “considerable courage” to those who do “not turn away from the storyteller.” 21 In these two novels the dragon seems to have consumed these protagonists throughout the movement of the plots. However, their conclusions give evidence of their having said “yes” to the Father of Souls. And certainly it takes courage for us readers to confront these twisted characters, most of all because we are forced to recognize that we are not different from these grotesque figures, although the evils around us that are taken for granted have a smoother surface. In other words, the modern world’s war on life is covered by euphe- misms – choice, dignity, quality of life – which to the discerning eye Sue Abromaitis 25 of a Tarwater and Motes do not justify the evil one whit.

III

Similarly, the rejection of the anti-Christian vision of modernism and postmodernism is the matter of Walker Percy’s commentary and fiction. Excerpts from the self-interview “Questions They Never Asked Me,” published in the December 1977 issue of Esquire , appear in the epilogue to his Signposts in a Strange Land. 22 Percy asks and answers questions about his Catholicism. He says that he is a “bad” Catholic who believes in “the dogma that the Catholic Church proposes for belief.” Asking himself, “ How is such a belief possible in this day and age? ” he responds, “What else is there?” When the putative interviewer lists “ humanism, atheism, agnosticism, Marxism, behaviorism, materialism, Buddhism, Muhamma- danism, Sufism, astrology, theosophy” as alternatives, Walker replies, “That’s what I mean.” And he dismisses scientific humanism as “not good enough.” 23 His explanation of his belief is relevant to the pervasive, if occasionally oblique, Catholicism in his work:

This life is much too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then be asked what you make of it and have to answer, “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore, I take it as axiomatic that no one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight; i.e., God. In fact, I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and wouldn’t let go until God identified himself and blessed him. 24

Satire is the medium through which the fiction of O’Connor and Percy explores the sin and joy of struggling human beings. Both know that mankind wants to avoid seeing sin as it is. O’Connor 26 Satire, Sin, and Joy contends that her audience “puts little stock either in grace or the devil.” 25 Both authors are living in a world in which the words of Alexander Pope have been realized:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, As, to be hated, needs but to be seen; Yet seen to oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace .26

Percy describes how the “horrible” killing of millions of children does not result in one’s seeing “many people horrified.” 27 He contends that

[t]he present age is demented. It is possessed by a sense of dislo- cation, a loss of personal identity, an alternating sentimentality and rage which, in an individual patient, could be characterized as dementia. . . . It is the most scientifically advanced, savage, democratic, inhuman, sentimental, murderous century in human history. 28

In a similar vein, O’Connor notes that unlike his pagan colleagues, the Christian novelist “recognizes sin as sin . . . he sees it not as sickness or an accident of environment, but as a responsible choice of offense against God which involves his eternal future. Either one is serious about salvation or one is not.” 29 Each of these writers is deadly serious about salvation. At the same time, as O’Connor notes, “it is well to realize that the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy. Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.” 30 In a 1985 St. Louis Post-Dispatch article, Patricia Rice reports:

Percy considers himself a “Catholic” writer . . . [saying that] religion “informs my view of the human condition. I make [ sic ] dis- Sue Abromaitis 27

tinction between that and delivering a message at the end. Some say my endings are ambiguous, that it is not clear what happens to my characters. Some suggest that my novels are not necessarily edifying. As Flannery [O’Connor] would say, she is not particularly out to edify.” 31

Percy’s vision of the comic is as apparent as his serious vision of man in his 1971 novel Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World . Moreover, there is nothing overtly edifying about the conclusion or, superficially at least, about Dr. Thomas More, the protagonist and narrator who informs the reader that he is

a physician, a not very successful psychiatrist; an alcoholic, a shaky middle-aged man subject to depressions and elations and morning terrors, but a genius nevertheless who sees into the hidden causes of things and erects simple hypotheses to account for the glut of everyday events; a bad Catholic; a widower and cuck- old whose wife ran off with a heathen Englishman and died on the island of Cozumel, where she hoped to begin a new life and see things afresh. 32

In his first sentence he invokes the imagery of an apocalypse and echoes Dante’s words at the start of the Divine Comedy :

NOW IN THESE DREAD LATTER DAYS of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death- dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last? 33

The novel is set in Louisiana from July 1st through 4th in a near- future year. More depicts the coming of internal struggles of all against all: black against white, Christian against humanist, as well as arson, looting, and other random violence. Already the environs have been touched with battles that have led to deserted neighbor- 28 Satire, Sin, and Joy hoods, disintegrating roads, abandoned stores, and the invasion of nature (think: vines, critters). The Catholic Church in the United States has broken into three parts: (1) the American Catholic Church whose new Rome is Cicero, Illinois; (2) the Dutch schismatics who believe in relevance but not God; (3) the Roman Catholic remnant, a tiny scattered flock with no place to go. 34 All of society has fragmented radically and is increasingly violent to others: cities, politics, races, religions, states. 35 In politics the Democrats boast of their being the party of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, the Pill, Atheism, Pot, Anti- Pollution, Sex, Abortion Now, Euthanasia” and are called LEFT, the abbreviation of the Republicans’ original acronym based on their principles: LEFTPAPASANE. 36 Republi- cans, originally wanting to call themselves “the Christian Conserva- tive Constitutional Party, the ironically abbreviated CCCP,” embraced LEFT’s calling them Knotheads, coining slogans, such as “Knotheads for America.” As More says, “The center did not hold.” However, he notes that “Paradise Estates where I live now . . . is that rare thing, a pleasant place where Knothead and Left – but not black – dwell side by side in peace.” 37 Around them is danger. The nearby swamps are populated by

Bantu guerrillas, dropouts from Tulane and Vanderbilt, M. I. T. and Loyola; draft dodgers, deserters from the Swedish army, psy- chopaths and pederasts from Memphis and New Orleans whose practices were not even tolerated in New Orleans; antipapal Catholics, malcontented Methodists, ESPers, UFOers, Aquarians, ex-Ayn Randers, Choctaw Zionists . . . and even a few old gray- bearded Kerouac beats. 38

In all of this chaos, this self-described “bad” Catholic, a member of a recusant family and a collateral descendent of St. Thomas More, has made a discovery, one that demands the reader willingly suspend his disbelief. A cloud resulting from an explosion during a scientific experiment has resulted in a “plague”: “Chronic angelism-bestialism Sue Abromaitis 29 that rives soul from body and sets it orbiting the great world as the spirit of abstraction when it takes the form of beasts, swans and bulls, werewolves, blood-suckers, Mr. Hydes, or just some lonesome ghost locked in its own machinery.” 39 More has invented a lapsometer to measure the parts of the brain and their energy flow. He is ambitious, fantasizing about winning a Nobel Prize. Clearly Percy is looking at a world in which all coherence is gone: the worst are passionate, and the few who might have some merit are desiccated. His satire has many objects, not the least of which is a hospital with a major research section, “Love,” in which scientists and technicians study with ostensible detachment different forms sexual activity.40 The irony and the humor that permeate the novel serve to make the satire all the more effective. For example, the attempt by a liberal reporter to maintain his cool when an interview with a Knothead turns into a bigoted screed is the stuff of comedy. 41 Satire and humor do not undercut Percy’s focus on the salvation of Thomas More, a concern that is the expression of Percy’s radical sense of the importance of each person. Throughout the novel More tells the reader that he is a sinner, and yet he is capable of wisdom, evidenced when he comments that “the mystery of evil is the mystery of limited goodness.” 42 He knows himself: he is “bad”; he “stopped eating Christ in Communion, stopped going to mass,” and lives “a disorderly life.” Nevertheless he insists that he is a believer, “in God and the whole business. . . . A man, wrote John, who says he believes in God and does not keep his commandments is a liar. If John is right, then I am a liar. Nevertheless, I still believe.” 43 Like those around him, More is never far from the angelism-bestialism that he has diagnosed. He is aware that his life does no honor to his collateral ancestor, St. Thomas More. 44 More in his pride is tempted by the genially manipulative Dr. Art Immelmann 45 to work on turning the lapsometer from a diagnostic tool into a therapeutic device that will alter the brains of those on whom it would be used. But natural love for a woman leads him to pray spontaneously: “ Sir 30 Satire, Sin, and Joy

Thomas More, kinsman, saint, best dearest merriest of Englishmen, pray for us and drive this son of a bitch hence .” 46 And his prayer is answered. One can see in this scene Flannery O’Connor’s analysis of what makes a “story ‘work.’ [. . . Namely,] an action that is totally unexpected, yet totally believable . . . always an action which indicates that grace has been offered.” 47 Another significant figure in the salvation of More is “[t]he one priest, an obscure curate, who remained faithful to Rome, could not support himself and had to hire out as a firewatcher.” 48 We learn that he is Father Rinaldo Smith, a minister to the few faithful Catholics in the area. He and More first meet in the hospital wing for the mentally ill, 49 and More tells him that he cannot receive the sacrament of penance because he lacks “Contrition. To say nothing of a firm purpose of amendment.” 50 Father Smith says that he will pray for More, and in response to his requesting More to pray for him, More says “I haven’t prayed much lately.” 51 This scene foreshadows the crisis of the novel, that point of decision that turns the plot. After the bulk of the novel, from July 1st through the 4th, in which all the violence has been chronicled, More leaps ahead five years, to a time after the violence of the wars of all against all. His section of Louisiana, from which the whites have departed, is now controlled by blacks, but life goes on much as it had. Before Christmas midnight Mass, More decides to go into the confessional. Father Smith is hoping that confessions will be brief and that More has been going to confession. The priest groans when More says that his last confession was eleven years ago. After a one-sentence account – “I accuse myself of drunkenness, lusts, envies, fornication, delight in the misfortunes of others, and loving myself better than God” – and his insistence that he feels no sorrow, 52 More is irritated by what he perceives to be the priest’s patronizing him “with his stock priestly tricks.” 53 What seems to be a pointless exchange suddenly takes a turn when Father Smith scolds More:

Sue Abromaitis 31

Meanwhile, forgive me but there are other things we must think about: like doing our jobs, you being a better doctor, I being a better priest, showing a bit of ordinary kindness to people, particularly our own families – unkindness to those close to us is such a pitiful thing – doing what we can for our poor unhappy country – things which, please forgive me, sometimes seem more important than dwelling on a few middle-aged daydreams. 54

The “scalded” More acknowledges: “You’re right. I’m sorry.” 55 O’Connor asserts that “there is a moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected.” 56 This is that moment. Percy ends the novel with an imperfect but integrated Dr. More wearing his sackcloth given him by Father Smith as his penance. Although his ambition and love of drink are not dead, he and Ellen are happily married with two small children. The possibility of joy in the doing what one ought is apparent in the conclusion. Things have changed in Percy’s 1987 novel, The Thanatos Syn- drome . We meet Dr. More, his wife Ellen, and Father Smith in an even more dysfunctional world than that of Love in the Ruins , and all are damaged. 57 Dr. More has recently returned from two years in Fort Pelham federal prison for selling controlled substances to a federal agent who posed as a truck driver. Still a psychiatrist, he thinks in terms of possibly writing up cases for JAMA , diagnosing symptoms, and treating psychiatric problems. Ellen has become a bridge master, the inadvertent victim of the villainous heavy-sodium pilot program, Blue Boy, and is absent for much of the novel. Father Smith displays signs of dementia even as he fights the good and authentically sacramental battle for life. In this typical South of Percy novels with its mixture of evil and good, respectability and lewdness, racial and religious conflicts, is a breathtakingly demonic core that is anti-life. It manifests itself in the Qualitarian Centers which Dr. Comeaux defends to More:

32 Satire, Sin, and Joy

What we’re doing [pedeuthanasia and gereuthenasia] . . . is following the laws of the Supreme Court, respecting the rights of the family, the consensus of child psychologists, the rights of the unwanted child not to have to suffer a life of suffering and abuse, the right of the unwanted aged to a life with dignity and a death with dignity. Toward this end we – to use your word – dispose of those neonates and euthanates who are entitled to the Right to Death provision in the recent court decisions. 58

Comeaux adds:

A neonate is a human infant who according to the American Psy- chological Association does not attain its individuality until the acquisition of language and according to the Supreme Court does not acquire its legal rights until the age of eighteen months – an arbitrary age to be sure, but one which, as you well know, is a good ballpark figure. 59

Comeaux’s dehumanizing and Orwellian language is, of course, an example of what Percy calls the evacuation of language. In a long passage Father Smith insists that words no longer “signify,” that they “are deprived of their meaning.” 60 He concludes this meeting with More, telling him:

You are a member of the first generation of doctors in the history of medicine to turn their backs on the oath of Hippocrates and kill millions of old useless people, unborn children, born malformed children, for the good of mankind – and to do so without a single murmur from one of you. Not a single letter of protest in the august New England Journal of Medicine. And do you know what you’re going to end up doing? . . . killing Jews. 61

Later Father Smith explains to More his teen-age experiences in Germany, 62 particularly his admiration for Dr. Jager and his friends, saying with horror that “[i]f I had been German not American, I would have joined him” as a member of the SS. 63 Later, as a soldier Sue Abromaitis 33 he was one of the liberators of “Eglfing-Haar, the famous hospital outside Munich. No, we didn’t liberate Dachau, but I saw it later.” 64 This hospital had a children’s section, the Kinderhaus , that had a “‘special department.’ It was a very pleasant sunny room with a large window, but completely bare except for a small white-tiled table only long enough to accommodate a child.” 65 In this room, five or six times a month, a child would be killed in experiments with drugs and gasses. And the physician most involved was Dr. Jager, the object of the young Smith’s respect. The parallels between Comeaux’s earlier description of the Qualitarian Center and this Kinderhaus are inescapable. At the conclusion of this section Father Smith answers More’s question, “Why did you become a priest?”, by saying, “In the end one must choose – given the chance.” More asks “Choose what?” The priest replies, “Life or death. What else?” 66 That the central symbol of the horrors of the Nazi assault on humanity in a children’s hospital is mirrored by the central symbol of the assault on humanity in this novel, a school for little children, Belle Ame. Rather than killing children physically, Van Dorn and his minions kill their souls and minds as they sexually abuse them, filming each event. The nature of the abuse is presented with scientific accuracy in chapter twelve, by a physician who “uses her doctoring to catch hold” as she tells More of the results of her examinations. 67 In one of the later scenes in the novel the perpetrators are punished through shots and blows.

As even this cursory survey of a few of the narratives of O’Connor and Percy reveals, their work is infused with the Catholic vision of the sacramental reality of creation, the reality that endows all that is with cosmic significance. God has chosen to reveal Himself in this world by this world. Whether we recognize ourselves 34 Satire, Sin, and Joy in their characters or initially avoid seeing our resemblance to the sinners, murderers, freaks, madmen, and fanatics who people their stories, we cannot ignore the intrinsic human dignity of each person we confront. Human dignity raises key questions: From what is it derived, or from whom does it come? What obligations does its being lay on all mankind? We live in a world in which terror rules, “notable not so much for its series of world catastrophes, the millions who have been slaughtered, the Holocaust, but for the banality with which these atrocities are committed and taken note of.” 68 Father Smith’s account of the testimony of a nurse in the Kinderhaus embodies the banality. Both O’Connor and Percy are at war with the banality, the averted eyes, and the pollution of language. Each is

assault[ing] the benumbed sensibility of the poor media consumer, because anything other than assault and satire can only be understood as a confirmation of the current corrupted meanings of such honorable old words as love, truth, beauty, brotherhood of man, life, and so on. 69

Ultimately, Percy sees himself as a literary artist whose “real challenge, as it always is with the artist, is to humanize the life around him, to formulate it for someone else, to render the inter- states, to tell the truth, to show how life is lived, and therefore to affirm life.” 70 O’Connor’s view is analogous to that of Percy:

I mean the fiction writer who looks on fiction as an art and who has resigned himself to its demands and inconveniences. I mean the fiction writer who writes neither for everybody, nor for the special few, but for the good of what he is writing. . . . This kind of fiction writer is always in pursuit of the real. 71

Like Percy, O’Connor believes that “[t]he writer whose vocation is Sue Abromaitis 35 fiction sees his obligation as being to the truth of what can happen in life.” 72 Both novelists, then, want to startle their readers out of the leth- argy that comfort and freedom from want and years of propaganda from those who deny the transcendental have visited on all of us in movies, television, plays, books, and magazines. They communicate directly and indirectly the positions that no one of any sophistication really takes all of this Christian stuff seriously, and that everyone who is someone knows that there is nothing wrong with self- realization and self-satisfaction. Both O’Connor and Percy depict worlds in which these ideas run head-on against the reality of human nature and the various extremes that follow from these ideas. And they depict them because they believe that what is is good, that life is to be affirmed, that material reality reveals the transcendental.

Carol Nevin “Sue” Abromaitis, Professor of English, Loyola University Maryland, is a Lady of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, a member of Legatus, and a former member of the board of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars. She has published and given conference papers on Jonathan Swift, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Alexander Pope, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, among others. A graduate of the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, her doctorate is from the University of Maryland. She has been department chairman, president of the faculty senate, teacher of the year, and a participant in many governance bodies over her forty-nine years at Loyola. In the Archdiocese of Baltimore she served on the former Archdiocesan School Board, the Cathedral Foundation Board, and the Maryland Catholic Conference and is currently on the boards of Mount de Sales Academy and Saint Thomas Aquinas Parish School. She and her husband Michael are members of the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen Parish.

1 Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur.” 36 Satire, Sin, and Joy

2 C. S. Lewis, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” Of Other Worlds , ed. Walter Hooper (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966), 36. 3 Walker Percy, “Why Are You a Catholic? The Late Novelist’s Parting Reflections,” Crisis (September 1990): 15. 4 Flannery O’Connor, “Novelist and Believer,” in Mystery and Manners , ed. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), 155. 5 Ibid ., 161. 6 Ibid ., 156-57. 7 Flannery O’Connor, “The Teaching of Literature,” in Mystery and Manners , 124. 8 Ibid., 125. 9 Flannery O’Connor, “The Church and the Fiction Writer,” in Mystery and Manners , 152-53. 10 Walker Percy, Strangers in a Strange Land (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1991), 159. 11 Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners , 68. 12 Ibid . 13 Flannery O’Connor, “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners , 44-45. 14 Flannery O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer & His Country,” in Mystery and Manners, 33-34. 15 Flannery O’Connor, 3 By Flannery O’Connor (New York: Signet, 1983), 54. All subsequent references to this novel and to The Violent Bear It Away are from this edition. 16 Ibid., 33, 54. 17 Ibid., 39. 18 Ibid., 120. 19 Ibid., 266. 20 Ibid., 267. 21 Flannery O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer & His Country,” in Mystery and Manners , 35. Sue Abromaitis 37

22 Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land , ed. Patrick Samway (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), 397-423. 23 Ibid., 416-17. 24 Ibid ., 417. 25 Flannery O’Connor, “On Her Own Work,” in Mystery and Manners , 118. 26 Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man,” in The Works of Alexander Pope Esq. (London: A. Miller et al., 1766), epistle II, lines 217-20. 27 Ibid ., 17. 28 Percy, “Why Are You a Catholic?” 16. 29 O’Connor, “Novelist and Believer,” 167. 30 Ibid. 31 Reprinted in The Delta Factor Newsletter of the Walker Percy Society 1, no. 1 (1994): 3. 32 Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971), 11. All subsequent references to the novel are from this edition. 33 Ibid., 3. 34 Ibid., 5-6. 35 Ibid., 17. 36 Ibid., 18. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 16. 39 Ibid., 383. 40 Ibid., 121 ff., 329 ff. 41 Ibid., 322-23. 42 Ibid., 45. 43 Ibid., 6. 44 Ibid., 23, 109. 45 Max Immelmann (1890-1916) was a World War I German ace pilot was noted for his ability to gain altitude while reversing direction. He did this half looping a plane to an upside-down position and then half rolling back to a normal upright 38 Satire, Sin, and Joy

flight. Thus the word means “turn.” Percy’s witty pun adds to the reader’s grasp of Immelmann’s villainy. 46 Ibid., 376. 47 O’Connor, “On Her Own Work,” in Mystery and Manners , 118. 48 Percy, Love in the Ruins , 6. 49 Ibid., 183. 50 Ibid., 186. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 397. 53 Ibid., 398. 54 Ibid., 399. 55 Ibid. 56 O’Connor, “On Her Own Work,” in Mystery and Manners , 118. 57 Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987). All subsequent references to the novel are from this edition. 58 Ibid., 199. 59 Ibid., 199-200. 60 Ibid., 117. 61 Ibid., 127-28. 62 Ibid., 239-57. 63 Ibid., 248. 64 Ibid., 253. 65 Ibid., 253. 66 Ibid., 257. 67 Ibid. 223. 68 Walker Percy, “Novel Writing in an Apocalyptic Time,” in Signposts in a Strange Land , 156. 69 Ibid ., 161. 70 Ibid ., 167. Sue Abromaitis 39

71 Flannery O’Connor, “Catholic Novelists,” in Mystery and Manners , 170-71. 72 Ibid ., 172.

The Church Universal and the Americanist Movement

James Hitchcock Saint Louis University

N 1889 POPE LEO XIII addressed a letter to the American bishops titled Testem Benevolentiae (“Witness of Good Will”), 1 I warning against certain errors under the general title of “Ameri- canism.” From the beginning Americanism was dismissed as a “phantom heresy,” a series of misunderstandings between the Vatican and the United States. But in fact the story is more complicated.

What would eventually become the United States of America was divided roughly into three cultural zones – the Protestant, chiefly English, East Coast; the French and Spanish Mississippi Valley; and the Spanish Southwest – each of which had a distinct religious history. The last of these three was – apart from Florida – chronologi- cally the first place where the Catholic faith was planted. But as the United States expanded westward beginning in the 1830s, the Hispanic character of Catholicism was diluted and the Hispanic population often treated as a conquered people. 2 The Church in the upper Mississippi Valley was dependent on Quebec from late in the seventeenth century. (The oldest continuous Catholic parish in the United States [1699] is Cahokia, Illinois.) The lower Mississippi Valley was settled by the French in the early eighteenth century, but in 1764 the entire Louisiana Territory, extending almost to the Canadian border, was ceded to Spain. 3 During the American Revolution one of the few priests left in 42 The Church Universal and the Americanist Movement the upper Valley, Pierre Gibault, persuaded his mainly French parishioners to welcome the Americans. The Louisiana Territory was briefly retaken by Napoleon, but only long enough to be sold to the United States in 1803. Most residents of the Mississippi Valley were Catholic at the time, and Catholics there were never regarded as outsiders, but after the Louisiana Purchase much of the territory was settled by “Americans” – easterners of mainly British Protestant stock – thereby diluting its French and Spanish character. The Church was gradually transformed by immigration, especially from Ireland and Germany. In the East, Catholic life was strongest in Maryland, which had not been officially a Catholic colony but was a place where Catholics could, at least some of the time, worship freely. 4 Catholic life in Maryland replicated Catholic life in England, in being rooted on the estates of the gentry, 5 who were among the leaders of a society most of whose people were Protestants, so that Catholics instinctively sought harmonious relations with their neighbors. 6 Maryland Catholics were among the strongest supporters of the American Revolution. Charles Carroll of Carrollton, one of the most important men in the colony, was a signer of Declaration of Independence, and his cousin John Carroll, a former Jesuit, was part of a delegation, including Benjamin Franklin, that was sent to Canada to seek Canadian neutrality, a mission that failed because England had recently granted religious toleration to Quebec Catholics. 7 After independence, John Carroll was the leader of a group of priests who told the Holy See that it was inappropriate that they should continue under the authority of the vicar apostolic of London and also warned that the Church would be held in suspicion if the Congregation of Propaganda Fidei (“a foreign state”) appeared to be choosing bishops for the new country. James Hitchcock 43

Carroll, who became the first American bishop in 1789, was in effect elected by his fellow priests and merely confirmed by Rome. 8 Before confirming him the Holy See queried Franklin, then the American ambassador in Paris, as to whether the appointment was acceptable to the American government, and received the surprising answer that it was none of the government’s concern. (Carroll misread the situation in thinking that it would be.) 9 Except for the Papal States, the United States was then the only country in the world where it was possible for the Church to erect dioceses and parishes, establish charitable and educational institutions, and appoint clergy without at least the formal approval of the government. This religious liberty was proclaimed to be a natural right, not conferred by the state. The United States, perhaps primarily because the British Enlightenment coexisted with organized religion, delivered what dogmatic European liberalism falsely promised: full religious toleration. Antireligious agitation of the European kind would have been virtually impossible in a country that was deeply influenced by numerous varieties of Protestantism – Anglicanism, Methodism, Quakerism, Scottish and Dutch Calvinism, German Lutheranism, indigenous black and white religions, above all by the Puritanism that evolved into evangelicalism and fundamentalism. This unofficial Protestant ascendancy created a paradoxical situation for Catholics, in that they were often a harassed minority, even while the religiosity of the culture meant that Christian belief of some kind was almost a social imperative. Christianity was simply taken for granted as the foundation of society, and skeptics were kept on the margins. 10 The prevailing view was that religion fostered a common morality that was the necessary basis of a good society, allowing people of all religions to live under a state that was neutral toward specific religions but not toward religion in general – blasphemy, for 44 The Church Universal and the Americanist Movement example, was a crime. Practically all the Founding Fathers were favorable to religion,11 but in a sense the views of that elite group soon ceased to be fully relevant, as the shift from republicanism to some kind of equali- tarian democracy gave greater weight to classes of people largely unaffected by the Enlightenment. The Second Great Awakening after 1800 stamped on the country a deeply Christian character that still survives. 12 Except in unusual cases like that of the Mormons, there was never any attempt to use the power of the state to suppress religion. No one was ever executed for his faith, very few were killed by mob violence, and only a few were even imprisoned. But the radical newness of this arrangement raised questions that would take a long time to resolve. Catholic teaching held that the state had an obligation to promote religion and morality. While in practical terms it was an immense benefit for Catholics to live in a neutral state, that very neutrality seemed to show that the American state did not accept its responsibility. Almost without exception, however, the American Catholic hierarchy of the nineteenth century extolled the separation of church and state, insisting that it was fully compatible with Catholic doctrine. The very aggressive Archbishop John J. Hughes of New York, for example, brushed aside the numerous examples of church– state union as merely “a historical accident.” 13 Catholics found that their legal rights were generally protected by the courts, which at various times confirmed the autonomy of private colleges; upheld the right of churches to import foreign clergy (because “we are a Christian nation”); recognized Catholic marriage as satisfying civil requirements; allowed the Church to receive bequests if incorporated; permitted tax exemptions for religious bodies; and held that charitable institutions under religious auspices were not “sectarian” and could receive public money. 14 A crucial feature of the American legal system was the principle James Hitchcock 45 that a church’s internal disputes, if brought before the secular courts, were to be decided according to the church’s own laws, in order to minimize the possibility of governmental interference in religious affairs. 15 It was a principle that proved to be of crucial importance in situations where religious obedience seemed to conflict with the democratic ideal of personal liberty. Thus when a Dominican, unhappy over having been transferred by his superiors, complained to Secretary of State Henry Clay that his rights as a citizen were being violated, Clay made inquiries of the papal nuncio in Paris and concluded that there was no issue, since the friar was not being physically coerced. 16 (In 1912 the issue came before the Supreme Court, which, based on the same principle, found that a monk’s vow of poverty did not violate the constitutional guarantee of personal liberty. 17 ) But constitutional and legal safeguards did not protect Catholics from severe harassment. As immigration increased massively during the 1840s, a virulent “nativist” movement arose in reaction. 18 At first it was ethnic only, so that even some Maryland Catholics of old stock were nativists, until the movement manifested its anti- Catholicism. 19 Know-Nothing riots – named after a loosely organized secret society – erupted in several cities. A convent school was burned to the ground near Boston, a papal nuncio was mobbed in Cincinnati, and a stone sent by Pius IX for the new Washington Monument was destroyed. The fraudulent memoir of a supposed nun (“Maria Monk”) spread the most lurid tales of convent life, and polemical attacks by Protestant clergy were often scurrilous and savage. 20 Violent anti-Catholicism was sometimes condemned by the Protestant elites, but those elites harbored their own prejudices, a combination of the classic Protestant view of Catholicism as a false religion and of the Enlightenment claim that it was the enemy of liberty. 46 The Church Universal and the Americanist Movement

Maryland Catholics were especially sensitive to the need to avoid anything that smacked of provocation. Thus Carroll once criticized holding a Corpus Christi procession, and he proposed that Mass be celebrated in the vernacular in order to make the Church appear less foreign. He was more tolerant of mixed marriages than the Holy See allowed, even accepting passively the old English Catholic custom whereby boys were raised Protestant and girls Catholic. (Later, however, he seems to have abandoned the idea of the vernacular, along with that of electing bishops.) 21 In general Carroll opposed bringing foreign priests to America; but, ironically, in order to train native clergy for a new country that had been spawned by revolution, he found it necessary to welcome French Sulpicians fleeing revolution in their own country. 22 For a long time most American seminarians were immigrants, although native vocations among women were more plentiful. 23 For two generations the mainly French Sulpicians were perhaps the most important religious community in America, with a number of them, including two of Carroll’s successors, serving as bishops. 24 Carroll naturally opposed bringing foreign bishops into the United States, 25 but Propaganda Fidei, which except in Carroll’s case diligently exercised its right of appointment, considered some foreigners unavoidable, while naming native-born bishops when possible. A disproportionate number of native bishops were drawn from the ranks of converts, usually former Episcopalians, including two archbishops of Baltimore – Samuel Eccleston (d. 1851) and James Roosevelt Bayley (d. 1877). But most bishops were Irish, if for no other reason than that they spoke the dominant language. In the beginning most were not even serving in the United States at the time of their appointment; the first two bishops of New York were Irish Dominicans stationed in Rome, the first of whom got no closer to New York than Naples. 26 James Hitchcock 47

There was some tension between French and Irish clergy. The French Sulpician Archbishop Ambrose Marechal of Baltimore (d. 1827) complained that Irish priests were unruly and that bishops in Ireland protected them, while the Irish in turn accused the French of being autocratic and of not bothering to learn English. 27 The democratic American spirit seemed to threaten the integrity of the Church in one important respect, lay trusteeism, a problem that was most acute in New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Besides claiming title to the parish property, some parishioners defied their bishops by claiming the right to hire and fire their pastors. 28 Carroll, although he once denounced a particular group of trustees as “Jacobins,” accepted the system. 29 Although it had European roots and some of its most ardent supporters were immigrants, the trusteeship system seemed to harmonize with the American Protestant ecclesiastical system called congregationalism. Trusteeism was, however, republican rather than democratic; in most cases only the more prosperous parishioners were allowed to serve as trustees. Trusteeism was not primarily a lay–clerical rivalry. Nineteenth- century American Catholicism was plagued by strife between bishops and priests; 30 and, although this too was sometimes attributed to the democratic American spirit, most dissident priests were immigrants, especially from Ireland. In almost every case a trusteeship dispute centered around two rival pastors, one appointed by the bishop, the other by the trustees, a split that occasionally led even to public brawls between rival factions. The Holy See condemned trusteeism as a violation of canon law, and bishops sometimes excommunicated dissidents; but some bishops allowed lay trustees in an advisory capacity, so long as the bishop retained title to the parish property and the authority to appoint and remove pastors. Paradoxically, Carroll’s “Americanist” ideas were kept alive especially by one of the immigrant Irish bishops, John England of 48 The Church Universal and the Americanist Movement

Charleston (d. 1842), who, as a strong supporter of the independence of his native land, extolled the American idea of liberty as the hope of the world. England argued that, properly understood, the Catholic tradition was republican, as seen in such things as the Magna Carta. 31 He wanted an English missal and a new English translation of the Bible, both of which the French-American bishops opposed. 32 To the disapproval of most of his fellow bishops, England prom- ulgated a “constitution” for his diocese that included an elected body of laymen to advise him and an annual diocesan convention, although all matters pertaining to the faith remained under his authority. 33 England was a prolific writer and preacher whose statements were closely scrutinized even by Protestants. In answer to a query, he once said that it was an open question whether there could be salvation outside the Church (“leave it to God”) and pointed out that the doctrine of papal infallibility was not official teaching. He insisted that the Church had no authority over governments. 34 At times he confessed himself “distraught” over the state of the Church in America, claiming (inaccurately) that large numbers of immigrants had apostasized, something he blamed on an uncompre- hending Propaganda Fidei and on European bishops, especially the French, who were unsuited to serve in the New World. 35 As the most energetic and perhaps most talented bishop of his generation, England stood almost alone in the hierarchy, continually pushing reluctant archbishops of Baltimore to summon national synods to address questions in the same way he addressed them in his own diocese. 36 But Propaganda had to approve all synodal decrees, and it was alert to signs of a semi-independent American hierarchy. A proposal to change the dates of certain holy days, for example, was rejected on the grounds that it separated the United States from the universal Church. 37 Propaganda also objected to the American bishops’ referring to James Hitchcock 49 the pope as “head of the episcopal college,” and the Holy See refused to designate the archbishops of Baltimore as “primates” – a title conferred in some other countries – conceding only that they had “prerogative of place.” 38 At the Fourth Provincial Council of Baltimore in 1837, the American bishops solemnly proclaimed their loyalty to the “spiritual and ecclesiastical supremacy of the chief bishop of the universal church, the pope, the bishop of Rome,” which obedience, they added, did not detract from the obedience they owed to any temporal government. 39 The Irish immigrant Francis Patrick Kenrick (d. 1863), who was successively bishop of Philadelphia and archbishop of Baltimore, endeavored with indifferent success to develop a distinctively American expression of the faith, opposing new devotions from Europe that he considered extravagant, writing textbooks on dogmatic and moral theology, and even translating the bible into English. 40 The opposite model of ecclesiastical leadership was Archbishop Hughes (d. 1864). Also from Ireland, he studied in Maryland but was far removed from Maryland’s genteel tradition, having worked there as a laborer before entering the seminary. While not devoid of culture, he was blunt and pugnacious, and from the custom of a bishop’s signing his Christian name preceded by a cross, his critics began calling him Dagger John. 41 Hughes faced down the strong remnants of trusteeism in New York and, like Bishop England, was suspicious of the semi- independence of religious orders. 42 Hughes was involved in almost continuous controversy in New York, including a long-standing feud that had a modern ring to it – the newspaper editor James Gordon Bennett boasted, “I’m a Catholic but in my own way,” and frequently lambasted the Church. 43 Hughes was engaged in almost continuous polemics with anti- 50 The Church Universal and the Americanist Movement

Catholics and threatened that Catholics in New York would if necessary resist the Know-Nothings with violence of their own. Kenrick, on the other hand, considered polemical defenses of the faith unavailing and left Philadelphia in disguise during the riots. 44 In the spirit of genteel Maryland ecumenism, Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney (d. 1864), a Marylander who achieved the highest office held by any American Catholic prior to 1961, thought Hughes’s combativeness was a menace to the Church, although Taney later lamented that he was himself the target of bigotry. 45 Surprisingly, Hughes showed himself sympathetic to two new American religions, the Shakers and the Mormons, probably because they were persecuted. 46 Kenrick’s successor in Baltimore was Martin J. Spalding (d. 1872), who combined the genteel Maryland tradition with that of the frontier, in that he was the scion of a colonial Maryland family who had helped create a flourishing Catholic culture in Kentucky. 47 Like almost every nineteenth-century bishop, Spalding extolled American democracy, although other systems were not to be condemned. The Catholic Church had always been the champion of freedom, he claimed, while Protestantism had increased the power of the state. Contrary to the Know-Nothings, it was Catholics who were loyal Americans, while Orangemen and radical German refugees were traitors to their native lands. 48 Some American bishops were dismayed by Pius IX’s seeming condemnation of democracy in the Syllabus of Errors (1864). Spalding defended the document but assured the nation that it did not apply to the United States, where such ideas were not held. 49 But America was also not an idyllic place. The Second Plenary Council of Baltimore (1866) identified sectarianism, unitarianism, pantheism, magnetism, and spiritism as evils, and Spalding himself decried the prevalence of abortion. 50 Also at Baltimore II, Spalding expressed his great devotion to the Holy See and rejoiced that the bishops had come to the meeting James Hitchcock 51 only because in his voice they heard the voice of Peter and were thereby linked to Christ in a golden chain. 51 Although Spalding had been educated at the College of the Propaganda in Rome, he and other American bishops were at first cool to the establishment of the North American College, and Spalding promoted the American College at Louvain that was seen by some as a rival institution. 52 Troubled that priestly vocations were inadequate in his archdiocese, he complained that the Sulpicians who staffed his seminary were too European in their outlook. 53

Doctrinally, the most significant way in which American Ca- tholicism diverged from Rome in the nineteenth century was over slavery. Since the fifteenth century the popes had condemned the slave trade and, while not calling for immediate emancipation, characterized involuntary servitude as inherently unjust. 54 A letter of Gregory XVI reiterating that condemnation was read at the Fourth Provincial Council of Baltimore (1837), 55 but there was almost no effort to apply it in America. Even if the papal condemnation had been thought to apply only to the slave trade, there is scant evidence that the bishops condemned even that. Bishop England started a school for free blacks but closed it in the face of threats of mob violence, assuring South Carolinians that he detested abolitionism. Employing a perfectly circular argument, he insisted that Gregory XVI’s brief did not condemn slavery itself, since otherwise the bishops would have been required to excommunicate slave-owners, which they had not done. He rebuked the Irish emancipation leader Daniel O’Connell for O’Connell’s own denunciations of slavery. 56 Kenrick’s textbook of moral theology justified slavery and, citing St. Paul’s Letter to Philemon, even defended the Fugitive Slave Law, which required that runaway slaves be forcibly returned 52 The Church Universal and the Americanist Movement to their masters. Kenrick reassured slave-owners that the Church did not favor upsetting established social arrangements. 57 Most of the Catholic elite of the South and Upper South, Archbishops Carroll and Spalding among them, owned slaves, and with little apparent crisis of conscience. 58 Some religious communities also owned slaves, and one Maryland Jesuit superior was removed by the Jesuit general for allowing slave families to be broken up through sales. 59 The Supreme Court’s momentous Dred Scott decision, holding that slaves were not persons within the meaning of law, was written by Taney, whose brother urged a bill in the Maryland legislature to bar free blacks from living in the state. 60 Few clergy called for emancipation, the rare exceptions being Archbishop John B. Purcell of Cincinnati (d. 1883); his convert Auxiliary Bishop Sylvester Rosecrans (d. 1878), brother of a Union general; and the convert Bishop Josue M. Young of Erie (d.1866), whom some Catholics denounced as a “Puritan tyrant” when he threatened to excommunicate Catholics who voted for General George McClellan in 1864. 61 Many Catholics regarded the antislavery movement as a malign effort by extremists to undermine the social order, based on a concept of “liberty” that had been destructive in Europe; and many abolitionists, drawn mainly from New England Puritan stock, were as much anti-Catholic as they were antislavery. 62 Catholics fought on both sides in the Civil War. 63 Louisiana was the only Confederate state that had a large Catholic population, but Maryland Catholics were thought to be primarily pro-Confederate, so that Kenrick bowed to protests and forbade public prayers for the preservation of the Union. 64 Hughes was pro-Union but antiabolitionist, holding that slavery might be “beneficial.” He supported the Union war effort and undertook a mission to Europe on its behalf but, having assured his flock that the war was not being fought over slavery, was shocked by James Hitchcock 53 the Emancipation Proclamation. 65 Irish Catholics were thought to be the chief perpetrators of the Anti-Draft Riots in New York City in 1863, during which more than a hundred people, mostly blacks, were slaughtered on the streets. Hughes’s last public appearance was an address to his people in which he reluctantly expressed sorrow that they could have perpetrated such atrocities. 66 Spalding opposed secession – first in Louisville, then in Balti- more, where he was transferred not long after the Battle of Gettys- burg. But having promised his flock that the “war of northern intolerance” would not free the slaves, he denounced the Emancipa- tion Proclamation and defended the Confederacy in letters to the Vatican. 67 As bishop of Louisville, Spalding had been Purcell’s suffragan, but he found Purcell’s and Rosecrans’s antislavery views “odious” and accused them of violating the spirit of neutrality that should prevail in the hierarchy. Spalding considered slavery a Protestant institution, for which the Catholic solution was gradual emancipation. 68 Bishop Patrick N. Lynch of Charleston (d. 1882) was sent as a Confederate emissary to Pius IX to persuade the pope to recognize the Confederacy, while Hughes and Bishop Michael Domenec of Pittsburgh (d.1876), a Spanish Vincentian, attempted to promote the Union cause in Europe. (After the war the American government forbade Lynch to return home, until Ulysses S. Grant’s former West Point roommate, who had become a Paulist priest, interceded for him.) 69 Bishop William H. Elder of Natchez (d. 1904), who later suc- ceeded Purcell at Cincinnati, was briefly jailed for disobeying the orders of the occupying Union army. 70 By a narrow margin the Supreme Court overturned the conviction of a priest who, under orders from Archbishop Peter Richard Kenrick (d. 1896) of St. Louis – Francis’s brother and himself a former slave-owner – refused to 54 The Church Universal and the Americanist Movement take an oath of loyalty to the Union. 71

The first religious community for men founded in the United States were the Paulists (Congregation of St. Paul), started just before the Civil War by the convert Isaac T. Hecker (d. 1888). 72 The son of German immigrants, Hecker was raised first a Lu- theran, then a Methodist, and became a spiritual seeker, exploring several movements that included New England Transcendentalism and the utopian Brook Farm experiment. He joined the Redemptor- ists but was dismissed after a dispute with his superiors in which Spalding and some other bishops supported him, as did Propaganda Fidei. 73 The dispute arose out of Hecker’s anxiety that Redemptorist methods were unsuited to American society, and he was determined that the Paulists were to be specially devoted to an appropriate kind of evangelization. Like Hughes, 74 Ireland, 75 and Spalding, 76 Hecker believed that Protestantism was disappearing and that, as a land of innovation and hope, America was ripe for conversion. 77 He believed that the Catholic doctrine of free will would especially appeal to Americans, in contrast to the pessimism of classical Lutheranism and Calvinism. While liberal Protestantism was even more optimistic, he saw it as in effect an abandonment of Christian- ity altogether. Hecker urged the Church to adapt itself to American culture, and his emphasis on the presence of the Holy Spirit, inspiring and guiding each person, seemed to provide the theological basis for a kind of spiritual democracy. Hecker thought that since the Council of Trent authority had been secure, thus making it safe to follow the promptings the Spirit, which would always coincide with the doctrines of the Church, in an inverse relationship between the presence of the Holy Spirit and the degree of formal authority. Hecker hoped that the Paulists would themselves exemplify this theology, in that they would not take permanent vows and formal James Hitchcock 55 discipline would be somewhat minimal, relying instead on the inner motivation of each member of the community. But as time went on he found that even most of his disciples did not share his vision and wanted a more structured system. 78 Without his saying so explicitly, Hecker’s hope also seems to have been that the United States could be converted through its social elite (“a special class of persons”), who had first to be shown that Catholicism was not a foreign entity. Most of the early Paulists were converts, one the son of a Union general, another a Harvard astronomer.79 Hecker was personally opposed to slavery but equally opposed to abolitionism, and he rejoiced that further evidence of the Church’s suitability for American society was the fact that it did not involve itself in the bitter disputes that led to the Civil War. The Church was, he judged on one occasion, “the only conservative body left in the nation.” 80 Hecker foresaw the conversion of the United States as in a sense the preliminary to the reconversion of Europe, which would benefit from the American spirit of freedom and thereby experience a spiritual awakening. 81 Virtually the only American Catholic intellectual of substance in nineteenth-century America was Orestes Brownson (d. 1876), who like his friend Hecker had been a seeker who passed through Calvinism, liberal Protestantism, Unitarianism, agnosticism, and Brook Farm before becoming a Catholic. 82 Like Hecker, Brownson thought the time had come for the United States to lead the world spiritually, but it could do so only if it abandoned a weak and compromised Protestantism for an unwavering Catholicism. He extolled American democracy but eventually came to mis- trust pure democracy, as tending toward a kind of philosophical relativism. But, although he espoused the Southern idea that a state could “nullify” an act of the federal government, he was strongly 56 The Church Universal and the Americanist Movement pro-Union and antislavery and privately excoriated the bishops, whom he charged with being pro-Confederate. 83 Hecker and Brownson were uneasy friends who gradually drifted father apart, as Brownson insisted there could be no salvation outside the Catholic Church and found Hecker equivocal on the subject, believing all people were called to be Catholics but not excluding others from salvation. Brownson was also an uncompromising defender of papal infallibility, in contrast to Hecker’s seeming hesitation. 84 During and after the Civil War a somewhat mysterious group of New York priests, calling themselves the Accademia, met regularly in private to discuss their vision of an American Church – a vernacular liturgy, the abolition of “medieval” forms of religious life, and other things. They had no significant effect, but in a sense they constituted a textbook example of Leo XII’s “Americanism.” 85 After the war Spalding rejoiced that the specter of Gallicanism was dead in the United States. 86 But, in a harbinger of things soon to come, Peter Kenrick walked out of Baltimore II, protesting that bishops should be sovereign in their own sees and should not accept instructions from Propaganda Fidei. 87 At the First Vatican Council (1869-70) few American prelates seem to have been unreservedly in favor of defining papal infallibility. Most – including Purcell, Bayley, then of Newark, archbishop of New York and soon to be the first American cardinal John F. McCloskey, Domenec, and Lynch – were “inopportunists” who believed in the doctrine but thought it should not be formally proclaimed, 88 which would inflame American anti-Catholicism. 89 (Ironically, however, while European governments were almost unanimous in their opposition to the dogma, the government of the United States was almost alone in its official indifference.) The German theologian Ignaz von Dollinger, who eventually left the Church over the issue, and the liberal English layman Lord Acton at first considered the American delegation the most James Hitchcock 57 promising and effective in their resistance to the proclamation. 90 A few American bishops, especially Peter Kenrick and the French Sulpician James A. Verot of Savannah (d. 1876), opposed it in substance. Kenrick published a pamphlet attacking the doctrine, distributed it during the Council, and afterward refused to rescind it, despite warnings from the Holy See. Whether he ever formally assented to the dogma is unclear. 91 Spalding attempted to play a mediating role at the Council, until it became obvious that the dogma would be defined, whereupon he supported it unreservedly. 92 In the end, twenty-five American bishops – a bare majority – voted for the decree. Twenty-two were absent, which presumably meant that they were not in favor, and Bishop Edward Fitzgerald of Little Rock (d. 1908) was one of only two non placet votes in the entire council. (He immediately submitted, saying “Now I believe, Holy Father.”) 93 Ironically, while some European liberals saw American resistance to papal infallibility as a manifestation of the democratic spirit, in reality it may have been a European import. Verot was a forthright Gallican, a theology that some of the Irish-American bishops, notably Peter Kenrick, were thought to have imbibed at the Maynooth Seminary. 94 As Rome was about to fall to the armies of Italy in 1870, Spal- ding expressed strong support for the Holy See but quietly quashed a plan to raise an American battalion to defend the Papal States. 95 Hecker denounced the conquest, by the “robber state” of Italy, as a gross violation of religious liberty. 96

Bayley, Spalding’s successor, was the quintessential “American” – a convert Episcopal minister, nephew of St. Elizabeth Bayley Seton, a relative of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. But his tenure was brief. 97 Bayley’s successor was James Gibbons (d. 1921), a former 58 The Church Universal and the Americanist Movement

Baltimore priest who had been born in the United States but raised partly in Ireland. With him the dream of a distinctively American Catholicism that began with Carroll reached both its fulfillment and its downfall. 98 No one ever did more than Gibbons to establish the image of the Church at home in American society. For over half a century as a bishop, he appeared to the public as a simple, kindly, humorously self-deprecating man imbued with the democratic spirit. He was routinely called upon to offer public prayers on civic occasions and, although the Church did not allow official ecumenical activities, regularly appeared alongside non-Catholic clergy with whom he seemed to enjoy cordial relations. The Americanist wing of the hierarchy was led by Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul (d. 1918) and included especially Bishop John J. Keane (d. 1918), bishop of Richmond and first rector of the Catholic University of America; Msgr. Denis J. O’Connell (d. 1924), rector of the North American College; and Bishop John Lancaster Spalding of Peoria (d. 1916). The three had considerable influence with Gibbons, who acted as their protective patron. 99 The Americanists’ chief antagonists were Archbishop Michael A. Corrigan of New York (d. 1902) and Bishop Bernard J. McQuaid of Rochester (d. 1908), along with the German bishops. 100 As time went on the antagonism between the two parties became deeply personal. 101 The ethnic character of the American hierarchy was a concrete issue around which the Americanists coalesced. At the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore (1884), 37 percent of the bishops were born in the United States or Canada, 28 percent in Ireland, 13 percent in Germany, and 10 percent in France. There were two Spanish bishops but no Italian. 102 When German-Americans complained to the Holy See that they were treated as second-class citizens and asked that they be given German bishops, their plea was rebuffed. 103 James Hitchcock 59

Irish bishops, including Gibbons, found the immigrant culture of their non-English-speaking flocks troublesome, the ubiquitous ethnic parishes sources of tension. 104 Ireland once so rudely rebuffed a Ukrainian-rite priest who presented himself for parish work that the priest joined the Russian Orthodox Church and triggered a massive schism. 105 At the extreme, an exasperated Ireland once wished that nine- tenths of the membership of the Church in the U.S. would disappear: “In Archbishop Carroll’s time the Church was truly American. Later the flood of foreign immigration overpowered us, and made the Church foreign in heart and in act. Thank God we are recovering from that misfortune.” 106 The Americanist bishops had a strong animus toward the Ger- man element in American Catholicism, a quarrel that extended to things like the teaching of German in the Catholic schools and to “temperance” (abstention from the use of alcohol), which the Germans insisted was a response to what was only an Irish problem. 107 But while ethnic divisions played some role in the Americanist controversy, they were not definitive, since most of the major participants were of Irish birth or extraction. Ironically, Ireland, Keane, and O’Connell had been born in Ireland, while Corrigan and McQuaid were native-born. 108 (John Spalding was Martin Spal- ding’s nephew, from an old Maryland-Kentucky family. 109 ) Perhaps the Americanists’ principal concern was to defend the American system of separation of church and state, even though few people at the time were attacking it. Leo XIII merely warned against absolutizing it, and Ireland’s principal intellectual adversary, the German theologian Joseph Schroeder at Catholic University, defended republicanism as the best form of government for the United States, merely criticizing the insistence that it be made universal. 110 Even Hecker thought it was only a temporary arrangement, since “all right-thinking men” saw 60 The Church Universal and the Americanist Movement that ultimately there had to be union of the two. 111 But John Spalding absolutized it, couched in characteristically passionate and sweeping language, in an address at Catholic University shortly after its opening in 1888. 112 When the Holy See condemned the Knights of Labor as a “secret society,” Gibbons persuaded the Vatican to lift the ban, 113 but the Americanists were far from being liberals by later standards. Gibbons thought most strikes were unjustified, opposed women’s suffrage, and considered racial segregation a wise custom. 114 Ireland, while he was strongly opposed to racial segregation, also opposed women’s suffrage, and he denounced the prevailing morality of the Victorian era as decadent and pagan. 115 He was hostile to the Catholic Uniates in part because they had married priests, and he regarded the laity as “soldiers” serving under clerical “officers.” 116 Ireland was an almost frenetic champion of the greatness of the nation and saw himself as engaged in a great battle for the direction of the American Church. He got on well with some of the leading businessmen of the “Gilded Age,” not least because he urgently solicited their loans and gifts to alleviate his chronic financial problems. 117 He was unusual among Catholics of his time in being an ardent Republican, seeing the Republicans as the party of a dynamic capitalism that was the engine of growth, while the Democrats were the party of the immigrant, thus a further sign of Catholics’ failure to enter fully into American society. His Republican loyalties also fit with his having been a Union Army chaplain and strongly antislavery but, unpredictably, he was also a champion of organized labor. 118 Like a number of bishops of Irish extraction, Ireland was an ardent apostle of “temperance,” regarding alcohol as the working man’s chief curse and another cause of Protestant disdain of the immigrant. 119 But paradoxically, the very modern-minded Ireland also thought James Hitchcock 61 it desirable that the immigrants settle in rural communities, and he sponsored several projects for reestablishing the European pattern of villages with churches at their centers, 120 an idea contrary to that of Hughes, who insisted that the Church serve the immigrants in the great cities. 121 Hughes’s idea proved correct. The colonization projects were only minimally successful while, for reasons that are unclear, only in the British Isles and three of its former colonies – Australia, Canada, and the United States – did immigrants, whether from abroad or from country to city, preserve their religious faith, and only in those countries did the industrial working class remain practicing Christians. 122 Education became the immediate lightning rod in the American- ist controversy. Unlike in Europe, not only was there no governmental threat to church schools in the United States, the Supreme Court in 1844 seriously considered the claim that prohibiting the teaching of religion in a privately endowed school constituted blasphemy, allowing the innovation only because the donor had no malicious intent. 123 (Not until 1925, however, was the right to religious education formally upheld by the Supreme Court. 124 ) The degree to which Catholics could participate in the “common schools” was one of the major disputed issues between Americanists and others. In his more liberal days Brownson, for example, opposed the establishment of parochial schools, proposing that instead Catholics serve as leaven in the public schools. 125 Hughes’s greatest battles were over education. After failing to rid the public schools of anti-Catholic bias, he began a comprehensive system of parochial schools and fought – largely unsuccessfully – to get public aid. 126 In Cincinnati, Purcell joined in a coalition with Jews and “free- thinkers” to overcome the Protestant bias of the public schools, although the result was perhaps an even less palatable secularism.127 62 The Church Universal and the Americanist Movement

Hecker in principle favored a strong Catholic presence in the public schools but gradually became disillusioned with their religionless character. 128 Ireland was the idea’s last champion. He considered the public schools secular, but he opposed Baltimore III’s mandate that every parish have a school and instead promoted a plan in which Catholic catechism could be taught in the public schools, a plan opposed by most of the bishops but tolerated by the Holy See. (The plan was discredited when the public school district itself repudiated the agreement.) 129 The Americanists’ optimism required them to minimize the degree of anti-Catholicism in the United States. During the presidential campaign of 1884 a Protestant minister uttered a famous remark denouncing the Democrats as the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” The Republican presidential candidate, James G. Blaine, claimed not to have heard the insult, and Ireland continued to have close political relations with Blaine. 130 Ireland dismissed the nativist American Protective Association as insignificant, 131 and he and Gibbons opposed a plan to establish a federation of Catholic societies for the purpose of resisting religious bigotry. They also brushed aside complaints about prejudice in the Federal government. 132 Ireland played a complex role in the Spanish-American War. Asked by the Vatican to help avert it, he tried to broker a compromise but, when that failed, enthusiastically supported the American cause. After the war, although some Catholics thought the Church was being treated unjustly in the Philippines, Ireland generally reposed confidence in Theodore Roosevelt’s policies. 133 (O’Connell hailed the war as the means by which the United States would sweep aside the decrepit structures of the Old World. 134 ) But, ironic in terms of the liberal bishops’ yearning to be thought fully American, Roosevelt privately dismissed them as “mick James Hitchcock 63 ecclesiastics” and denounced them as subservient to the Vatican rather than fully loyal Americans. 135 There was a considerable gap between the Americanists’ rhetoric and their actual practices. Thus while minimizing anti-Catholic hostility, they also raised, for strategic purposes, the specter of a Kulturkampf. O’Connell advised Ireland that they stood little chance of getting their way in Rome unless they warned that the American government might curtail the freedoms of the Church. 136 While the Americanists extolled American freedom, their control of Catholic University enabled them to purge professors not in sympathy with their goals. They hired a private detective to shadow Joseph Schroeder and obtained his resignation by accusing him of habitual drunkenness. Later a conservative professor from France was also dismissed. 137 Ireland, despite his devotion to the idea of church–state separation, was in reality a skilled navigator of political waters, involving himself in secular politics in order to achieve his ecclesiastical goals – openly supporting (against McQuaid) a priest’s candidacy for public office in New York state, enlisting the aid of President Benjamin Harrison against the German Americans’ appeal to Rome, and – until almost the very end of his life – lobbying Roosevelt and other leading Republican politicians to help him gain a cardinal’s hat. 138 Inevitably, the Republicans used Ireland in turn, as in attempting to defuse the furor over “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” criticizing William Jennings Bryan as a “socialist” in 1896, and justifying the Spanish-American War. 139 In time, the division between “liberals” and “conservatives” in the hierarchy came to be thought of as a split between proponents of a quasi-independent “American Church” and a Church fully loyal to Rome. In the beginning, however, the roles were almost reversed. In 1853 the Italian archbishop Gaetano Bedini was sent to the United States as the pope’s unofficial representative. He was 64 The Church Universal and the Americanist Movement vehemently attacked for alleged complicity in atrocities in the Papal States and in Cincinnati was threatened with mob violence. Hughes assisted Bedini’s mission, but other bishops, especially Francis Kenrick, considered it provocative and unwise. 140 Forty years later Corrigan and McQuaid were among probably the majority of American bishops who were opposed to the idea of a permanent Apostolic Delegation, at a time when Ireland and Keane (but not Spalding) favored it, because they hoped to gain the appointee’s confidence. 141 (Partly because of this issue, Ireland and Spalding drifted apart and even became enemies. 142 ) Opponents of the Delegation believed that Rome misunderstood the American situation and that canon law was not properly adapted to American needs. 143 The hierarchical split widened over the project to establish the Catholic University, in which Spalding and Keane played key roles and Corrigan was opposed. (The project was conceived partly because the liberal bishops considered the Jesuits hopelessly reactionary.) 144 The bitterest incident in the Americanist era was the case of Father Edward McGlynn, a New York priest suspended by Corrigan for his increasingly fanatical involvement in secular politics, especially Henry George’s “single tax” movement. 145 McGlynn, a member of the first ordination class of the North American College, seems to have been almost pathologically rebellious toward Church authority, often making common cause with anti-Catholics. 146 Most of the bishops who opposed a permanent Apostolic Dele- gation did so because they thought Rome was too willing to listen to priests disciplined by their bishops. But McGlynn’s cause was espoused by some Americanists, who saw it as a test case for the American idea of freedom of expression and as a wedge to use against Corrigan.147 Initially the first permanent apostolic delegate, Archbishop James Hitchcock 65

Francesco Satolli, showed himself more friendly to the liberals than to the Corrigan faction, confirming some bishops’ fears by arranging for McGlynn’s reinstatement under rather lenient terms. 148 But anti-Roman attitudes did pervade the Americanist hierarchy. Keane regarded the Vatican as hopelessly backward, urging the Paulist Fathers, for example, not to submit their rule to Rome for approval. 149 O’Connell told Ireland, “For hundreds of years the Curia Romano has been in constant conflict with the Church,” 150 and Spalding wrote that, while Americans accepted doctrine from the hands of the pope, "as for the rest, they ask him to interfere as little as may be.” 151 In 1893 Satolli appeared in Ireland’s company at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago but refused to attend the Exposition’s World’s Congress of Religions, in which Ireland, Keane, Gibbons, and other Catholics participated. Two years later the delegate announced that the Holy See had forbidden Catholic participation in further such ecumenical activities. 152 The Chicago incident, along with a speech by O’Connell in France in which he passionately extolled religious freedom and church–state separation and claimed that English common law was superior to Roman law, probably had the affect of provoking a Roman reaction. 153 Satolli turned against the Americanists, as O’Connell was forced to resign as rector of the North American College and Keane as rector of Catholic University. 154 Leo XIII then sent a message to the American bishops ( Longin- qua Oceani – “From Across the Ocean”) warning that, while separation of church and state was tolerable, Catholic doctrine held that the state should give positive support to religion. 155 Unpredictably, Testem Benevolentiae , four years later, was provoked by a French translation of a biography of Isaac Hecker, in which an enthusiastic preface called Hecker the “priest of the future” and lauded the American Catholic way of life as unique, a view that O’Connell publicly endorsed at a conference in France. The book 66 The Church Universal and the Americanist Movement received wide notice in French Catholic circles, and “Father Hecker’s Americanism,” was attacked in the conservative Catholic press. 156 Leo prevented the book from being placed on the Index , instead appointing a committee of cardinals to study the question. The committee reported adversely on Americanism, but the pope softened the report so that no specific person was accused of holding the condemned doctrines. 157 Leo did not call Americanism a heresy, and he excluded from condemnation the use of the word “Americanism” to signify “the characteristic qualities which reflect honor on the people of America.” The brunt of the papal warning was against believing that the Church should follow the “spirit of the age,” the basic error, according to the pope, being the claim that the Church should modify her doctrines to suit modern civilization and attract converts. Specific errors included: external spiritual direction was no longer necessary; natural and active virtues were extolled over supernatural and passive virtues; the promptings of the Holy Spirit were followed in an individualistic way; and religious vows were incompatible with Christian liberty. The pope did not condemn separation of church and state but warned that it should not be absolutized. Testem Benevolentiae was addressed to the American bishops through Gibbons, and both he and Ireland tried to prevent its issuance. The Americanist prelates publicly submitted but denied that the condemned doctrines were prevalent in the United States, while the conservative bishops thanked the pope for saving the American Church. 158 The Americanist bishops were thereafter at pains to distinguish “political” from “ecclesiastical” Americanism; the former, they claimed, the pope had endorsed, and the latter no one espoused. They went so far as to distance themselves from Hecker, Ireland James Hitchcock 67 saying that he had never really understood the Paulist’s ideas and O’Connell calling Hecker “a good man with queer ideas.” 159 Like most formal condemnations of false doctrine, Testem Be- nevolentiae did not cite specific sources, which makes its relevance therefore somewhat difficult to evaluate. What the pope primarily captured in Testem Benevolentiae were ideas that were “in the air” at the time and that, rightly or wrongly, Hecker’s French admirers found in him. But while the assumption that he favored active over passive virtues might seem logical, given his dream of converting the world, in fact he was a kind of mystic who emphasized prayer, meditation, and forgetfulness of the world, and he was vague about organiza- tional matters. 160 In the end Americanism was primarily a vague, enthusiastic euphoria that became controversial because its proponents were in the habit of making grand rhetorical gestures that almost invited being misused. They wanted some kind of adaptation of the Catholic faith to the culture but had no clear idea how this was to be achieved and were therefore vulnerable to having their rhetoric taken at face value. Spalding, for example, once gave a rousing exhortation to “Church and Age, unite!”, 161 while O’Connell hailed Ireland in terms almost of Manifest Destiny: “‘for this you were born, for this came into the world’: to realize the dreams of your youth for America, and to be the instrument in the hands of Providence for spreading the benefits of a new civilization over the world.” 162 These exhortations to adapt the faith to changing times could be seen as the essence of the heresy of Modernism, as condemned by St. Pius X in 1907, but there were no direct connections between Americanism and Modernism. The Americanists seem simply to have taken doctrine for granted, while at the same time finding it uninteresting. Ireland saw no importance in Leo XIII’s effort to inspire a Thomistic revival,163 68 The Church Universal and the Americanist Movement and the founders of Catholic University offered no distinctive vision of what it ought to be. But given their self-conscious modernism, some Americanists at first reached out to the innovative European theologians. Ireland invited Alfred Loisy to teach at the St. Paul seminary, but after the French abbé was condemned as a Modernist the Minnesota prelate supported the Holy See. 164 Ireland at various times denounced skeptical modern philosophies, against which he judged Protestantism was of little use, 165 and he strongly denounced Dollinger after the German theologian left the Church. 166 As rector of Catholic University, O’Connell arranged the ouster of a professor suspected of Modernist tendencies in scripture studies. 167 When Loisy met Ireland and Spalding in 1902, he was disappointed that they seemed to have opinions on no religious issues except those that touched on politics. 168 A handful of American priests did become Modernists, notably the Paulist William L. Sullivan 169 and the Josephite John R. Slattery. Five other Paulists resigned from the priesthood because of the condemnation of Modernism, and the New York Review , published at the New York archdiocesan seminary, was suppressed after it published articles on biblical criticism and summaries of Modernist theology. 170 In the end Americanism’s fatal flaw was not heterodoxy but a very limited understanding of America itself. John Carroll was highly honored at his death, praised for his firm but temperate spirit; but the fact that he came from a distinguished colonial family had much to do with public acceptance of his faith, and this “Maryland tradition” was kept alive by England, Francis Kenrick, Gibbons, and others. Consciously or unconsciously, Americanists took Anglo-Protestants as their touchstone, believing that a Catholic Church that freed itself from outmoded baggage would win over its enemies. It was thus not accidental that, on what was the only doctrinal James Hitchcock 69 issue that separated them from the Holy See – slavery and race – some of the bishops most self-conscious about their citizenship (Ireland excepted) virtually ignored papal teaching, seeking instead to reassure aristocratic Southerners and definitively separate themselves from obstreperous New England abolitionists. But the Paulist dream of converting America through its elite remained unfulfilled. Hecker himself made few converts, and almost none from the category of the agnostic “seekers” who he thought were particularly ripe. He was deeply disappointed that men like Ralph Waldo Emerson instead became “minimizers of Christ and maximizers of themselves.” 171 After a time converts no longer joined the Paulists. 172 In minimizing the degree of anti-Catholicism, favoring the con- ciliatory approach of Francis Kenrick over Hughes’s confrontation- alism, the Americanists also misread the nature of the “American Way,” in which aggressiveness – as exemplified by abolitionists, temperance advocates, feminists, and many others – is required for a movement to be taken seriously. In their eagerness to adapt to the culture, the Americanists overlooked the obvious fact that their Church was primarily an immigrant Church, and they treated immigration not as an opportunity, as Hughes did, but as an obstacle. Bishop Carroll resisted exercising whatever jurisdiction he had beyond the Alleghenies, 173 and later Americanism, with obvious exceptions, was primarily an East Coast phenomenon. The Americanists were apparently oblivious to the French and Hispanic heritages of the country and paid only desultory attention to the Indian missions. Testem Benevolentiae was issued at precisely the moment when the Church was entering upon its period of greatest growth and influence, when its strength would in many ways be sustained by precisely those things – ethnic loyalties, ingrained orthodoxy, 70 The Church Universal and the Americanist Movement fidelity to the Holy See, flourishing religious orders – that the Americanists saw as obstacles to overcome.

James Hitchcock received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University and his A.B. from Saint Louis University. He also received honorary D.H.L. degrees from Benedictine College and Franciscan University. Dr. Hitchcock has written seven books and is currently working on his eighth. He has written scholarly and general articles that have appeared in Catholic Historical Review, Bulletin of the Institute for Historical Research, Beacham’s Biographical Dictionary, New York Times Magazine, Yale Review, American Scholar, Modern Age, and New Oxford Review, to name just a few. Dr. Hitchcock has also been awarded the Cardinal Wright Award from the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars and the Frederic Ozanam Award from the Society of Catholic Social Scientists. He has previously served as secretary of the Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference and president of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.

1 English translation in Thomas T. McAvoy, The Great Crisis in American Catholic History, 1895-1900 (Chicago: Regnery, 1957), 379-92. 2 John Tracy Ellis, American Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). 3 John F. Rothensteiner, History of the Archdiocese of St. Louis (St. Louis: Blackwell Weilandy, 1928), 1:1-236. 4 Thomas Spalding, Premier See: A History of the Archdiocese of Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 1-3. 5 Ibid., 3-6. 6 Ibid., 17-18. 7 John Gilmary Shea, Life and Times of the Most Rev. John Carroll (New York, 1888), 145-48. 8 Spalding, Premier See , 6; James Henessey, “A Distinctive Tradition of American Catholicism,” in Catholicism in America , ed. Philip Gleason (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 36. 9 Spalding, Premier See , 6. James Hitchcock 71

10 James Hitchcock, The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 2:22-46. 11 James H. Hutson, Religion and the Founding of the American Republic (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1998). 12 Edwin S. Gaustad, Jr., Faith of Our Fathers (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 120-32. 13 Richard Shaw, Dagger John: The Unquiet Life and Times of Archbishop John Hughes (New York: Paulist Press, 1977), 192. 14 Hitchcock, Supreme Court 1:7-8, 11-14, 18, 20, 27, 34-36. 15 Ibid. 1:11-14. 16 Peter Guilday, The Life and Times of John England (New York: The America Press, 1927), 2:233-5; Shaw, Dagger John , 31, 52-53. 17 Hitchcock, Supreme Court 1:10-11. 18 Ray Allan Billington, The Protestant Crusade (New York: Macmillan, 1938). 19 Spalding, Premier See , 135, 171. 20 Billington, Protestant Crusade . 21 Spalding, Premier See , 24; Hennesey, “Distinctive Tradition,” 36; John Tracy Ellis, Perspectives in American Catholicism (Baltimore: Helicon, 1963), 127. 22 Spalding, Premier See , 23-24. 23 Ibid., 55-57. 24 Christopher Kauffman, Tradition and Transformation in Catholic Culture: The Priests of St. Sulpice in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1988). 25 Shea, Carroll , 165-67. 26 Florence D. Cohalan, A Popular History of the Archdiocese of New York (Yonkers, N.Y.: United States Catholic Historical Society, 1983), 21-38. 27 Guilday, England 1:11-15. 28 Patrick W. Carey, People, Priests and Prelates (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987); Shea, Carroll , 418-24, 627, 651; Spalding, Premier See , 12; Guilday, England 1:145-248, 335-40; Shaw, Dagger John , 27-49. 29 Spalding, Premier See , 12, 27, 33. 30 Ibid., 42-44; Shaw, Dagger John , 74-116. 31 Guilday, England 1:115-20; 2:43; Patrick W. Carey, An Immigrant Bishop 72 The Church Universal and the Americanist Movement

(Yonkers, N.Y.: United States Catholic Historical Society, 1982). 32 Guilday, England 1:330-32. 33 Ibid. 1:343-54. 34 Ibid. 1:366-68; 2:57, 430-32. 35 Ibid. 1:423-31, 476, 481; 2:268, 345. England’s claims about apostasy were examined by Gerald Shaughnessy, Has the Immigrant Kept the Faith? (New York: Macmillan, 1925). 36 Guilday, England 1:408-10; 2:105-8, 115. 37 Peter Guilday, A History of the Councils of Baltimore (New York: Macmillan, 1932), 87. 38 Ibid., 55. 39 Ibid., 118-19. 40 Hugh J. Nolan, The Most Rev. Francis Patrick Kenrick (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1948); Spalding, Premier See , 163-65, 171. 41 Shaw, Dagger John . 42 Ibid., 227, 318. 43 Ibid., 125, 275-77. 44 Spalding, Premier See , 131-34. 45 Ibid., 171. 46 Shaw, Dagger John , 194, 256, 275. 47 Spalding, Martin John Spalding (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1973); Clyde F. Crews, An American Holy Land (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, 1987). 48 Spalding, Spalding , 94-99, 106. 49 Spalding, Premier See , 197; Spalding, Martin John Spalding , 241. 50 Spalding, Martin John Spalding , 192, 213. 51 Guilday, History of Councils , 216. 52 Spalding, Premier See , 155, 158, 182, 199; Spalding, Martin John Spalding , 261. 53 Spalding, Premier See , 188; Spalding, Martin John Spalding , 162. 54 Joel S. Panzer, The Popes and Slavery (New York: Alba House, 1996). James Hitchcock 73

55 Panzer, Slavery , 44-48; Guilday, England 1:127. 56 Panzer, Slavery , 68; Guilday, England 2:152-53, 471. 57 Joseph D. Brokhage, Francis Patrick Kenrick’s Opinions on Slavery (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1955); Panzer, Slavery , 69; Spalding, Premier See , 175. 58 Spalding, Premier See , 57-58; Guilday, England 1:22; Spalding, Martin John Spalding , 128-29. 59 Spalding, Premier See , 113. 60 Ibid. 61 Spalding, Martin John Spalding , 162. 62 Shaw, Dagger John , 334-37, 342-44. 63 Benjamin Blied, Catholics and the Civil War (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing, 1945). 64 Spalding, Premier See , 176. 65 Shaw, Dagger John , 137, 342-60. 66 Ibid., 361-68. 67 Spalding, Martin John Spalding , 131-2, 140; Spalding, Premier See , 198. 68 Spalding, Martin John Spalding , 138, 141. 69 Ibid., 167-68, 181. 70 Ibid., 161-62. 71 Hitchcock, Supreme Court 1:21-24. 72 Vincent F. Holden, The Yankee Paul (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Company, 1958); David J. O’Brien, Isaac Hecker (New York: Paulist Press, 1992). 73 O’Brien, Hecker , 7-65, 139, 141, 136, 153, 158. 74 Shaw, Dagger John , 194. 75 Marvin O’Connell, John Ireland and the American Catholic Church (St. Paul, Minn.: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1988), 280. 76 Spalding, Martin John Spalding , 116. 77 O’Brien, Hecker , 109, 118, 128-34, 296-301. 78 O’Brien, Hecker , 284. 74 The Church Universal and the Americanist Movement

79 Joseph McSorley, Father Hecker and His Friends (St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co., 1952). 80 O’Brien, Hecker , 145, 192. 81 Ibid., 234-37. 82 Thomas R. Ryan, Orestes Brownson (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor, 1976); Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Orestes Brownson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1939). 83 O’Brien, Hecker , 246. 84 Ibid., 250, 254. 85 Robert Emmett Curran, Michael Augustine Corrigan and the Shaping of Conservative Catholicism in America (New York: Arno Press, 1978), 171; Richard L. Burtsell, The Diary of Richard L. Burtsell , ed. Nelson J. Callahan (New York: Arno Press, 1978). 86 Spalding, Premier See , 1. 86 Ibid., 155, 92. 87 Spalding, Martin John Spalding , 221-23; Spalding, Premier See , 190. 88 James J. Henessey, The First Council of the Vatican: The American Experience (New York: Herder and Herder, 1963), 9-12. 89 Ibid., 84, 126, 132, 175, 240-42, 259. 90 Ibid., 9, 30. 91 Ibid., 32, 42, 49, 62, 69, 72, 196, 199, 235-37, 244, 252; Spalding, Martin John Spalding , 323. See also Michael V. Gannon, Rebel Bishop: The Life and Era of Augustin Verot (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Company, 1964). Kenrick’s papers were apparently destroyed after his death. 92 Spalding, Premier See , 201-4; Spalding, Martin John Spalding , 286-300; Henessey, First Council , 57, 109, 238. 93 Hennesey, First Council , 9-24, 279-81. 94 Ibid., 329. 95 Spalding, Premier See , 199; Spalding, Martin John Spalding , 251-60. 96 O’Brien, Hecker , 304. 97 Hildegarde Yeager, The Life of James Roosevelt Bayley (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1947). 98 John Tracy Ellis, The Life of James Cardinal Gibbons , 2 vols. (Milwaukee: James Hitchcock 75

Bruce Publishing Company, 1952). 99 McAvoy, Crisis ; Robert D. Cross, The Emergence of Liberal Catholicism in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958); Spalding, Premier See , 258. 100 Curran, Corrigan , 15, 16, 20; Frederuck J. Zwierlein, The Life and Letters of Bishop McQuaid (Rome: Desclee & compagni, 1926), 2:54, 171-84. 101 O’Connell, Ireland , 367, 397. 102 The Memorial Volume: History of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore (Baltimore: Baltimore Publishing Company, 1885), 82-110. 103 Spalding, Premier See , 191, 256, 262; Colman Barry, The Catholic Church and the German Americans (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Company, 953). 104 Spalding, Premier See , 250-59. 105 O’Connell, Ireland , 269-76. 106 James H. Moynihan, The Life of Archbishop John Ireland (New York: Arno Press, 1953), 413. 107 O’Connell, Ireland , 198, 258-62, 293, 306, 310, 322, 331. 108 O’Connell, Ireland , 1; Patrick H. Ahern, The Life of John J. Keane (Milwau- kee: Bruce Publishing Company, 1955), 1; Gerald P. Fogarty, The Vatican and the Americanist Crisis: Denis J. O’Connell (Rome: Università Gregoriana Editrice, 1974), 1; Curran, Corrigan , 1; Zwierlein, McQuaid 1:1. 109 David Francis Sweeney, The Life of John Lancaster Spalding (New York: Herder and Herder, 1965). 110 Colman Barry, The Catholic Church and the German Americans (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Company, 1953), 123. 111 O’Brien, Hecker , 237. 112 Sweeney, Spalding , 123. 113 Spalding, Premier See , 253, 287. 114 Ibid., 285-88. 115 O’Connell, Ireland , 276, 386, 514. 116 Ibid., 276, 283. 117 Ibid., 379-86. 118 Ibid., 61-87. 76 The Church Universal and the Americanist Movement

119 Ibid., 198, 249-50, 395. 120 Ibid., 135-61. 121 Shaw, Dagger John , 308-13. 122 For the United States see Shaughnessy, Immigrant . 123 Hitchcock, Supreme Court 1:33-34. 124 Ibid. 1:29. 125 Ryan, Brownson , 163. 126 Shaw, Dagger John , 141-74. 127 Ward McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction: The Public School in the Politics of the 1870s (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1998), 27-32. 128 O’Brien, Hecker , 305-12. 129 O’Connell, Ireland , 292, 324-8, 358-61, 369. 130 Fogarty, O’Connell , 86. 131 O’Connell, Ireland , 392. 132 Spalding, Premier See , 295. 133 O’Connell, Ireland , 444-55, 478; Moynihan, Ireland , 28. 134 O’Connell, Ireland , 455. 135 Ahern, Keane , 114; O’Connell, Ireland , 487, 509. 136 O’Connell, Ireland , 342; Fogarty, O’Connell , 86. 137 Patrick Ahern, The Catholic University of America, 1887-1896 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1948), 162; O’Connell, Ireland , 432-33, 443, 488-97. 138 O’Connell, Ireland , 348, 398, 484, 488-92, 507; Ahern, Keane , 377; Ellis, Gibbons 2:682; Curran, Corrigan , 368. 139 O’Connell, Ireland , 425-26. 140 Shaw, Dagger John , 279-84. 141 O’Connell, Ireland , 351-55, 364-65, 400. 142 Ibid., 371. 143 Curran, Corrigan , 15-20; Zwierlein, McQuaid 2:171-84. James Hitchcock 77

144 O’Connell, Ireland , 228-34. 145 Stephan Bell, Rebel Priest and Prophet: A Biography of Dr. Edward McGlynn (New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1937). 146 Ibid., 219. 147 Curran, Corrigan , 176, 258; O’Connell, Ireland , 346. 148 Curran, Corrigan , 285, 295. 149 Ahern, Keane , 238, 256. 150 Ibid., 189. 151 Sweeney, Spalding , 213. 152 Cross, Emergence , 44; O’Connell, Ireland , 356, 388. 153 Spalding, Premier See , 268-69; O’Connell, Ireland , 439. 154 Curran, Corrigan , 361-64, 373. 155 Spalding, Premier See , 266. 156 McAvoy, Crisis , 128-36; O’Brien, Hecker , 376-96. 157 McAvoy, Crisis , 128-36. 158 O’Connell, Ireland , 461-66. 159 O’Brien, Hecker , 390-91. 160 Ibid., 353. 161 O’Connell, Ireland , 388; R. Scott Appleby, Church and Age Unite! The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992). 162 Fogarty, O’Connell , 279. 163 O’Connell, Ireland , 568. 164 Ibid., 540, 588. 165 Ibid., 193-94. 166 Ibid., 540. 167 Fogarty, O’Connell , 304. 168 Sweeney, Spalding , 182. 169 John Ratté, Three Modernists:Alfred Loisy, George Tyrrell, William L. Sullivan (New York: Catholic Book Club, 1967). 78 The Church Universal and the Americanist Movement

170 Cohalan, Popular History, 190-94. 171 O’Brien, Hecker , 291. 172 McSorley, Hecker , 152. 173 Shea, Carroll , 460-72. “For All Who Live in a Strange Land”: Reflections on Being Catholic in America

Glenn W. Olsen University of Utah, Salt Lake City

VERY SUNDAY among the petitions offered at Mass at my parish church, typically following supplications for refugees Eand immigrants, is a prayer “for all who live in a strange land.” In its most obvious sense, this is a prayer for those who have come to the United States from somewhere else, and are somewhat disoriented by what they find. Acknowledging Archbishop Chaput’s presence, we might add that even if someone’s ancestors came so long ago that memory fails and we call them indigenous, that does not make the country in which they now live less strange. Although over the generations many have become familiar with American ways, from the first the American Church has been composed of immigrants, of people who probably at least initially felt themselves living in a strange land. These have always been divided on the question of inculturation, of how much of American culture they should adopt, implicitly at the expense of either giving up old cultural habits or blending old and new, and how much they should resist. Probably a majority of those who have come to America have wanted to appear to be good Americans, and a minority have significantly feared the larger American culture’s possible negative influence on their Catholicism. The bishops have been similarly divided. Some, such as John Ireland (1838-1918), are well known for their positions, in his case belief in the desirability of thorough assimilation of immigrants to America because of, he thought, the 80 Reflections on Being Catholic in America broad-ranging compatibility between Catholicism and American culture. Bishop Ireland was not of the opinion that a position such as his compromised his faith or let American culture call the tune. On the contrary, when push came to shove, with Testem Benevolentiae he condemned “Americanism.” 1 Others were more nuanced than Ireland, for instance the Do- minican Thomas Langdon Grace, also, beginning in 1859, bishop of St. Paul, who developed a thoughtful form of a position which did not want wholesale acceptance of American ways. He worried about the uncritical allegiance to the Democratic party of so many immigrants, saying: “preserve your independence, and do not become the tools of bold and intriguing men.” 2 Although an admirer of the U.S. Constitution and a patriot, Grace thought that Catholics should “never consent to sink or sacrifice [their rights] in the interests of any political organization.” 3 I want here to dwell on the strangeness of being a Catholic in America. How strange this has been has varied over time. Rightly or wrongly, in the Kennedy years many Catholics thought they had achieved acceptance by the larger culture, and found themselves hardly alienated from that culture. 4 Many read – or were taught to read – Vatican II as a break with the inherited Catholic past and an acceptance of an American view on various issues. 5 This was a perspective found beyond the United States, and I still remember walking in the 1960s down Via Conciliazione to see my first of many posters showing “I due seminatori,” John XXIII and JFK, walking down the rows of a field casting seed. Of course, for some it turned out that this moment of good feelings promoted by “updat- ing” was quite short. In the United States, after Roe v. Wade , many had second thoughts. Still, secularization, that is accepting the ways of the saeculum , proceeded apace. For many religion no longer stood at the center of their lives; or, to put it another way, their religion was little more than devotion to America, sometimes called civil religion. Some sort of parallel weakening of faith was found Glenn W. Olsen 81 elsewhere in the First World, and seemed almost to define this world. 6 Down to the present, tradition-minded people walk around in a state of shock. Martin Amis writes of one of his characters, “We live half our lives in shock, he thought. And it’s the second half.” 7 Yet in recent years observers note new movements in the Church, sometimes attributed to the influence of the papacy of John Paul II and the coming to adulthood of Catholics who had no experience of the pre-Vatican II years. At least some recent surveys suggest that today there is new appreciation of the place of religion, including Catholicism, in human life. A recent study of how people in my own field (historians) identify themselves, that is, of what specialties they look to in identifying themselves, shows that things have shifted dramatically over the length of my professional career. Recent interest in religion manifests itself in the fact that whereas as recently as 1992 only about 4 percent of historians saw religious history as their primary interest, today it surpasses all other categories with which a historian might identify. 8 Just as the social historians who came to dominate historical studies in the years following my own reception of the Ph.D., many of them antireligious or thinking that religion is at the periphery of “real” life, are aging and disappearing, religious historians are young and increasing. To the discipline of history no more than to life, it appears, does the idea that the world is in general secularizing apply. 9 At this convention three years ago, John F. Crosby, in treating assimilation, noted that, whether we like it or not, assimilation is always going on. 10 In a book published a few years earlier, the late Remí Brague had made a similar point in regard to Western civilization itself. 11 Perhaps more than any other culture, this has been one turned outward, assimilating the cultures before and around it. More recently Keith Thomas has stressed the power of what is sometimes innocently called fashion – the accommodation of individual preferences to communal guidelines – and how powerful 82 Reflections on Being Catholic in America on a larger scale the commercial imperative that has shaped Western life for centuries has been. 12 The question then is not whether there will be assimilation or acculturation, but whether these can be turned to good ends. Let me develop a bit my observations about how “accommodating” humans are. In my parish we have a book club. Some time ago we read Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader , which tells a story placed in the Nazi period. At one point in our discussion I made the remark that I was always taken aback by people critical of how the average German or Italian behaved during the war, as if such critics would have themselves acted differently. I just assume that my first concern would also have been to save my own skin. In explaining this I made another offhand remark to the effect that all of us confront everyday evil in, say, our jobs, remarking that in my own one had to plow through the levels of deceit present in, for instance, departmental meetings. Someone, completely missing the point, and thinking I must be deeply unhappy, asked where I worked, clearly intending to extend sympathy to me. In answering the question, I said that the point was that everyone in the room had an experience of evil just by the fact of being alive. And it did not follow that because a person saw humans for what they are, that that person was unhappy. I remember that once one of The New York Times religion columnists, having heard me give a little disquisition on the human condition, remarked over cocktails that he found gaiety in someone so pessimistic incongruous. I told him – he was a Catholic – that the combination of so-called pessimism and happiness – joy is the preferred word – was normal in Catholics, or at least to be expected. A few months later our book club took up Elie Wiesel’s Night , and in reading François Mauriac’s foreword to it, I found a good example of how a Catholic could be fooled by the modern world. I could see how Wiesel and Mauriac could have a natural affinity for each other, for both seemed to me rather naive. To stay with Mauriac, in his foreword he describes the conversation on his first Glenn W. Olsen 83 meeting with Wiesel. At this meeting Mauriac recounted to Wiesel the day in Paris during the Occupation when his wife came home and described having seen cattle cars loaded with Jewish children departing from Austerlitz station. Mauriac says this was before they knew of the Nazis’ extermination methods. Then he writes:

I believe that on that day, I first became aware of the mystery of the iniquity whose exposure marked the end of an era and the beginning of another. The dream conceived by Western man in the eighteenth century, whose dawn he thought he had glimpsed in 1789, and which until August 2, 1914, had become stronger with the advent of the Enlightenment and scientific discoveries – that dream finally vanished for me before those trainloads of small children. 13

I suppose a reading could be given to this passage which makes the earlier Mauriac sound less naive, but my point is that this is just an example of how we all tend to “accommodation,” to taking on the color of the world around us, even if our religion should warn us that we are not made for that world. I would use such observations about how “accommodating” humans are to stand with those who see the necessity of building social thought around a doctrine of the mediocre, around those of us who in our everyday lives do not seem saints, but “middling.” I want a system of government which both recognizes the differences among humans, that is, that by nature we are in every measurable way unequal, and the fact that most of us are in some sense “in the middle.” 14 This mediocrity is one of the things that inclines humans to assimilation. Self-knowledge alone should tell us that our nature is to accommodate ourselves to the world around us, to be “fashion- able,” and, once the world of commerce has developed, to seek short-term gratification. Few can resist such siren calls. Saying that, I have to admit that yes, the more radical one’s Christianity is, the more one actually desires to be a saint rather than mediocre, the 84 Reflections on Being Catholic in America more likely it is that one will be in tension with one’s society and feel a stranger. If one really wants beauty and truth in the public order, one is going to experience a great deal of pain. Let me elaborate. In my recent book, The Turn to Transcendence , I accept John Lukacs’s argument that we are living at the end of the bourgeois age of print culture, symphonies, piano lessons, and the use of education to encourage linear or logical thinking. 15 A new visual or oral culture built around the internet and TV, and filling the vacuum left by the decline of vocabulary and attention to the parts of speech, has arrived. Yet I also praise those who have fought and are fighting against an asphyxiating immanentism in favor of some idea of transcendence which might include things which lead to a sense of transcendence such as chant, historic polyphony, retention of Latin, and church decoration built around portrayal of the communion of the saints. 16 It would seem that these things work against one another. If the bourgeois age is ending, and with it some of the forms of literacy out of which came much of, for instance, the great music of the Church, what is the point of wanting to encourage any longer arts whose first goals historically were to worship and glorify God? How can we continue a music based on the sophisticated traditions of the past, when our schools turn out students with hardly any knowledge of or sympathy for past practice, whose experience of music at best is such TV programs as “Glee”? What, in the light of the new oral culture that seems to be upon us, are we to do? I presume that in the first instance our answer must be the same as that given by Romano Guardini when surveying “the end of the modern world.” We must be faithful, come what may, and aid those not very conscious of their final end and dignity. But we should always remember that if the Church itself is forever assimilating, its very raison d’être is mission or an outward movement of imparting itself to others in which all cultures receive a Christian inspiration. I will return to this point in my conclusion. Glenn W. Olsen 85

Our answer must be put in more than generalities. First, as to the liturgy, clearly the globalization of the Church has brought the Church into contact with liturgical traditions which are in some measure not European. We have all seen Cardinal Arinze swaying at Mass. Even within one country, ours, there is much variation. The rhythms of the choir in St. Patrick’s in New York are not the same as those found in Corpus Christi (Texas). In my own church in Salt Lake, though the Latin core of the Roman Mass stands forth in all Masses, the 11:00 Mass, with its continuation of the choir school traditions of especially England, is different from the 3:00 Spanish Mass, with its Spanish choir and percussion. I know there are terrible abuses, but in the best instances we might see the variation in music as variation on a shared rite going back to the ancient Church. John L. Allen suggests that the comeback of the Latin Mass being experienced around the world shows that, though Catholics speak many languages, they share a Latin Mass which few view as a form of European cultural imperialism. 17 Prayer “for all who live in a strange land” is not simply prayer for immigrants, for as a venerable theme has it, we all live in a regio dissimilitudo , “in a strange land.” We are all strangers and on pilgrimage. In an important respect, Christianity makes – or should make – one ill at ease in all lands. For instance, thoughtful Chris- tians have always reflected on what it means to be a peacemaker in this world. 18 Some of the most striking examples of this come from the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, for instance in attempts by knights to justify their form of life. From deep in the Middle Ages reflective warriors wondered whether the life of the knight and of the Christian were compatible. Such reflection was embodied in many medieval male saints’ lives, and in great works of literature such as Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival . The concern was not the modern, banal one of wondering whether one can use force at all, summed up in the contemporary indiscriminating use of the word “violence,” but the Augustinian query as to what obligation 86 Reflections on Being Catholic in America one has to struggle for a world ordered to justice. Does this include willingness to go to war or the obligation to fight? The analysis of the late-fourteenth-century English knight Sir John Clanvowe, in his The Two Ways is particularly striking. Rather than argue, as most knights had, that the chivalric and Christian lives easily support one another, Sir John stressed the contrast between the pure life asked of the Christian, and the devastations wreaked by the knightly life with its killings, wasting of properties, and great expenditure on food and drink. His wondering about the liceity of the knight’s life is of the order of Christ’s wondering whether a rich man can be saved, or what a recent book has revealed about the conflict between the desire for success and faithfulness to religion found among some antebellum Christians. 19 To stay with the late Middle Ages, though most had admired the social heights the knight achieves, for Sir John it was meekness that Christianity asks for, simple clothes and food, and suffering the wrongs done to oneself. Presumably, giving a paper at a scholarly convention to broadcast one’s ideas is not on Clanvowe’s list of pure activities. Christ provides the example, suffering worldly scorn and not living by the false standards of human society. A recent interpreter comments that implementing Clanvowe’s ideas would “require the crumbling of social hierarchy in general, and would tear apart the connective tissue, destroy the carefully calibrated compromises, and break bridges between paradoxical borrowings from different sets of religious ideas.” 20 For it is not simply the havoc that the fighting ways of the knight visits on society that Clanvowe opposes, but his very valuing of a proud demeanor in life. The Christian is called to a stable practice of humility. 21 Certainly there must be a conflict between Clanvowe’s views and those of our contemporaries who tell us that being American and Catholic, or Catholic and prosperous, is easy, that these things easily fit together. We might be tempted to dismiss Clanvowe as a proto- Puritan, but there is an obvious sense in which Christianity Glenn W. Olsen 87 tenaciously pursued undermines the conventions of this world. In The Turn to Transcendence I defend some unpopular ideas, such as, on the one hand, the inadequacy of social egalitarianism and, on the other, the naturalness and necessity of various forms of hierarchy, that is, of a hierarchical society. I suggest that in principle democracy is a bad idea, at many levels. A recent review of a book on the early American republic observes, without asking why, that “America would never again have a generation of leaders of the intellectual caliber of the Founders.” 22 Presumably this was not because subsequent Americans were born dumber. Might it not have to do with various forms of elitism the Founding generation embodied, subsequently lost? Or even with their religion? 23 In any case the story is not over, but enough of it is so that we can appreciate such remarks as that of Molly Haskel to the effect that “the Internet is democracy’s revenge on democracy.” 24 Certainly some of what I present in my book goes against the prescriptions given for the ills of our society by a range of thinkers running from right to left. 25 Implicitly I observe that natural truths which any person should be able to recognize have in our society been jettisoned. And I am afraid that Catholicism has been complicit in this, that is, that Catholics have pushed for or assumed ideas of equality which make a decent human life difficult. Instead of grace completing nature, mistaken notions thought to come from Christian revelation have undermined nature. I argued that utopianism is found all over the American landscape in demanding things the political order can not deliver, and that many Catholics thought amongst the most enlightened have been complicating our human situation. On the question of democracy, I have defended the idea that democracy is not approved by the Catholic Church as the best form of human government. Had the late Richard John Neuhaus not had such an influence on American Catholic life, I would have thought this a position any moderately informed Catholic would not be tempted by. 26 I note that even a man of the left such as John L. 88 Reflections on Being Catholic in America

Allen, Jr., agrees with me. 27 That said, Allen rightly points out that while Catholicism is neutral about the various forms of government, in fact “the Church has moved steadily closer to asserting that democracy not only is consistent with the common good but is the best way to organize social life.” Allen unfortunately is unclear about what he means by democracy, but I would agree with him that the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church , paragraph 395 – “The subject of political authority is the people considered in its entirety as those who have sovereignty” – seems to throw former caution to the winds when it states: “Although this right is operative in every state and in every kind of political regime, a democratic form of government, due to its procedures for verification, allows and guarantees its fullest application.” 28 I take it that Allen uses a more expansive definition of democracy than do I, but the Compendium ’s statement only seems right to me if by democracy we understand the rule of law, that is, a fixed constitutional regime. This sometimes, but by no means always, was the sense of various documents issued in the time of John Paul II. But, as I have pointed out in my book, if all we mean by democracy is the rule of law, we are not necessarily talking about democracy as government by the people at all, but only of one of the elements desirable in any form of political life. Of course my position goes far beyond correcting the record about what the Church teaches as presented by Neuhaus. With Robert P. Kraynak I do not think democracy in principle a good form of government at all, and think that typically promotion of democracy at the least involves a certain intellectual laziness and lack of precision about what is being promoted (see chapter six of my book). I do not want to concentrate here on what in any case would not be much more than invocation of the ancient and medieval discussion of the question of the best form of government, and of the prudential questions involved in such discussion. Among the reasons that such words as “peace” and “violence” are so loosely used in our Glenn W. Olsen 89 times is insufficient attention to what used to be called “the order of justice” (although I would not necessarily want to defend how that “order” was understood). Because I hang around with the Com- munio gang, I am particularly sensitive to the possibility that by seeing the centrality of love in Christian thought, I might inadvertently undermine natural structures. I do not mean the free-standing natural structures of a good deal of Catholic thought before the impact of Henri de Lubac’s Surnaturel , but structures which possess a certain clarity aside from Christian revelation. 29 But there is an opposite side of the coin. If grace can be pursued in a way that undermines nature, what of the reverse? The question I want to raise here is whether my defense of such naturally justifiable structures as “monarchy” blocks the way to taking the words of Jesus seriously? What is my response to an ardent Christian such as Clanvowe? Are we obliged – out of what I would call an excess of charity – to be democrats? Over the centuries much has been written about such questions, which as I have just said used to be talked about under the heading of the relation of justice and charity. I have the impression that many today hold to a “cheap Christianity” in which they do the intellectually and morally lazy thing of giving lip service to the most demanding forms of utopianism – no more war, no more poverty, no more capital punishment, opacity in all our deliberations and transactions – while in fact not bothering with the most elementary acts to advance justice in this world. Catholicism should have saved the world from belief in progress, but of course instead Catholicism, especially American Catholicism, rather mindlessly assimilating, has been remade by this belief. It is possible, as John L. Allen has also suggested, that in the near future the Catholic view of original sin will have a comeback – not so much, Allen thinks, to deal with the horrors of the twentieth century, but as a way of preserving a sense of human freedom in a world ever more genetically determined. 30 That is, just as Augustine showed how we are both heavily determined by our personal histories and 90 Reflections on Being Catholic in America environment, he also showed that no amount of such constraint eliminates free will. Maybe the advance of genetics will force us to have similar thoughts. When I was a younger man, my friends and I sometimes played the game of “where would you live if you could live anywhere?” I never had a straightforward answer in that game because, of course, all countries and cultures offer advantages and disadvantages. Further, as a 1659 ruling of the Propaganda Fidei stated in regard to missionizing: 31

What could be more absurd than to transport France, Spain or It- aly or some other European country to China? Do not introduce all that to them, but only the faith. It is the nature of men to love and treasure above everything else their own country and that which belongs to it. In consequence, there is no stronger cause for alienation and hate than an attack on local customs, especially when these go back to a venerable antiquity.

So I knew that wherever I lived there would be people much attached to their own culture, and things I liked and things I disliked. In a sense what the question my friends and I were interested in, when we asked where we would most like to live, could be cast as a weighing of the distinctive goods and evils of this country against that. In important ways all countries fall so short of the Kingdom of God that sometimes where one lives is almost a matter of indifference. Sometimes, to express my discontent with our times in general, I decided that I should think of myself as I imagined St. Boniface thought of himself, as a missionary to a very benighted culture. St. Boniface had to deal with people who could not read; I had to deal with people who no longer read. You understand this is a game, and in a game you can simplify. After my book was in press, a work of generally solid journalism appeared (to which I have already referred), John Allen’s The Future Church . Allen, a Catholic liberal writing for the the National Glenn W. Olsen 91

Catholic Reporter , believes that one of the notes of the Church in the twenty-first century will be an uncompromising nature. 32 In my book I did not engage in much prognostication, but did argue that this, understood as I understand it, should be the course the Church should pursue. Allen also believes that, as what he calls “Southern Catholicism” comes to have a larger and larger place in the Church, there will be growing pressure for inculturation, “allowing the faith to be shaped by the local culture.” 33 Again, I have little doubt Allen is right, and in obvious ways, theology aside, there is no way that a global Church can be governed in details from the center, or given much of a common culture. 34 There must be a large place for both the leadership of local churches and cultural variation. 35 Allen also suggests that as Southern Catholicism comes to dominate the Church, there will be a larger place for things which at the present tend to embarrass Northern Catholicism – miracles, healing, and the supernatural among them. 36 Again I think he is right, and in important ways I look forward to this development. In various tirades against the liberal or Whig view of history over the years, I have stressed the large place that disbelief has played in the historical views of even the pious. For us it is very difficult actually to affirm that history is something written by God rather than men, or to say that evil has a palpable presence in human history. Many of us have been present for sermons in which, against clear statements of scripture about the presence of God in history, priests have told us that the AIDS epidemic is not a punishment for evil. I, who have had nothing to say on this one way or the other, have always wondered how these priests could be so certain about this, and why they do not explain how their views relate either to many scriptural passages or to many centuries of Christian history. It will take some doing for Northern Christians to shift from the effective denial that God is the Lord of History to a Southern perspective in which, for instance, evil is a real presence in daily life. But in important ways I look forward to turning from the Enlightenment universe of Northern Christianity 92 Reflections on Being Catholic in America to the religious universe of the South. Obviously there are many things about “folk religion” about which we must be careful, but how refreshing to live in a world in which people actually believe. Allen suggests that in the world that is coming, the theology of suffering will have a comeback. 37 This touches on what was said above in regard to Weisel and Mauriac. Much of the modern world does everything it can to avoid suffering. Catholics, on the other hand, if not exactly seeking suffering out, have generally understood it as they have poverty or mediocrity, as something which cannot be eliminated from life and which has its own purposes. Such things are not to be removed from life at all costs. Above all, if the defense of moral absolutes causes suffering, that is to be accepted. For a Catholic, part of the strangeness of living in America is living in a land only superficially touched by natural law teaching. 38 This was true from the first, and of course is closely related to the importance of Calvinism in American history. Even a great thinker of the colonial period like Jonathan Edwards, who on the point of the presence of God in human history was on the side of the angels, gave so much weight to God’s “anger” in his message, and in his scientific thought was too co-opted by Newtonianism, that he little worked out what the natural things are that a Christian must respect. America was much bolstered in the early years of the American republic by the presence of evangelical Protestantism, the influence of which is visible in all kinds of ways still today. But again this was a form of Christianity rather hollow when it comes to the natural law. When someone favorable to religion today wants to defend some bizarre practice, such as killing chickens in one’s rites, the defense very well may take the line that religious belief per se must be respected. Of course in a national experience properly rooted in the natural law this would not be so. In a Catholic position, reason and revelation must be in harmony, and one has no obligation to respect a religious belief which is in opposition to reason. It is understood that some of the good is known by “reason alone,” and Glenn W. Olsen 93 that therefore not all one’s ideas about the good come from revelation. Perhaps John Allen is right when he suggests that in the coming years there may be a revival of natural law thinking as a way of dealing with, for instance, the difficult issues present in the biotech revolution or environmental questions. 39 I would have to stress, however, that, taking American culture as a whole, this would not be so much a revival as almost a first instance of use of the natural law. Certainly John Courtney Murray was right to underline the various surrogates for a full-bodied natural law teaching present in American history from the first, but it seems to me that it also has to be said that, for instance, exposition of the reasoning behind classic natural law positions never very fully entered the curricula of American public schools, or ever has been much of, say, military discussion of questions such as whether Nagasaki should have been bombed. Most acknowledge the presence of a theory of natural law or natural rights in the thought of the American Founders, but as one of many other ingredients, including the pronounced presence of an American Protestant evangelicalism which, while sometimes speaking of “Nature’s God,” tended not to mean the same thing by such terms as had pre-Enlightenment Christianity. 40 What we are to make of this? Some see America as quite Christian throughout most of its history, and only relatively recently becoming unmoored, perhaps in the Supreme Court decisions of the last couple generations. Others note the degree to which the Christianity of the Revolutionary or Founding period had already imbibed the focus of the Enlightenment on “liberty.” How compatible the Founding American premises with Catholic political thought? Exacerbated for our generation by the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre, the debate continues. In The Turn to Transcendence , though of course acknowledging a Christian presence from the first, I essentially agree with MacIn- tyre. My emphasis is on how strong the ordering of so much to 94 Reflections on Being Catholic in America liberté was from the Revolutionary period, and therefore on the fact that the Founding American premises, though coming from many sources, fused around liberal ideas which had been reshaping Christianity itself. While of course there are degrees here, and, for instance, the mid-nineteenth-century slippage from a vocabulary of republicanism to one of democracy is only one of many indications of a remaking of American self-understanding, my argument is and remains that the commitment to an ideology of liberty was there from the beginning of the uniting of the States. Undoubtedly the Supreme Court from the 1940s rendered an already liberal (= liberty- valuing) regime even more liberal than it had been, but from the first our Founding beliefs included the possibility of the various unravelings or workings out of the implications of placing a modern understanding of liberty (freedom from , stressing individual autonomy), as opposed to Augustinian one (freedom for , stressing adherence to the good, true, and beautiful as freedom’s goal), at the center of national experience. 41 Remember, for Augustine self-will was antisocial. By our so valuing freedom according to its modern understanding, we make a proper social life virtually impossible. In his book Allen suggests that we may in the near future expect a redefinition of the cultural wars. 42 In fact, this has been happening. In my book I noted that, for instance, significant elements of the so- called right are hardly interested in conservation at all, and that significant elements of the left worry about the implications of globalization for the common good. 43 The terms “liberal” and “conservative” have never been very good for characterizing political positions, and this will remain so. In such a situation, it may not be so necessary to explain to Americans, who as MacIntyre has said have been so much a part of the liberal tradition that they hardly can understand a position which does not value liberty above all else, why the pope is neither of the right nor of the left. 44 The implications of globalization for traditional forms of government are both unclear and of the highest moment. Some argue Glenn W. Olsen 95 that such things as the growth of multinational corporations and the Internet place severe limitations on those who would govern from a center, whether the center is a national capital or the U.N., and it seems to me they are right. This seems to bear the distinct possibility of a more frightening future than our present, one that the political process as usually understood can even less control. Though politics has never been particularly rational, we seem to face a world become even more chaotic than at present. Again John Allen has thought hard about this, suggesting that what likely is coming in reaction is the growth of networking, that is, of horizontal social organizations which constantly form temporary alliances with one another in order to deal with specific problems. 45 It is indeed unlikely that some center will control worldwide processes very effectively, but perhaps networking, very demanding of the conscientious, more corresponds to the world as it now is. Allen suggests that the encouragement and use of such horizontal groupings could be understood as the development in a new direction of the doctrine of subsidiarity. One final comment on how enterprises such as an expanded doctrine of subsidiarity could articulate the relevance of Catholic social teaching in an ever more complicated world. Henri de Lubac, and Benedict XVI after him, have intended by their theology of communio a critique of both the abstract communalism of the secular humanisms, and the false piety of so much Christian individualism. 46 By returning to a view of the Eucharist in which it is seen as giving the Church its existence, rather than being some freestanding practice in which the goal is “my joy” rather than “our joy,” de Lubac and Benedict have given us an idea of communion in Christ which should be attractive to the larger world. Protestantism gave us an individualism of “God and the soul,” and Catholicism now for many has developed its own forms of individualism, of for instance “me and the Mass,” in which the necessary relation between Eucharist and the continuing life of the Church – that is, everything that goes under the term “ecclesiology” – is unclear. What we need 96 Reflections on Being Catholic in America is to explain the way in which the legitimate desires of many outside the Church, as for a social life which is not simply collective but personal, can be realized by an adequate doctrine of human and divine communion.

Glenn W. Olsen is Professor of Medieval History emeritus at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. He has published in ancient and medieval intellectual and ecclesiastical history as well as the history of sexuality and various topics in contemporary theology, philosophy, and political thought. His most recent book is The Turn to Transcendence: The Role of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010). Two other books are forthcoming: Of Sodomites, Androgynes, and Hermaphrodites: Sodomy in the Age of Peter Damian (Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto), and On the Road to Emmaus: The Catholic Dialogue with America and Modernity (The Catholic University of America Press). He has received Fulbright, ACLS, and NEH grants.

1 D. Q. McInerny, review, in Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly 32, n. 4 (Winter 2009): 45-48, at 48, of Marvin R. O’Connell, Pilgrims to the Northland: The Archdiocese of St. Paul, 1840-1962 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). In general see James T. Fisher, Communion of Immigrants: A History of Catholics in America , new ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Cf. on many of the themes taken up in the present paper, Francis Cardinal George, The Difference God Makes: A Catholic Vision of Faith, Communion, and Culture (New York: Crossroad, 2009); and James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). The present essay can not take up the problem of inculturation on a global scale, but see the interesting remarks about what form inculturation might take in the future in India or China in John L. Allen, Jr., The Future Church: How Ten Trends are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 365-67. 2 Connell, Pilgrims to the Northland , 166. My The Turn to Transcendence: The Role of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010), is only one of a burgeoning literature in defense of a public religious presence. Glenn W. Olsen 97

3 Ibid., 166, with McInerny, review, in Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly 32, n. 4 (Winter 2009): 45-47, at 46. 4 Russell Shaw, “John F. Kennedy’s Political Legacy,” Our Sunday Visitor 99, n. 10 (July 4, 2010): 9-12, traces back to Kennedy the belief of some Catholic politicians that they can ignore Church teaching. 5 There is a useful review of recent books on interpreting Vatican II by Russell Brewer in The Catholic Social Science Review 15 (2010): 255-59; and see Jared Wicks, “Further Light on Vatican II,” The Catholic Historical Review 45 (2009): 546-69. 6 See Gianni Vattimo and René Girard, Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue , ed. Pierpaolo Antonello, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 7 Quoted in Edmund White, “More Lad Than Bad,” The New York Review of Books (hereafter, NYRB ) 57, n. 11 (June 24, 2010): 16-17, at 17. 8 Robert B. Townsend, “A New Found Religion? The Field Surges among AHA Members,” Perspectives in History 47, n. 9 (December 2009): 6-8, at 6. 9 Ibid., 7. 10 John F. Crosby, “How the Gospel Encounters the Culture in the Catholic University: Some Lessons from John Henry Newman,” in The Idea of the Catholic University , ed. Kenneth D. Whitehead (Scranton, Pa.: University of Scranton Press, 2009), 13-24. 11 Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2002). 12 The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Cf. for recent America, Christopher Shannon, Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, the Individual, and Culture in American Social Thought, from Veblen to Mills (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 13 Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Hill and Wang, 1958; trans. 2006), xviii. 14 Norbert Bolz, Diskurs über die Ungleichheit: Ein Anti-Rousseau (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2009). 15 Jason Epstein, “Publishing: The Revolutionary Future,” NYRB 57, n. 4 (March 11, 2010): 4-6, is one attempt to take the story beyond Lukacs. Epstein believes printed books will always remain. 16 On the nature of liturgy, see, in addition to my Turn to Transcendence , Nathan D. Mitchell, The Mystery of the Rosary: Marian Devotion and the Reinvention of Catholicism (New York: New York University Press, 2009). See further on 98 Reflections on Being Catholic in America

transcendence, José Granados, “Love and the Organism: A Theological Contribution to the Study of Life,” Communio 32 (2005): 434-71, at 452-53. 17 Future Church , 42. 18 Richard T. Hughes, Christian America and the Kingdom of God , preface by Brian McLaren (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2009), is an uneven exposition of the place of the idea of the Kingdom of God in American history. Hughes partly confuses the Christian idea of peace with contemporary secular understandings, but in arguing the gap between American Christian profession and practice and attacking the notion that America is a Christian nation, makes many good points. 19 Lorman A. Ratner, Paula T. Kaufman, and Dwight L. Teeter, Jr., Paradoxes of Prosperity: Wealth-Seeking Versus Christian Values in Pre-Civil War America (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2009). 20 Richard W. Kaeuper, Holy Warrior: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 202-205, at 205. 21 Julia I. Miller and Laurie Taylor-Mitchell, “The Ognissanti Madonna and the Humiliati Order in Florence,” in The Cambridge Companion to Giotto , ed. Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 157- 75, esp. 167-72. 22 Susan Dunn, “When America Was Transformed,” NYRB 57, n. 5 (March 25, 2010): 29-31, at 29, noting, 30, that the equality of the early republic was more psychological than economic. 23 On the question of how religious the Founding generations were, and on the nature of their religion, including their strong anti-Catholicism, and on their views of the place of religion in society, see Ronald B. Flowers, Melissa Rogers, and Steven K. Green, Religious Freedom and the Supreme Court (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2008), and Lorri Glover, “Faith and the Founding of Virginia,” Historically Speaking 11, n. 1 (June 2010): 38-40. 24 Quoted in Armond White, “Do Movie Critics Matter?” First Things , n. 201 (April 2010): 16-18, at 17. 25 Among those on the left, Tony Judt, who, while seeing that a core of shared views has almost disappeared from our society, continues to resist any thought that such a core could be anything but secular. See Tony Judt, “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?” NYRB 56, n. 20 (December 17, 2009). More generally, see Richard A. Posner, The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). 26 See my “The Catholic Moment,” Communio 15 (1988): 474-87, and “The ‘Catholic Moment’ and the Question of Inculturation,” in Catholicity and the New Glenn W. Olsen 99

Evangelization , Proceedings from the Seventeenth Convention of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, Corpus Christi, Texas, 1994 (Steubenville, Ohio: Franciscan University Press, 1995), 17-54. For a current example of democratic capitalism working against the rule of law, see Raymond Baker and Eva Joly, “Illicit Money: Can It Be Stopped?” NYRB 56, n. 19 (December 3, 2009): 61-64, at 62. 27 Future Church , 363-64. 28 Quotations from Allen, Future Church , 363. On the birth of the modern sovereign state, see Bernard Bourdin, The Theological-Political Origins of the Modern State: The Controversy between James I of England and Cardinal Bellarmine , trans. Susan Pickford (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010). On the definition of democracy, see Kenneth L. Grasso, “John Paul II on Modernity, Freedom, and the Metaphysics of the Person,” The Catholic Social Science Review 15 (2010): 15-34, at 20. For definition of the common good, see Patrick Riordan, A Grammar of the Common Good: Speaking of Globalization (London: Continuum, 2008). 29 Of the excellent articles in Communio 35 (2008), see especially on the mistaken ways the relation of grace and nature have been construed, the translation of Henri de Lubac’s “The Total Meaning of Man and the World,” 613-41. 30 Future Church , 252-53. 31 Ibid., 444. 32 Ibid., as at 5. 33 Ibid., 10, 41-42. 34 That said, Walter Brandmüller, Light and Shadows: Church History amid Faith, Fact and Legend , trans. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 73-84, esp. 81, shows how central the papacy has sometimes been to revival and the various ecclesiastical wakenings which have followed times of decline. 35 Future Church , as at 20-23, 41. 36 Future Church , 26-27. For background see Robert Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 37 Future Church , 249-50, on the following. 38 Russell Hittinger, The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in a Post- Christian World (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2003), quotes some of the important American texts on natural law. 39 Future Church , 243-44, 307, 321-23, 362-63, 445. Cf. Hadley Arkes, Constitutional Illusions and Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural 100 Reflections on Being Catholic in America

Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Grasso, “John Paul II,” 21-22. 40 Rethinking Rights: Historical Political and Philosophical Perspectives , ed. Bruce P. Frohen and Kenneth Grasso (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2009), treats the history and nature of “rights.” Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), considers the history of the meaning of rights; argues for the necessity of a framework of rights for modern political entities; and remarks on the limitations of the historical analysis of Brian Tierney and the philosophical analysis of Alasdair MacIntyre. See also John Rist, What is Truth? From the Academy to the Vatican (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 41 E. D. Hirsch, Jr., “How to Save the Schools,” NYRB 57, n. 8 (May 13, 2010): 16-19, treats the use of education in U.S. history to foster the ideal of liberty. In general see Norbert Bolz, Die ungeliebte Freiheit (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010). 42 Future Church , 250-51. 43 A social democrat like Tony Judt, though in my opinion having little sense of how his own position stands in the way of the shared life in society he wishes, bleakly but rightly observes that our sense of collective purpose now exists of little more than the pursuit of material self-interest. See “Ill Fares the Land,” NYRB 57, n. 7 (April 29, 2009): 17-23. 44 To MacIntyre’s many books, cf. Shannon, Conspicuous Criticism . 45 Future Church , 264-65, 267, 284-88, 292-93. 46 This and the following is a reflection on Aaron Riches, “Church, Eucharist, and Predestination in Barth and De Lubac: Convergence and Divergence in Communio ,” Communio 35 (2008): 565-98, at 594-95. Americanism and Catholic Intellectual Life

Christopher Shannon Christendom College

NLY A LITTLE MORE than a year ago, the American Catholic intellectual community was abuzz with the controversy over OPresident Barack Obama’s scheduled visit to the University of Notre Dame to receive an honorary degree in law and deliver the university’s commencement address. Many orthodox Catholics were outraged that Notre Dame would confer such an honor on a political figure so notorious for his public support of abortion. Coming so soon after Notre Dame’s controversial decision to allow the performance of the “Vagina Monologues,” the Obama visit seemed proof beyond all doubt that Notre Dame had sold its soul to the cultural liberalism that dominates secular higher education in America. Those whose memory extends beyond last year should recall that in 2001, Notre Dame conferred a similar honor on Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, a figure who for the two terms of his presidency promoted himself as a defender of cultural conservatism. How to make sense of this? Well, let’s look at what Obama and Bush have in common. Most obviously, they are both presidents of the United States. The politics at play in these presidential invita- tions (there have been about nine of them) is neither liberalism nor conservatism, but Americanism. This Americanism is perhaps something less than the theological heresy condemned by Leo XIII in Testem Benevolentiae , yet certainly something more than the patriotic love of country that no pope has ever denied to Catholic citizens of modern nation states. The Americanism that has afflicted 102 Americanism and Catholic Intellectual Life

Notre Dame and the majority of the American Catholic population is a kind of nationalism that at best refuses to acknowledge any fundamental conflict between Catholicism and the American Way of Life – and at worst, sees the conflict and takes the side of America. What is the American Way of Life that binds George Bush to Barak Obama? It is the way of freedom, understood primarily as the freedom of the individual from external constraint. In George Bush’s second inaugural address, he proclaimed: “The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” Let us for the moment pass over the fact that the expansion of freedom served Bush as the rationale for two wars of choice resulting in death of, by the most conservative estimates, some 100,000 civilians. The statement itself stands alone as blasphemous. Jesus Christ is the best, really the only, hope for freedom in the world. It will not do to say that Bush was simply speaking in political terms, not religious. In his second inaugural, he invoked the eighteenth-century deist god and proclaimed the spread of eighteenth-century deist freedom was America’s mission to the world. Americanism is, in effect, the original liberation theology, and in that sense, a heresy. Where Jesus Christ says “the Truth will set you free,” America says freedom is the truth. The American Way of Life is the theological language of American Protestant civil religion. Sadly, it is also the language of most American Catholics when they speak in public life. Conservative Catholics tend to follow American conservatism in seeing the market as the privileged institution of freedom; liberal Catholics tend to follow American liberalism in stressing the need for state action to provide the level playing field for individual freedom. The inability of Catholics to think beyond these dominant public alternatives stems in part from a (sometimes willful) misreading of Dignitatis Humanae , yet also reflects a profound alienation from indigenous American Catholic political traditions. I would here like to examine the relationship between Catholicism Christopher Shannon 103 and these two theologies of freedom, and then look at the alternative Catholic politics of community. Before I go any further, I need to say a little more about my use of the term “theology.” Theologians such as John Milbank and William Cavanaugh have argued that for too long historians have viewed the rise of modern political and social theory in terms of secularization, understood as the abandonment of the Christian worldview in favor of some non-Christian, rational science of society. Both Milbank and Cavanaugh see modern social theory rather as a perversion (in the Augustinian sense) or parody of Christian theology. In his essay “The Myth of the State as Saviour,” Cavanaugh has made the case most forcefully in his treatment of modern liberal social contract theory as a heretical “soteriology” (theology of salvation). In biblical soteriology, man was born for communion with God and his fellow man, is everywhere divided, and seeks true communion with God through the Church. Cavanaugh reads social contract theory as a parody of the biblical story of the Garden of Eden, in which the likes of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau create variations on a myth in which man was born free, is everywhere in chains, and seeks freedom through rational, consensual political structures. The state replaces the Church as the ultimate authoritative social institution and either creates a new state religion or simply tolerates a variety of religions so long as they remain private and accept the state as the final public authority. 1 Cavanaugh’s account is provocative, but in a sense, the centuries-long papal suspicion of the modern nation-state stemmed from the popes’ recognition that this new institution posed a theological as well as a political challenge to the Church. With Dignitatis Humanae, the Church finally made its peace with religious pluralism and toleration – but did so on distinctly Catholic grounds. Liberal and conservative Catholics proud of the American role in shaping this document have too often rushed to interpret it as a full-scale endorsement of the U.S. Constitution. It is one thing to 104 Americanism and Catholic Intellectual Life say that Catholics can work with modern pluralistic democracies; it is another to say that religious pluralism is a good thing in itself. Similarly, it is one thing to say that the Founding Fathers’ invocation of natural law provides some point of contact with the Catholic natural law tradition; it is another thing to imply that the Founders were Thomists. The American Catholic engagement with the Founding moved very quickly from affinity to identity, from what we might call inculturation to idolatry. There are others far more qualified than I to speak on Dignitatis Humanae . In dealing with the soteriology of freedom with respect to American politics, I will confine my comments here to what we could call the tradition of the Founding, especially as reflected in the general reverence for the Founding among contemporary conservative Catholics. This reverence suggests something like the medieval Christian idealization of the old Roman Empire, with one important difference: pagan Rome never knew Christianity, while the Enlightenment deists who founded the United States knew Christianity and rejected it for some strong or weak version of Free Masonry. Popes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries condemned Free Masonry with much the same severity they would later direct toward atheistic communism, but this never seems to figure much into conservative Catholic accounts of the Founding. Catholic apologists concede the dangers of Free Masonry in the case of the French Revolution, but then go on to insist on a near ontological distinction between the French Revolution and the American War of Independence. By this story, the Founders were not radical revolutionaries bent on overthrowing all traditional social and political structures, but rather conservatives seeking to defend the traditional rights of Englishmen; moreover, whereas the French Revolution was hostile to religion, the American War of Independence was friendly to it. There is a measure of truth to this story. The American colonists were conservative – but what they were trying to conserve was the political settlement of 1688, the Christopher Shannon 105

Glorious Revolution that drove the legitimate Catholic King James II from the throne and established once for all the dominance of Parliament over the king. Similarly, there is a difference between the French and American revolutions, but one of degree rather than kind. The comparative violence of the French Revolution stems from the desire of the French to accomplish overnight what the English had achieved over the course of roughly 150 years of civil war. Did the French revolutionists assault the Church? Well, the English took care of that back in 1534. Did the French kill a king? Well, the English did that back in 1649. Voltaire himself, in his Letters on England , pointed to eighteenth-century England as the ideal Enlightened society: Parliament had power over the king, no one took religion very seriously, but everyone was very serious about making money. I raise these issues not to condemn any Founder individually, but simply to call attention to the general worldview of the Founders. The Founders shared with Voltaire the view that English liberty of the Glorious Revolution was human freedom per se. Even more troubling for Catholics, Voltaire and the Founders took as an article of faith that the Catholic Church was the greatest enemy of freedom in human history. Here is a sample of this view from the writings of one of the American Founders:

Since the promulgation of christianity, the two greatest systems of tyranny, that have sprung from this original, are the cannon and the feudal law. . . .

By the former of these, the most refined, sublime, extensive, and astonishing constitution of policy, that ever was conceived by the mind of man, was framed by the Romish clergy for the aggrandisement of their own order. All the epithets I have here given to the Romish policy are just: and will be allowed to be so, when it is considered, that they even persuaded mankind to believe, faithfully and undoubtingly, that GOD almighty had intrusted them with the keys of heaven; whose gates they might 106 Americanism and Catholic Intellectual Life

open and close at pleasure. . . . Nay with the mysterious, awful, incomprehensible power of creating out of bread and wine, the flesh and blood of God himself. All these opinions, they were enabled to spread and rivet among the people, by reducing their minds to a state of sordid ignorance and staring timidity; and by infusing into them a religious horror of letters and knowledge. Thus was human nature chained fast for ages, in a cruel, shameful and deplorable servitude. 2

These words come not from a free thinker like Jefferson or Franklin, but from John Adams, generally considered the most conservative of the Founders. Imagine the outcry if a liberal Democrat were to say such a thing today. The foundational presence of anti-Catholicism in American political culture does not bar Catholics from a fruitful engagement with the Founders. The U.S. Constitution is an admirable political achievement that has stood the test of time, but it is only a political document and is philosophically incapable of dealing with the moral and cultural challenges of our present historical moment. Every year at the March for Life I cringe as I hear even Catholic speakers invoke the authority of the Founders against abortion. As partisans of liberty, the Founders were “pro-choice,” but assumed that moral people would make choices acceptable to the moral norms of eighteenth-century British gentry. True, abortion was not among those norms, but the social world of the gentry is gone, and the various philosophical systems that affirmed the norms of that world have all self-deconstructed. The Founders gave us a system of government; we can work with that. They did not, however, give us anything approaching the kind of comprehensive view of human person needed to guide Catholic politics in America. As the U.S. Constitution reflects the soteriology of freedom in politics, so free-market capitalism reflects the soteriology of freedom in economics. This second liberation theology has been a much more divisive force among American Catholics: not only does it separate liberal from conservative Catholics in public life, but it threatens to Christopher Shannon 107 divide conservative Catholics who share a common commitment to orthodox theology (narrowly defined) but cannot come to any agreement on the interpretation of the social teachings of the Church. Conservative Catholic defenders of the free market have to do battle not only with liberal statists, but also with traditionalist Catholics who believe that traditional Catholic theology and liturgy can survive only with the support of stable social structures something like those that existed in traditional agrarian societies. Catholics of good will may legitimately disagree as to whether the state or the free market provides the more just distribution of scarce resources. Conservatives have advanced persuasive critiques of Great Society antipoverty programs, yet even Alan Greenspan has conceded that the free market bears some responsibility for the current worldwide economic collapse. Catholics of good will cannot, however, disagree on matters of anthropology, that is, the understanding of the human person that must inform any just economy. For Catholics, man is made in the image and likeness of God, which means that he is created to know, love, and serve God. As God freely gives his love to us, he asks that we freely give our love to Him; but we cannot properly understand the nature of human freedom apart from its proper end, this loving relationship with the Triune God. Integral to this loving relationship with God is a loving relationship with our fellow man. After God had provided for all of Adam’s material needs in Garden of Eden, he said “it is not good for man to be alone.” He fashioned Eve out of Adam as a suitable partner – suitable in that she is both identical (bone of his bone), yet different (female rather than male). Against this traditional Christian understanding, modern capitalist economic thought detaches man from any particular end and understands human nature primarily in terms of the ability to choose his ends – a moral process figured variously as pursuing one’s own self-interest or maximizing one’s utility. This utility-maximizing individual looks to other individuals not for communion, but for the 108 Americanism and Catholic Intellectual Life satisfaction of material desires. Adam Smith sees the ability to truck and barter as the defining characteristic of man, and exchange relations as the foundation of human society. Smith and others in this tradition do indeed hold out a vision of communion, but one that can be understood only as a parody or perversion of Christian communion: in the Orwellian rhetoric of the free market, through the magic of the invisible hand (a deus ex machina if ever there were one), competition becomes cooperation, anarchy becomes order, and private vice becomes public virtue. 3 The title of Smith’s sacred text, The Wealth of Nations , references an apocalyptic, messianic passage from the Book of Isaiah. In this, it is one of the most powerful example of modernity’s ongoing effort to immanentize the eschaton. Historically, the nineteenth century quickly revealed Smith’s sanguine, egalitarian vision an illusion. The dark satanic mills of industrial England inspired economic thinkers from Ricardo and Malthus to Herbert Spencer to acknowledge the market as a Hobbesian war of all against all, or in the language of Social Darwinism, a struggle for the survival of the fittest. Most defenders of the market in the twentieth century adopted a view somewhat between Smith and Spencer, disavowing utopia while insisting that winners outnumber losers in the competitive marketplace. Liberal Catholics have framed their critique of the market primarily as a defense of the losers, but speaking as a traditionalist Catholic, I would like to focus on what the market does to the winners. This approach shifts the debate over capitalism, away from the problem of distributive justice and toward issues of human nature and the proper ordering of society. The most respected theorists of capitalism all agree that a dynamic market economy depends upon constant innovation, the creation of new products and services to generate new marketing opportunities to produce more wealth. I would argue that the very innovation that produces wealth has also served to undermine the traditional social institutions that nurture a proper understanding of the human person. Christopher Shannon 109

Take, for example, the family. The Catholic Church has consistently opposed socialist schemes to replace the family with state child care. The modern assault on the family began, however, with capitalism’s earlier assault on the agrarian home economy. Before the threat of socialism occupied the Church’s attention, Victorian economists praised the demise of the home economy in the name of higher productivity and efficiency; Victorian moralists, in turn, re- imagined the family as a purely emotional, sentimental institution, a haven from the heartless world created by Victorian capitalism. 4 The Victorian dream that the family could provide an emotional stability that would compensate for all of the social instability created by the market proved to be an illusion. The family itself became a target for all sorts of products and services to assist women in child rearing; eventually the lure of the job market drew many women out of the home altogether. Even before career-woman feminism, American consumer culture had largely won the battle for the souls of America’s children; a consumer-oriented youth culture continues to drive a wedge between generations within families. Not simply a matter of personal morality, this consumerism has become an economic necessity. If people really were satisfied with modest comfort, if teenagers and young adults really refused to throw themselves with wild abandon into the orgy of consumerism promised to them as their American birthright, the economy as we know it would collapse. “Family values” conservatives had best wake up and realize that from the perspective of our market society, the Victorian family is as outdated as the agrarian home economy. For the market, all that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned. Despite the efforts of neo-conservative Catholics such as Michael Novak to gloss all this dynamism as creativity, we could more accurately diagnose contemporary family life as the fruit of capitalism’s ethic of creative destruction. 5 What has the market give us as compensation? Wealth. The last fifty years that have witnessed the near demise of the family 110 Americanism and Catholic Intellectual Life have also seen an overall increase in wealth production. The average American has more of everything than he or she had fifty years ago – well, more of everything except family. From a market perspective, consumers appear to have chosen wealth production over family stability; since no ends are given as natural, what is, is right. Malcontents are still “free” to choose to have stable families; if one determines that the general culture of divorce and family instability inhibits your ability to maintain a stable family life, then the market allows you the freedom to go live in a cave or some other location far removed from our market society. Everyone remains free – within the limits of the market. For Catholics, the market cannot have the final word. Wealth production – if Catholics should even think in such abstract terms – is subordinate to other, higher social goods such as family stability. The proper ordering of social goods is at the heart of the Catholic social tradition, but such an ordering is exactly what market thinkers dismiss as the road to serfdom. Apologists for the market are not blind to the social and cultural disarray of contemporary America. Conceding the market’s deficiencies but suspicious of state efforts to provide social and cultural order, these thinkers more often than not follow Alexis de Tocqueville in looking to local voluntary associations to mediate between the two extremes of anarchic individualism and authoritarian statism; history has proven these institutions incapable of performing this task. The state and the market bear at least equal responsibility for the destruction of local life in America, but the problem goes deeper than institutions. Very early on in its history, America’s foundational suspicion of centralized state power morphed into a suspicion of all social and political authority external to the individual. We get some sense of this even in de Tocqueville, who figures community most often in the contractual term, “voluntary association.” True communities, like families, are not voluntary; we do not choose to join them, and we cannot leave them at will. Rootless, restless Americans have, as a people, refused to Christopher Shannon 111 accept any community as authoritative short of, ironically, the nation state, which since Lincoln has transcended its purely contractual, human origins to achieve sacred status. Good Catholics who would never dream of voting for a pro-choice politician will nevertheless fight, kill, and die for a pro-choice nation-state. Despite the American distaste for community in practice, the idea of community retains a powerful symbolic appeal in America. Politicians who shill for the state and the market rarely invoke images of government bureaucrats or corporate executives when they seek to inspire voters; rather, both tend to promise a bold future that will look a lot like small town American past (only richer). Much of the American rhetoric of community has been shallow and sentimental, yet, like the shallow and sentimental rhetoric of family values, it points to a truth about who we are as human beings. Community, too, is an American tradition. The Puritan settlers of the seventeenth century imaged New England a “city upon a hill,” a light to the nations. Since the early nineteenth century, Americans have generally understood this light as the torch of freedom. The textual source for this imagery, John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charity,” conveys a very different meaning. 6 For Win- throp, the light of New England was fundamentally that of piety, not liberty. If some of this meaning survives in America’s evangelical Christian chauvinism, there is another meaning that we have nearly lost. Winthrop saw the success of his New England experiment as depending not simply on individual piety, but on the integrity of community. Much of this lay sermon is a reminder to the settlers of their duties and obligations to each other. Those duties were not simply a matter of virtue – individual self-control and moral probity – but of love – self-surrender and submission to authority. Win- throp’s vision of an organic, hierarchically ordered community is very much a legacy of the medieval Catholic vision of the social body as a type of the Body of Christ. Those Catholics who feel that in order to participate in American public life we must speak an 112 Americanism and Catholic Intellectual Life

American language cannot honestly claim that the state and the market exhaust the possibilities within American political culture. Again and again, Americans have turned to some notion of community in the wake of the failure of one or both of the dominant alternatives. In my books Conspicuous Criticism and A World Made Safe for Differences , I have looked at one of the most powerful communitarian languages of twentieth-century America, the idea of culture. 7 It is a word liberals and conservatives today take for granted: conservatives defend American culture, liberals espouse multiculturalism, and both speak of the “culture wars.” As it is used today, the word is of relatively recent vintage and did not enter the mainstream American vocabulary until the 1930s. By culture I mean the notion of a whole way of life, a set of values or ideals that bind people together. This notion of culture grew out of the academic discipline of anthropology and set itself against the older, elitist sense of culture as the best that had been thought and said in literature and the arts. The Columbia anthropologist Franz Boas was the guru behind the new definition of culture. His idea of culture entered the vocabulary of educated Americans largely through the popular work of his students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. Mead is perhaps the better known of the two today – in no small part due to her provocative use of ethnographic studies of non-Western peoples to argue for sexual liberation in the West. Still, Benedict’s 1934 Patterns of Culture was more significant in shaping the pre-1960s view of culture in America. Benedict shared Mead’s desire for sexual liberation, but the burden of her book lies less in liberation than in the idea of culture as reflecting an organic unity rooted in shared values. Writing in the depths of the Depression – and with explicit New Deal sympathies – Benedict wrote to persuade her fellow Americans that there was life after the free market. Common values, not capitalist exchange relations, provided the foundation for social order. Even as Benedict argued for the state to step in and take Christopher Shannon 113 control of the economy, she insisted that the unity and stability provided by a common culture functioned as a check on any attempt by a strong, centralized state to claim a monopoly on the ability to provide social order. Aside from the formal qualities of culture in general, American culture was particularly resistant to authoritarian statism because it held up individual freedom as the central value that provided the pattern for the whole culture. The Great Depression had revealed the bankruptcy of the old economic individualism, but the American spirit of individualism would live on in an ideal of cultural freedom indebted to Romantic, Emersonian ideals of self-creation. Thus culture, invoked as an antidote to the acids of modernity, served only to extend an ideal of instrumental individualism even more deeply into the fabric of American culture. In this way, the notion of American culture as it developed in the 1930s laid the ground work for the so-called cultural revolution of the 1960s. I say “so-called” because, from the standpoint of intellectual history, the 1960s is firmly in the American grain of individualism going back at least to de Tocqueville’s age, which was not simply the Age of Jackson, but also the Age of Emerson. Between the 1930s and the 1960s stand the proud decades of World War II and the postwar consensus. This moment of unprecedented national unity saw the seeming triumph of the American Way of Life – a concept of only mid-twentieth-century vintage and one deeply indebted to Benedict’s anthropology. Politicians left and right, Catholic and non- Catholic, continue to invoke this term as a kind of divine sanction for their various political programs. What, exactly, is this American Way of Life? Here is a definition from one of the most authoritative commentators from the 1950s:

The American Way of Life is individualistic, dynamic, pragmatic. It affirms the supreme value and dignity of the individual; it stresses incessant activity on his part, for he is never to rest but is always to be striving to ‘get ahead’; it defines an ethic of self- 114 Americanism and Catholic Intellectual Life

reliance, merit, and character, and judges by achievement: ‘deeds, not creeds’ are what count. The American Way of Life is humani- tarian, ‘forward looking,’ optimistic. . . . The American believes in progress, in self-improvement, and quite fanatically in education. But above all, the American is idealistic. 8

This account comes from Will Herberg’s classic 1955 work, Protestant, Catholic, Jew . Like most intellectuals of the 1950s, Herberg was critical of the American Way of Life for its tendency to foster cultural conformity at home and chauvinism abroad. Writing in the context of religion, Herberg saw in the American Way of Life an even more pernicious threat: that of idolatry. For Herberg, the supposed religious revival of the 1950s had very little to do with the God of the Bible and everything to do with America’s worship of itself: the “God” inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance was simply a God made in the image and likeness of the American Way of Life. Where did Catholics fit in all of this? Well, at first glance, Her- berg’s description of the American Way of Life sounds an awful lot like the Americanism Leo XIII condemned in Testem Benevolentiae . Herberg is sensitive to this, and notes how as recently as 1950 Pius XII condemned “the ‘heresy of action’: the notion that ‘the world can be saved by . . . external activity.’” 9 Because of the Church’s longstanding suspicion of all the tropes of Americanism and its institutional mechanisms for declaring unified, authoritative teaching, Herberg speculated that of America’s three main religious groups, Catholics would remain the most resistant to the American Way of Life. The 1960s would prove him wrong, but there is more to the story of Catholicism and the American Way of Life than a simple tale of assimilation. The whole story of the quest for an American culture reflects a profound longing for a kind of unity that American life has not been able to provide – and a kind of unity that only the Catholic Church can provide. In my books I have argued that the idea of culture has served American, and more broadly Western, intellectuals as a secular substitute for a premodern, Christopher Shannon 115

Catholic notion of tradition. Culture is a substitute for or perversion of Catholic tradition because it promises community without authority. Alasdair MacIntyre has given us the fullest account of what tradition looks like in an intellectual community of scholars. Yet in its insistence on the primacy of authority to individual freedom within community, MacIntyre’s concept of tradition reflects a much broader Catholic social ethic – one lived out just as much in a properly ordered, modern American parish as in a medieval European university. The Jewish-American writer Alan Ehrenhalt has given us a wonderful portrait of American Catholic parish life that directly addresses the broader problem of community and authority in America. His now classic, The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America , looks back on Chicago Catholi- cism in the 1950s and finds America at its best. 10 Ehrenhalt’s Catholic fifties are a far cry from Herberg’s American Way of Life. There is nary a hard-striving, progressive, optimistic individualist at St. Nick’s, the South Side Catholic parish that Ehrenhalt takes as a model for community. The parishioners of St. Nick’s are faithful disciples of what Ehrenhalt calls “the limited life.” 11 Whereas mainstream American culture looks upon limits as external constraints on freedom, Ehrenhalt sees the idea of limits as a positive good: that is, the ability of people to accept limits on their freedom to choose enables them to build up the kind of relationships, loyalties, and obligations that make for the higher good of community. Ehrenhalt sees this notion of limits playing out in the practical, worldly arena of economics and politics. Whereas suburban Americans embraced the expanding array of choices available in America’s national consumer economy, Chicago’s urban Catholics generally had to settle for less choice. Legal restrictions and space constraints limited the expansion of chain stores into the South Side, while the limitations of public transportation made shopping outside 116 Americanism and Catholic Intellectual Life of one’s neighborhood difficult; by the same token, fair trade laws ensured that mom and pop stores could price competitively with the big chains. 12 For Ehrenhalt, the personal relationships forged through local, neighborhood commerce more than compensated for the limitations of pure consumer choice. This same ethic permeated Chicago politics as well. The Irish Catholic mayor Richard Daley emerges as a kind of hero. Ehrenhalt is not blind to the corruption in Daley’s machine, but then, neither was Daley. In Ehrenhalt’s reading, it was Daley’s Catholicism itself that led him to tolerate evil; no crusader or idealist, Daley saw politics in terms of distributing financial favors in exchange for the loyalty and obedience necessary to preserve public order. Daley knew that one had to tolerate sin in the name of public order – yet he never stooped to the kind of moralistic sophistry in which private vice would magically become public virtue. Vice remained vice, in private and in public. 13 Richard Daley, Sr. is in many ways the last of the great urban, Irish Catholic political bosses. His reputation has undergone somewhat of a revision in recent years. Liberals who for so long reviled Daley as a racist reactionary have come to appreciate his skill in helping Chicago avoid the sad fate of other post-industrial cities such as Detroit. 14 Interestingly, few Catholics outside of Chicago, conservative or liberal, seem willing to claim him or his predeces- sors as their own. For national Catholic political commentators, Daley and his ilk represent the politics of the old Catholic ghetto, which remains an embarrassment and a hindrance to national Catholic political aspirations. In appealing to this older American Catholic political tradition, I in no way deny the corruption that flourished within it. But look at the news today: is politics any less corrupt? If anything, the dominance of national government has only raised the stakes of corruption. I take corruption to be a constant: what we have lost, again, is community. The urban political machines generated very little in the way of warm, fuzzy feelings, but they did command the loyalty of those who benefited from their Christopher Shannon 117 patronage. Catholics should spend less time reading The Federalist Papers and more reading William L. Riordon’s classic Plunkitt of Tammany Hall .15 A light comic masterpiece perhaps best remembered now for coining the phrase “honest graft,” Riordon’s book also provides the best account of the ethos of loyalty and community that made the machines work. Plunkitt’s full name is George Washington Plunkitt, but that is about the only mention of a Founding Father that you will find in Riordon’s book. For Plunkitt, politics is not about ideas and ideals – no political science majors need apply! Politics begins with knowing people in face-to-face relations and earning their loyalty by delivering the goods, be those goods city jobs, contracts, or services. The ward heeler is personally accountable for delivering these goods. If he fails, he cannot blame the government, because he is the government; he cannot blame the market, because he cannot pass the buck. Yet the machines earned loyalty not simply by the efficient distribution of scarce resources; few of the party faithful ever got rich. Plunkitt stresses that political clubs earn loyalty through a whole range of activities with little direct relation to economics. Tammany Hall sponsored sports teams, singing groups (from a time when real men sang), and, of course, those famous beer keg picnics. The feverish round of activities that comprised Tammany politics mirrored nothing if not the organization of Catholic parish life in the golden age of urban Catholicism. The party and the Church would sometimes compete for the time commitments of urban Catholics, but more often than not the two reinforced a common religious/political identity. One famous anecdote of the time has a slightly inebriated Irishman raising his glass in an after-dinner toast, “God bless the two greatest organizations in the world, the Catholic Church and Tammany Hall!” After a long silence, a dinner guest asks the question, “What’s the second one?” Catholics, or at least Irish Catholics, made their peace with the Constitution not by anticipating the ideas of John Courtney Murray but by operating at a 118 Americanism and Catholic Intellectual Life local political level that was simply below the radar of the establishment clause. From the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Catholicism functioned as a semi-established Church in the cities of the Northeast and the Midwest. 16 Political unity reinforced religious unity, just as today the political divisions within Catholic America reinforce the theological divisions within the Church. The link between politics and religion is natural. We see this natural fit today in secular liberal partisans of the state and evangelical conservative partisans of the market, yet neither of these religious/political options fits with the American Catholic tradition of community. Catholics need to look back to the best of that tradition even as they realize its limitations – chiefly its inability to rise above the merely practical. That focus was good and natural; political life should be primarily about maintaining a proper order rather than discussing foundational ideals. Politics today, however, demands that we be able to address fundamental ideals, most obviously in upholding the dignity of the human person against the culture of death, but also in defending the primacy of local community against the destabilizing forces of the state and the market. Old Plunkitt simply cannot help us much here. Catholic tradition does, however, offer alternatives. The Catholic labor movement in particular provides models for the kind of conscious articulation of community we need to address our current political situation. Conservatives suspicious of labor politics in America would do well to remember that the greatest Catholic anticommunist movement of the twentieth century was a labor union led by the Polish Catholic Lech Walesa. In opposing Soviet communism, Polish Catholics did not invoke the American Founding Fathers or rally around the sacred cause of liberty; rather, they invoked the Catholic principle of community captured by the word solidarity . In his book The Spirit of Solidarity , Father Jozef Tischner, the chief philosopher of the movement, saw the foundation of solidarity in the principle Christopher Shannon 119 that every man is expected to help carry the burdens of other men. 17 America has seen its own homegrown solidarity movements stretching back to the labor priests of the 1930s through to Cesar Chavez during the 1960s. Set against Soviet Communism or American capitalism, solidarity is no mere private virtue or counsel of perfection, but the fundamental social principle that has shaped Catholic politics at its best. There are no easy answers to the question of how to realize this ideal Catholic politics, but the future of the Church in America depends on our ability to agree on foundational political principles. To accept the existing political divisions as incidental to our faith life is to surrender the hope for a faithful Catholicism in America to the idol of an American Catholicism.

Christopher Shannon is an Associate Professor of History at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia, where he teaches courses in Western Civilization, U.S. History, and Historiography. He is an intellectual historian whose scholarly work has focused on the rise of social science as the language of public reason in twentieth-century America. His first two books, Conspicuous Criticism (1996) and A World Made Safe for Differences (2001), examine the rise of the anthropological notion of culture as a secular substitute for a pre-modern, Catholic notion of tradition. Professor Shannon is a former Associate Director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, and the Erasmus Institute. His most recent book, Bowery to Broadway: The American Irish in Classical Hollywood Cinema (2010), explores the relation of religion and ethnicity in American popular culture during the first half of the twentieth century.

1 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). William T. Cavanaugh, “The Myth of the State as Saviour,” in his Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism (New York: T&T Clark, 2002), 9-52. 120 Americanism and Catholic Intellectual Life

2 John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law , in The American Intellectual Tradition. Volume I, 1630-1865 , ed. David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 113-14. 3 One of the most notorious Catholic apologists for the free market enthusiastically endorses Wilhelm Röpke’s free market nostrum that “anarchy in economics” produces “an orderly cosmos.” Thomas E. Woods, Jr., The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005), 203. 4 For the best account of this ideology, see Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1977). 5 For a thorough and convincing critique of Novak and Catholic neoconservative economics, see David L. Schindler, Heart of the World, Center of the Church: Communio Ecclesiology, Liberalism, and Liberation (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996), especially chapter 4. 6 John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in The American Intellectual Tradition , 7-15. 7 Christopher Shannon, Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, the Individual, and Culture in Modern American Social Thought (Scranton, Pa.: University of Scranton Press, 2006). Christopher Shannon, A World Made Safe for Differences: Cold War Intellectuals and the Politics of Identity (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001). 8 Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1960), 79. 9 Ibid ., 149. 10 Alan Ehrenhalt, The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 11 Ibid ., 7-32. 12 Ibid ., 15. 13 For an account of the place of this ethos in American Catholic popular culture in the decades just prior to the 1950s, see my Bowery to Broadway: The American Irish in Classic Hollywood Cinema (Scranton, Pa.: University of Scranton Press, 2010). 14 See Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley – His Battle for Chicago and the Nation (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2001). 15 William L. Riordon, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics (New York: Signet Classic, 1995). Christopher Shannon 121

16 See Christopher Shannon, “Tammany Catholicism: The Semi-Established Church in the Immigrant City,” in Holding on to the Faith: Confessional Traditions in American Christianity , ed. Douglas A. Sweeney and Charles Hambrick-Stowe (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, Inc., 2008), 155- 169. 17 On the philosophy of Solidarity, see L. Brent Bozell, “Mary’s Bread,” in his Mustard Seeds: A Conservative Becomes a Catholic (Front Royal, Va.: Christendom Press, 2001), 340. Nature, Grace, and the Public Square

Stephen Fields, S.J. Georgetown University

N AN ENGAGING ARTICLE published in Communio in 1994, David Schindler offers a critical reading of John Courtney I Murray on the relation of church and state in light of Henri de Lubac on the relation of nature and grace. 1 With the help of David’s critique, I will endeavor to show that Murray and the twentieth- century French theologian must complement each other, if a healthy relation between the Cities of God and of Man is to obtain, especially in the United States.

Let us begin with some preliminary comments on the relation between nature and grace in de Lubac. In a word, he understands the entire created order to be imbued from the outset by God’s grace. This means that the primordial and absolute decision of God is, first and foremost, not so much to create but to redeem – to share his very life in grace with others. It is grace, therefore, that exercises a priority over created nature. “It is not nature . . . which requires grace,” says de Lubac; “it is rather grace which . . . calls into being spiritual creatures to receive it.” 2 Hence, it is not possible to envisage any concretely existing being “prior to or without its supernatural finalization.” 3 The end of created nature is supernatural. Nature’s innate dynamism requires a telos – a goal, end, or purpose – that nature is utterly impotent to provide for itself. This telos can only be given by a gratuitous action on the part of God. Created 124 Nature, Grace, and the Public Square nature, therefore, cannot ultimately rest content with any good that, strictly speaking, is proportionate to it. On the basis of these claims, de Lubac advances a further thesis. He follows sound Thomist metaphysics that every end, goal, and telos of any process is already implicitly present in the very process itself. The end draws the process to its completion from within, as it were. Accordingly, grace is not conferred on nature externally, but serves nature congenially from within it. In this sense, then, nature becomes an intrinsic moment of grace – the order of creation becomes an intrinsic moment in the order of redemption. From this basic position, implications emerge for modeling the relation between the City of God and the City of Man, especially the Church and the state. Comments de Lubac himself:

The law of the relation between nature and grace, in its generality, is everywhere the same. It is from within that grace seizes nature, and, far from diminishing nature, raises it up, in order to make it serve [grace’s] own ends. It is from within that faith transforms reason, that the Church transforms the state. As the messenger of Christ, the Church is not the guardian of the state; on the contrary[,] she ennobles the state, inspiring it toward Christian values and thereby toward its becoming more human. 4

From these claims of de Lubac, David Schindler draws several conclusions. First, the Church and the state must remain distinct, even though this distinction cannot be absolute. Grace, after all, is lodged within the natural order. Second, the Church has a duty to convert the state – not by overpowering it, but instead, by means appropriate to its essence as a communion of love, by drawing the state’s functioning ever more within its own ambit. Third, and here he gets helpfully concrete and specific: The Church should not allow to stand as unchallenged any interpretation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that privileges an areligious or secular understanding of the nonestablishment of religion clause. We will no doubt recall this portion of the Bill of Rights from our Civics 101: Stephen Fields, S.J. 125

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” For his part, Murray interprets the First Amendment as an “article of peace.” This means that the government must remain neutral concerning the content of religion. The state is bound not to pass any moral or theological judgments on beliefs or religious actions. Schindler, citing the work of Gerald Bradley, rightly observes that, in fact, the original intent of the First Amendment was determined implicitly by Protestant definitions and premises. But the amendment’s interpretation, as we all know only too well, can be controlled by a liberal, even an aggressively secular, individualism. 5 The upshot is this: if, with de Lubac, we hold that nature is subordinated to the end of grace, then we have a sound theological footing from which to challenge the hegemony of any such secular interpretation. In contrast with de Lubac’s model of the relation between church and state, Father Murray, if I understand David’s argument rightly, emerges as unsophisticated and anachronistic. In his view, which is supported by my distinguished mentor at Yale George Lindbeck, Murray falls victim to the theory of pure nature. 6 According to de Lubac, this theory originated in the Dominican Cardinal Cajetan’s sixteenth-century interpretation, which turned St. Thomas’s theology into something it never was. 7 Simply stated, the pure nature theory asserts that nature possesses its own proportionate end. The order of grace, superadded to the order of creation, establishes a dualism between the two orders. As a result, the human person functions according to two ends. When graced, the person’s natural end is altered so that the person can achieve the end of grace, which is the beatific vision. Following this dualism, the early seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuit Suarez opines, for instance, that as punishment for original sin, God has withdrawn humanity’s supernatural end. 8 As I recall my cradle Catholic upbringing, the pure nature theory was the “coin of the realm” in catechesis and the practical life of faith. Murray’s model does indeed lead him to make the following 126 Nature, Grace, and the Public Square claim: the Church “does not aim to alter the finality of the state, but to enable the state to achieve its own finality as determined by its own nature.” 9 The Church enables the state to do this, he says, by purifying the temporal order’s “processes and structures,” guiding them toward “their inherently secular ends.” 10 Sentiments such as these, which underscore nature’s having an intrinsic end, lead my Jesuit confrere Leon Hooper to speak of Murray’s “Gelasian dualism.” 11 If Murray does posit a dualism, it is certainly, as we shall see, a nuanced and qualified one, just like that of Pope Gelasius. His famous letter of 494 to the Emperor Anastasius acknowledges an appropriate reciprocity between ecclesiastical and civil authorities. 12 For his part, Schindler finds Murray’s putative dualism leading to deleterious consequences. Although as a Thomist Murray would acknowledge that all human acts are grounded in God, nonetheless, Schindler claims, Murray does not integrate this relation between God and human acts into his proposals for the public order. 13 In other words, Murray’s assertion of the state’s neutrality concerning religion leads inevitably to a society indifferent to the transcendent. Neutrality toward God, observes Schindler, is a far cry from positive openness to God. Mere neutrality, he avers, devolves all too easily into the privatization of religion, and this privatization falls quickly into secularism. 14 Drawing on the work of Will Herberg, David sees “Puritanism, Deism, and secularism” all coming together in America, because “they all share . . . a conception of God as first distant and hence separate from the world.” 15 Because Murray’s thought is grounded in the theory of pure nature, it brings the Catholic intellectual tradition into a precarious cooperation with this separating of the divine from the affairs of humanity. So much is this the case that, argues Schindler, not only does “Murray’s position . . . not provide any principled protection against . . . atheism,” but “it provides an exact theoretical foundation for” it. 16

Stephen Fields, S.J. 127

I believe a more sympathetic reading of Murray is possible that can compensate for deficiencies in de Lubac, even as the Frenchman can correct the American. Let us first turn to the issue of Murray’s putative dualism by assessing what he might mean by the term “the ends of the state.” On the one hand, surely it cannot be denied that the state, from its own perspective, operates according to real ends. These may even be considered, as Murray claims, intrinsic to the state. They include, among other things, forming a more perfect union, establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and securing for us the blessings of liberty. That the state acts to obtain these ends does not therefore mean that they are ultimately proportionate to the order of history – to the consummation of time and space – in which the state necessarily functions. The state’s ends are achieved successively, individually, and discretely. Civic processes come to completion in the midst of other processes that are still striving toward their purpose. But these ends, even were their entire manifold finally able to be accomplished, could never give history a lastingly perfecting surcease. The twentieth-century French thinker Maurice Blondel has shown us that reason, unaided by any Christian revelation, can itself affirm the impotence of history in the face of its ultimate end. On the other hand, from the perspective of the order of grace, we can affirm, in faith, that history’s only satisfying end is Jesus Christ, who makes our sanctifying justification before God a real possibility. That the state operates for its own intrinsic ends does not compromise the existence of, or the action of, history’s one supernatural end in Christ. In short, then: the ends of nature certainly can operate according to their own integrity; but they can do so precisely under, and within, the one, overarching end of grace. How, then, might we understand the relation of these natural ends to history’s one graced end? De Lubac gives us a clue when he 128 Nature, Grace, and the Public Square says that the order of grace itself calls forth history into being precisely in order for history to receive grace. This means, first of all, that nature and grace do not constitute a dualism that, in any sense, is equivocal. On the contrary, they constitute two orders that, while distinct, exist within a harmoniously reciprocal unity. Accordingly, their relation is rightly understood, not as equivocal, but as analogous. Moreover, nature can be understood as the sacrament of grace. A sacrament consists of an empirical medium that causes what it signifies. Hence, we can rightly affirm that the entire order of creation – of nature, of history, of time and space – makes the order of grace present for the benefit of material beings, especially human persons. Let us illustrate this point by looking, for instance, at the sacrament of baptism. We use water as this ritual’s empirical medium, its so-called outward sign. The water signifies the spiritual cleansing from sin of the person being baptized. The water exercises its own intrinsic end, a physical washing, even as precisely in so doing it mediates the end of grace. The physical washing of the water and the washing of grace are thus analogous in the sacrament. In other words, the water’s purpose is not at all compromised when grace unifies it with its own higher purpose. Just so, the entire created order, while exercising its own intrinsic ends, can, according to God’s designs, be harnessed by, subsumed into, and unified with, God’s graced activity, in order to bring about God’s freely chosen supernatural purposes. Our question then becomes this: Can the putative dualism that Murray’s critics find in his model of nature and grace, church and state, be read as an analogous unity-in-difference rather than as an equivocal separation? Schindler’s own article in Communio quotes the following rich passage from Murray’s 1948 paper on the “Government Repression of Heresy”:

[Just] as the harmony of nature presupposes [the] enduring dis- Stephen Fields, S.J. 129

tinction [between nature and grace], so [also] the harmony of [church and state] is conditioned by the fidelity of each to its own [exigency. . . . Church and state] complete one another, not so that one assumes the other’s functions, but so that each favors the performance by the other of the other’s own functions, the favoring being done by each [according to its own mode of proceeding]. 17

As I read this thesis of Murray’s, it represents about as articulate a statement of the analogous relation between church and state as one would hope to find. Whereas church and state have distinct ends, these ends are completed by each other according to the modes appropriate to each. This completing implies a mutuality between the work of church and state. Mutuality in turn implies that this work can overlap, become unified, within the respective diversity of church and state. Where there is a unity-in-diversity, there is perforce, not an equivocal dualism, but an analogy. Furthermore, if church and state complete the ends of each other, then each performs a sacramental role for the other. In other words, the state, acting according to its own ends, can help complete the ends of the Church, even as water, in physically washing, can bring a person to his sanctifying end. Conversely, the Church, in preaching the Gospel and celebrating its sacred rituals, can, as Murray says, purify nature: that is, it can call the City of Man away from sin and to the virtue that constitutes the integrity of its own intrinsic ends. How then do Murray and de Lubac stand vis-à-vis each other? In the first place, although both derive the relation between church and state from the relation between nature and grace, both would shrewdly know that these two sets of relations are not totally congruent. The work of the Church is no more equal to the entire order of grace than the work of the state is equal to the entire order of nature. God’s salvific purposes operate outside the juridic borders of the institutional Church, both as the prevenient grace that gives all human beings an instinct of faith and as the baptism of desire that, in addition to the usual water, can also justify. In addition, both know 130 Nature, Grace, and the Public Square that the Church, as well as the state, functions in history that is still awaiting its fulfillment in Christ. Even as the ordinary medium of grace, the Church now only partially realizes the Lord’s pledge of future glory. It seems fair to conclude, therefore, that both thinkers would acknowledge the ability of the Church and the state to pursue their own intrinsic ends within history, even as these ends can operate under the one overarching eschatological end of grace. For his part, Murray speaks a salutary word to de Lubac by positing an analogous model of church and state that preserves the integrity of both orders within their interaction. Reiterating this word is especially important when the theory of pure nature propounded by Cajetan is displaced in favor of a theory like de Lubac’s, which makes the order of creation, from its inception, an intrinsic moment within the order of redemption. As developed by de Lubac and others (like Karl Rahner, Max Seckler, and Hans Urs von Balthasar), this theory leads to the claim that no “slice” of pure nature exists in this world, and to the claim that nature should be defined as a “remainder concept.” 18 This last epithet means that “pure” nature would be left if we were to subtract all grace from the one concrete order of reality that we do, in fact, know. It is not possible for us to perform this subtraction; but if we could, we would have distilled pure nature. However appropriate these claims may be when they are rightly understood, they present a significant problem. If the one and only concrete order of reality is that of grace, and if nature is merely a remainder, then all too easily can nature simply become lost in grace – overpowered by it, dissipated in it, like a thimble of water in a jug full of wine. Deleterious consequences can follow from such a scenario. First, we risk taking on a problem found in some strains of Protestantism. For instance, the twentieth-century Swiss Lutheran theologian Karl Barth asserts that the order of grace is what he calls the “wholly other.” It breaks in upon the order of nature like a tangent “perpen- dicularly from above.” 19 Grace touches nature therefore at only one Stephen Fields, S.J. 131 point, namely, the Incarnation. This view would seem to preserve a robust conception of nature that obtains in strong opposition to grace. But Barth views nature as so deeply corrupted by the Fall that nature retains little, if any, integrity for grace to support and perfect. 20 The upshot is that Barth effectively crushes nature, leaving only the one order of grace. 21 Unlike Barth, proponents of de Lubac’s theory do not risk crushing nature; but they do risk so blurring the distinction between it and grace that, like Barth, nature becomes theologically trivial and insignificant. When the distinction between nature and grace is blurred, the result is the secularism for which, ironically, Schindler finds Murray unintentionally responsible. Murray’s dualism between nature and grace, he says, makes God too distant. Well, what happens, we might ask, when the order of grace is made too close? The contemporary philosopher of religion Louis Dupré reminds us that secularism grows and thrives only when the tension between the sacred and the profane is lost. These two orders are mutually dependent. The profane defines all spheres of experience that we do not consider holy, divine, grace-laden. Secularism, properly speaking, can be described as the bland homogenization of human experience that results when nothing is considered either sacred or profane. 22 It can develop when the sense of the sacred is lost, because people stop cultivating a religious attitude toward reality. In this case, the meaning of the sacred sinks into the profane. It can also develop when the profane itself loses meaning. If everything becomes sacred, then effectively nothing is sacred. If nothing is sacred, then the profane evanesces and secularism ensues. This scenario has rightly caused the Christian history of the West to judge theocracy as a failed experiment. The recently beatified Cardinal Newman, for instance, deplored the Erastian establishment of the Anglican Church in the United Kingdom. As he tells us in his autobiography Apologia pro vita sua , the callous suppression of dioceses by a Parliament eager to balance a budget precipitated John 132 Nature, Grace, and the Public Square

Keble’s 1833 sermon on “National Apostasy,” which initiated the Oxford Movement. 23 Theory and practice both attest, therefore, to the need of sustaining the creative opposition between sacred and profane, grace and nature. The Church does not suffer from the healthy viability of the profane. In fact, it feeds and thrives upon it. The Church suffers when the order of grace it represents so encroaches into the order of nature that the vitally distinct role of nature as the necessary vehicle and sacramental medium of grace is lost. This encroachment can occur when nature and grace are not conceived analogously – when, in other words, the dialectic between them, and between church and state, is not at the same time both maintained and reconciled. It may well be, of course, that Murray overstates his case if he implies that nature can possess an ultimate finality that is proportionate to it. If so, then de Lubac surely speaks to him a salutary word. But Murray’s insistence that the Church must respect the integrity of nature’s appropriate ends not only protects the prerogatives of the Church; but also, as I would now like to argue, it protects our religious liberty in pluralist America.

III

Let us recall Schindler’s argument. According to it, for Murray, Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Liberty means that the state should exercise no coercion in religious matters. The state is bound by the natural law. This insists upon the fundamental dignity of human persons to accept responsibility for acting on their own initiative in religious matters. 24 For Murray, therefore, the state’s implicit openness to God “guarantees the neutrality necessary for granting all religions equal status before the law, and for permitting them all then to go on to add their own positive content of what [religious] freedom is for .” 25 As we have seen, Schindler believes that Murray’s interpretation of Vatican II’s Declaration counte- Stephen Fields, S.J. 133 nances the state’s indifference to God. He also believes that this indifference creates a vacuum for the enemies of God to fill with alacrity. These include various types of secularism, like liberal dogmatism, religious privatism, and atheism. Moreover, Schindler believes that Murray’s interpretation be- trays an error even deeper than his putative dualism between nature and grace and church and state. To his discredit, Murray delays the question of God, whose existence cannot be delayed, because it is the very ground of freedom. In support of his critique, Schindler quotes Pope John Paul II’s reading of Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Liberty in his 1979 encyclical Redemptor hominis . Here the pontiff states that human beings “perceive intimately that the truth revealed to us by God imposes on us an obligation.” 26 Murray, for his part, although admitting that God is the ground of human freedom, does not incorporate any divine obligation into his proposal for the public operation of freedom. By contrast, Schindler believes, if I understand him rightly, that de Lubac’s position on nature and grace allows such an incorporation, perhaps even demands it. In sum, then: Schindler views Murray as charting a course for our American religious liberty decidedly at odds with the map devised by Vatican II. To be honest, aspects of Schindler’s thesis do indeed frighten me. I sense in them the seeds of the logic that underlies the famous adage of Cardinal Ottaviani’s: “Error has no rights.” Certainly it does not. But what about the rights of the human persons who sincerely follow their consciences in religious matters? I wonder: Are not Ottaviani’s the same seeds that sprouted in Calvin’s Geneva, and in other attempts to grow the theocracies that troubled Newman? As I indicated at the beginning of this paper, Schindler does not favor or propose a theocracy. Nonetheless, he does realize that his reading of de Lubac initiates a momentum in that direction. 27 He endeavors to find ways to check it. I do not believe, however, that these efforts will be successful unless an analogous understanding of 134 Nature, Grace, and the Public Square church and state, such as Murray proposes, is incorporated into de Lubac’s position. Let me further explain by returning to Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Liberty . Section 2 says: “[A]ll persons are both impelled by their nature and bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth. . . . But men cannot satisfy the obligation in a way that is in keeping with their own nature unless they enjoy both psychological freedom and immunity from external coercion.” 28 This teaching draws an all-important distinction between an obligation that rightly devolves upon the individual, on the one hand, and the role of the state in the face of this obligation, on the other hand. So, yes, indeed, the state should delay the question of religious truth, precisely because the obligation to seek it does not devolve on the state, but on the conscience of the individual who, as Pascal’s wager warns us, postpones it to his eternal jeopardy. If the state has an obligation to assist individuals in their obligation to religious truth, then where will this end? For the sake of argument, let us suppose, for instance, that the state, instead of being neutral toward religion, were to express a positive disposition toward it. In a pluralist society like ours, would this disposition not constitute a form of coercion on some sincere consciences? But let us say, again for the sake of argument, that we are willing to risk coercing the liberal dogmatists, the privatizers of religion, and the atheists. One might then happily rejoice that secularism is now stripped of its ability to privilege its irreligion over the Constitution’s original intent. I do believe, however, that our short-term elation would soon give way to long-term distress. Inevitably, rendering the irreligious socially marginal within America’s pluralism would unhappily alter the combatants in the so- called culture war. They would change from us religious people united against the irreligious to us religious people feuding among ourselves. I would not quite predict a recurrence of the Thirty Years War on American soil. But I would rather have the likes of Pat Stephen Fields, S.J. 135

Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Oral Roberts, Ralph Reed, Randall Terry, and other Christian fundamentalists on my side in the debate against the irreligious in American, than to be pitted against them in an internecine Christian struggle that would surely arise. In such a scenario, the ensuing questions about how to interpret the Constitu- tion’s positive disposition toward religion would coerce particular religions to seek an advantage for their own content. Religion, let us recall, thrives when it subsists in tension with those opposed to the sacred. If the liberal dogmatists, the religious privatizers, and the atheists are muted, the sacred will begin to tear itself asunder. Saturn will eat his own young, and rampant secularism will triumph. In short, the future of religious liberty in America has a vested interest in keeping precisely those dogmatists, privatizers, and atheists active in the public square. Finally, even as we favor de Lubac’s position, we cannot escape the question, and indeed the solution, that Murray poses. On the one hand, de Lubac puts forth a relation between nature and grace that renders every human being’s natural desire for God an implicit Christian vocation. On the other hand, he tells us that the Church is not the guardian of the state. These two premises demand a middle term to mediate between them. Accordingly, what other viable model between church and state fulfils this role except the analogy proposed by our American peritus at Vatican II, in which the state refrains from prejudicing the freedom of every person’s conscience to satisfy his natural desire for God? If Murray’s analogy means that the enemies of the sacred stand equal with religion before the bar of the state’s neutrality, or even if it means that religion must stridently assert its prerogatives in order to avoid being suborned by the profane, then such scenarios can serve to purify, nourish, and strengthen religion. They can spur it on to convert hearts more zealously, so that, in turn, civil society may more fully embody those virtues that enable it to realize its own appropriate ends. As a conclusion, let me draw our attention to a something 136 Nature, Grace, and the Public Square

George Santayana wrote in 1920. He reminds us to give thanks for the happy paradox of “ e pluribus unum ” – of unity-in-diversity – that blesses the American project that we “so proudly hail”:

Consider, for instance, the American Catholics, of whom there are nominally many millions, and who often seem to retain their an- cestral faith sincerely and affectionately. . . . It confronts the boastful natural man, such as the American is, with a thousand denials and menaces. Everything in American life is the antipodes of such a system, yet the American Catholic is entirely at peace. His tone in everything, even in religion, is cheerfully American. It is wonderful how silently, amicably and happily he lives in a community whose spirit is profoundly hostile to that of his religion. . . . Attachment to his church in such a temper brings him into no serious conflict with his Protestant neighbors. They live and meet on common ground. 29

John Courtney Murray’s contribution to and interpretation of Vatican II would help to keep things just this way: securing the blessings of religious liberty, not only for our “land of the free,” but for the wider human family.

Father Fields is an expert in philosophical theology and the history of Christian thought. He is the author of Being and Symbol: On the Origins and Development of Karl Rahner’s Metaphysics and numerous scholarly articles. He is former president of the Jesuit Philosophical Association.

1 David L. Schindler, “Religious Freedom, Truth, and American Liberalism: Another Look at John Courtney Murray,” Communio: International Catholic Review 21, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 696-741. 2 Henri de Lubac, “Le mystère du surnaturel,” Recherches de science religieuse 36 (1949): 94-95; in Stephen J. Duffy, The Graced Horizon: Nature and Grace in Modern Catholic Thought (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1992), 76. 3 Anton C. Pegis, “Nature and Spirit: Some Reflections on the Problem of the End of Man,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 23 (1949): 7-9; in Duffy, Graced Horizon , 70 n.9, as summarizing de Lubac. Stephen Fields, S.J. 137

4 Henri de Lubac, “Le pouvoir de l’église en matière temporelle,” Revue de sciences religieuses 12 (1932): 329-54, at 343-44; cited in Schindler, “Religious Freedom,” 732. 5 Gerald Bradley, “Beyond Murray’s Articles of Peace and Faith,” in John Courtney Murray and the American Civil Conversation, ed. Robert P. Hunt and Kenneth L. Grasso (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1992), 181- 204, at 191; in Schindler, “Religious Freedom,” 711. 6 George Lindbeck, “John Courtney Murray: An Evaluation,” Christianity and Crisis 21 (27 November 1961): 213-16; in Schindler, “Religious Freedom,” 727. 7 Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural , trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), 11-12. 8 Francisco Suarez, De gratia , prolog. 4, c. 1, n. 5, Opera omnia , vol. 7 (1857), 18; in de Lubac, Mystery , 89. 9 John Courtney Murray, “Government Repression of Heresy,” Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America (1948): 26-98, at 65-66; in Schindler, “Religious Freedom,” 731. 10 John Courtney Murray, “The Declaration on Religious Freedom,” in Concilium 15 (New York: Paulist Press, 1966), 3-16, at 10; in Schindler, “Religious Freedom,” 731. 11 J. Leon Hooper, “General Introduction,” in Religious Liberty: Catholic Struggles with Pluralism/John Courtney Murray , ed. J. Leon Hooper (Louisville, Ken.: Westminster/John Knox, 1993), 11-48, at 25; in Schindler, “Religious Freedom,” 730. 12 “Medieval Sourcebook: Gelasius I on Spiritual and Temporal Power, 494,” in Readings in European History , ed. J. H. Robinson (Boston: Ginn, 1905), 72-73; available from www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/gelasius1.html (accessed September 17, 2010). 13 Schindler, “Religious Freedom,” 721. 14 Ibid., 718. 15 Ibid., referring to Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955). 16 Ibid., 723. 17 Murray, “Government Repression,” 57; in Schindler, “Religious Freedom,” 729- 30. 18 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation , trans. Edward T. Oakes (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 288; 138 Nature, Grace, and the Public Square

Karl Rahner, “Relationship Between Nature and Grace,” Theological Investiga- tions 1, trans. Cornelius Ernst (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 297-317, at 312-13. 19 Karl Barth, The Humanity of God , trans. John Newton Thomas et al. (Atlanta, Ga.: John Knox Press, 1960), 41. 20 Ibid., 44. 21 See Balthasar, Theology of Karl Barth , 272. 22 Louis Dupré, The Other Dimension: A Search for the Meaning of Religious Attitudes (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 14-18. 23 John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 152f. 24 Vatican II, “Declaration on Religious Freedom,” in Vatican II: An Interfaith Appraisal , ed. John M. Miller (Notre Dame, Ind.: Associated Press, 1966), 565– 85, at 571-72; in Schindler, “Religious Freedom,” 716. 25 Schindler, “Religious Freedom,” 721. 26 John Paul II, Redemptor hominis , n. 12; in Schindler, 726. 27 Schindler, “Religious Freedom,” 735. 28 Vatican II, Declaration on Religious Liberty , s. 2, in Vatican II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents , ed. Austin Flannery (Northport, N.Y.: Costello Publishing Co., 1984), 1:801. 29 George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United Sates , in The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy; and Character and Opinion in the United States , ed. James Seaton (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), 43-44. The Monastic Quaerere Deum : Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America

David L. Schindler Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family

OPE BENEDICT XVI has made a point during the years of his papacy to affirm the necessity of natural law and the integrity P of nature and thus the secular in Christians’ engagement with culture. It was striking, for example, that on his 2008 visit to France he said we needed “a new reflection on the true meaning and importance of laïcitè ,” or what we might call secularity. On this occasion he also affirmed the “distinction between the political realm and that of religion,” while insisting at the same time on the state’s responsibility “to become more aware of the irreplaceable role of religion for the formation of consciences and the contribution which it can bring to – among other things – the creation of a basic ethical consensus in society.” Indeed, I should say more generally in this context, given the topic I have been asked to address, that Pope Benedict has affirmed the distinctiveness of America’s form of the Enlightenment, acknowledging the difference between the French Revolution and Continental liberalism, on the one hand, and the American Revolution and Anglo-American liberalism, on the other. It is interesting to note, however, that at a meeting with cultural leaders on this same visit to France, Benedict stated that monastic culture, with its center in the Benedictine quaerere Deum , still has something important to say to us. Indeed, he concluded his lecture with the statement that “what gave Europe’s culture its foundation – 140 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America the search for God and the readiness to listen to him – remains today the basis of any culture.” My purpose in this paper is to explore the meaning of Benedict’s thought as expressed here, in terms of the problem of religion, or religiosity, in America. A main concern will be to reflect in this light on the work of the Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray, whose arguments regarding religion and religious freedom and the meaning of America are acknowledged widely as among the most sophisticated in the history of American Catholicism. My procedure will be to outline the ontological principles I take to be implied in Benedict’s statements regarding the significance of monasticism for an authentic human culture in our age of distinctly liberal democratic and religiously pluralist sensibilities. This outline will set the terms in which I will consider Murray’s reading of America. My larger purpose is to ponder how Catholics should best understand their presence in the culture of America.

Let me begin by situating my reflections within the Catholic engagement with the meaning of America as first expressed in a formal way in the so-called Americanist crisis at the turn of the twentieth century. Those who defended America against the criticisms made by Leo XIII in his 1899 encyclical, Testem Benevolentiae , did so typically in terms of a twofold claim. Their argument was, first, that America’s philosophical understanding of human nature was consistent with the pre-modern, classical understanding. Thus they held that America’s Declaration of Independence affirmed truths about man that were not America’s invention but were already given with man’s nature. These truths were evident to all men, even if now expressed in the modern language of equality and rights. The so-called Americanists argued, secondly, that what was David L. Schindler 141 really new about America was to be found rather in its new understanding of political order, or the state. According to the Americanists, America involved not so much new notions of human being and human virtue as a new political–institutional method for dealing with these notions. The older state–church union model of political authority, the purpose of which was explicitly to guide men in the matter of truth, was replaced with a democratic republican model of political authority. This latter model separated state and church and, while emphasizing the need for moral virtue (often supported by religious belief), adopted the political method of freedom. That is, the American state as an institution did not, de jure , have any pedagogical function in the matter of the truth regarding the nature and destiny of man. On the contrary, in accord with the Anglo-Saxon liberal tradition, the state was conceived primarily as a procedural mechanism that created space for the equal right of each citizen to hold and express his or her own notions of truth. The state, in other words, was to remain neutral vis-à-vis the pluralism of religious faiths that was indigenous to America. Education regarding the truth about man and formation in virtue were tasks proper to the cultural institutions of society like the church and the family. The American state was said thus to embody a “political” or “juridical” as distinct from metaphysical or theological notion of political authority. Regarding this second point, however, we should be clear. The intended neutrality of the state, with its detachment from any properly pedagogical function in the matter of metaphysical or religious truth, did not imply for America’s Founders an insensitivity to the importance of religion, or indeed at least of moral virtue, for the maintenance of civic order. On the contrary, the point was simply that government ought not to be the proper agent in educating citizens toward religious truth and morality; that government could indeed serve religion and morality most effectively by securing free space and equal rights for individual persons and “private” institu- 142 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America tions, and allowing these to form the people in religion and morality. The Americanists argued, in sum, that America’s political method of freedom stemmed from the rightful recognition that the state was not the source or final arbiter of the truth about the human being; and that this new method had not weakened religion but rather strength- ened it. Religion in America was flourishing, not disappearing. Testem Benevolentiae had identified several problems with respect to Catholics’ efforts to adjust to the distinctive demands of the modern age in America. These problems concerned: the modern view of liberty and the tendency to rely more on the individual guidance of the Holy Spirit than on obedience to Church authority or “external” spiritual direction; the primacy of natural as distinct from supernatural virtues, and again of active as distinct from passive virtues; and also the preference of active virtues over traditional religious vows in providing an effective apostolic presence in the face of the peculiar exigencies of modern life. The Americanists acknowledged that these problems identified by the pope were indeed problems, but maintained that they were not really significant tendencies within the Church in America. The Americanists argued rather that Leo XIII’s central target, the life and theology of Isaac Hecker, had been misleadingly depicted in a French introduction to an American biography of Hecker that had falsely characterized Hecker’s approach as similar to that of the Modernists. Thus there arose the term “phantom heresy” as an apt way of describing the criticism indicated by Testem Benevolentiae : the errors it described may indeed be “heretical,” but they did not exist in America. The America defended by the Americanists, then, consisted in the ancient idea of natural law now articulated in the modern language of rights and equality, and in the adoption of a new political method which, by emphasizing freedom as distinct from truth as the proper function of government, could better accommodate America’s native religious pluralism. This interpretation of the Americanists remained the dominant David L. Schindler 143 one throughout the twentieth century and was given perhaps its most nuanced articulation in the work of John Courtney Murray in mid- century, especially regarding the distinction between the state and civil society, and state and church. Murray’s interpretation was repeated and developed on the hundredth anniversary of Testem Benevolentiae , by spokesmen on both the “left” (for example, Joseph Komonchak, emeritus professor at The Catholic University of America) and on the “right” (for example, Matthew Spalding, a research scholar and political scientist at the Heritage Foundation). The difference of these latter three thinkers from the original Americanists, however, is that the Second Vatican Council, as articulated, for example, in Gaudium et Spes and Dignitatis Humanae , is now invoked in confirmation of the Americanists’ claim that America’s newness is a matter not so much of anthropological or “ideological” substance as of institutional form. It is a matter of freedom as the method par excellence of democratic institutions, above all of the state. Interpreters such as Spalding invoke the pontificate of John Paul II, and especially his encyclical Centesimus Annus , as further evidence of the Council’s, and thus the Church’s, acceptance of Anglo-America’s distinctive liberalism, now claimed also to include America’s liberal economic order. Indeed, Spalding suggests that Testem Benevolentiae initiates a discussion that leads to “the mature understanding of democracy and its teaching concerning human rights, self-government, and religious liberty” eventually realized in Dignitatis Humanae and the papacy of John Paul II. A final point. It has been a commonly held view that modern patterns of life lead to and presuppose the cultural absence of God, and that modernity thus entails secularism. The Americanists – and indeed the majority of contemporary American Catholics and increasingly even of academics generally – claim that America is “exceptional” in this regard: in the sense that religion has flourished in America’s modernity, and indeed has done so not in spite but 144 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America because of her exercise of “political,” as distinct from metaphysical or theological, reason in matters of state.

Let me now situate my own argument in relation to the Ameri- canist reading of the American Founding and culture. First of all, I agree that the American Revolution and its expression in subsequent political and cultural life are different from the French Revolution and the nineteenth-century Continental liberal state and cultural life. I agree that the ideas of freedom, equality, and rights have their origin in natural law and are indispensable for a proper understanding of human dignity, and that the Declaration of Independence for this reason represents a significant historical achievement. I believe that the distinction between church and state has roots in the Gospel, and agree also with historian James Hitchcock, for example, that America’s sense of this distinction, rightly understood, does not justify the “separationism” between religion and the state which has since the 1940s increasingly narrowed the permissible scope of religion in American public life. I agree, in other words, that this separationism is an inadequate reading of the dominant understanding of religious liberty in America’s founding period. I also agree with those who argue that the aggressive secularism more typical of Europe is restricted in America mostly to what has been termed the new “knowledge class” of academics from elite universities and representatives of the elite media. This aggressive kind of secularism is surely growing today, but the fact remains that “religion gave birth to America” and America has “the soul of a church.” In sum, let me emphasize my agreement that America has, in its origins and in its mainstream, always insisted on the importance of moral virtue and religion for civil society. Recognition of the sincerity and vigor of America’s moral and religious sensibility is essential for understanding rightly the sense in which America is David L. Schindler 145 truly “exceptional” in matters of religion and secularism. It is basic to my argument, then, that we must acknowledge this sincerity and vigor if we are to grasp the depth and complexity of the cultural problems America now faces. What I intend to argue is thus not that America’s religiosity and moral awareness have ever lacked intensity or an abundant presence in the culture, but that her intense and abundant religiosity and moral energy have harbored in their roots a seriously inadequate ontology of creation. We can recall here the work of Jewish sociologist of religion Will Herberg, who in his “classic” Protestant, Catholic, Jew of the 1950s, argued that religion and secularism in America stem largely from the same sources. That is, secularism in America is a sign and expression not so much of an absence of religion as of the presence of religion of a peculiar, and peculiarly inadequate, sort. Herberg argued that America’s peculiar secularism is best understood as “secularized Puritanism.” His point was that there is a logical link between America’s distinctive kind of secularism and America’s distinctive kind of religion – America’s historically prevalent Puritanism – such that secularism and religion in America not only opposed each other but in some basic way were actually tied implicitly, and however unintentionally, to a common vision of man. In their explicit opposition to each other at one level, America’s religion and America’s secularism paradoxically reinforced each other at another level. Herberg thought that Europeans typically missed this paradox in their analyses of the problem of religion and secularism in America, and indeed he wrote his book with the intention of correcting the widespread tendency to overlook the paradox. While agreeing in important ways with Herberg’s understanding of this paradoxical link between religion and secularism in America, I think this link needs to be qualified more adequately in ontological terms, and indeed in light of the Catholic faith. The problem we face today in America, viewed in ontological terms, is not only, or primarily, that of recovering a religion that was once was taken 146 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America largely for granted in America and seems the opposite of secularism. Rather, we need to reconsider the nature or logic – the ontological meaning – of America’s historical religiosity itself. We need to ponder the profound and paradoxical way in which this religion, on its own proper self-understanding, contains the ontological seeds of the very secularization that it has always, in its explicit intentionality and with utmost sincerity, resisted. Let me name this defective religious ontology and anthropology before describing it in more detail. My contention, first of all, is that America’s historically dominant understanding of man embeds a voluntaristic idea of freedom, an instrumentalist (or technologistic) idea of human reason, and a positivistic idea of religion. Further, these features all presuppose and are driven by a definite, if mostly unwitting, ontology of man and the cosmos in relation to the Creator. Key is this ontology’s lack of an adequate sense of the original givenness of the creature’s relation to the Creator, and, inside this relation, of each creature’s relation to other creatures. This givenness of relation may be termed “constitutive,” in the sense that the relation is first established in us by God in his act of creating us, and thus reaches to the inmost depths of our being. The relation, in other words, is not something first contracted by the creature, or simply added posteriorly to an already constituted substance. The creature is the origin of his being and acting only as always- anteriorly receptive of that origin. 1 John 4:10 indicates the scriptural ground for what is indicated here: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us.” At the ontological level, and in terms of human being, this implies that man’s first act is a “filial” act, an act which somehow recognizes that man’s being is from another, even if unaware of the full implications of this origin from another. Thus, as German philosopher Robert Spaemann says, the act of freedom, rightly understood, consists most basically in an act of “letting be”: letting be what is first given . These comments will be developed further in my discussion David L. Schindler 147 below regarding Benedict XVI and the monastic quaerere Deum . Here I wish merely to record what seems to me the most proper name for the inadequate ontology which undergirds America’s tendencies toward a voluntaristic freedom, an instrumentalist intelligence, and a positivistic religion or religiosity. That name I believe is semi-pelagianism, or what may be termed an ontological pelagianism. This suggestion may seem harsh, so let me explain. By “semi- pelagianism” here I do not refer in the first instance to the theological pelagianism signifying a heresy in the formal sense. I refer rather to an ontology which, however unintentionally, assigns to man the wrong sense of priority in actualizing the relation to God that most properly characterizes his meaning as a creature; and assigns thereby the wrong sense also of what it means for the creature to be and to act in itself and hence in a legitimately autonomous way. As Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict has emphasized, it is important to go to the root metaphysical issues in diagnosing the obstacles to the faith in the present cultural situation. Such metaphysical criticism of course does not tell the whole story. On the contrary, in keeping with the spirit of Pope Benedict, the point is simply that we must diagnose accurately, if the many positive features of American culture are to be realized in a way that secures rather than undermines the truth regarding our creaturely relation to God, a relation which, again, America in its founding core has intended to foster, or at least to allow to flourish. Notice the presupposition that thus informs the critical argument of this paper. I am assuming with de Tocqueville that religion gave birth to America and lay at America’s founding core, and indeed that this religion has sustained the moral energy characteristic of America throughout the course of her history. The criticism just introduced carries no intention of withdrawing these judgments. The criticism presupposes the legitimacy of the state–church and state– society distinctions, as well as the natural warrant for equality, 148 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America rights, and freedom. My questions bear rather on how this distinction and this natural warrant are to be understood, if and insofar as the truth intended by these is to be secured in an integrated and stable fashion. The negative burden of my argument in this connection is that America’s mostly unwittingly assumed ontology of the relation between creation and the Creator fragments and thus undermines the integrity and inherent dignity of the creature. America’s institutions, political but also economic and academic and cultural, insofar as they are shaped, however unconsciously, by a semi-pelagian view of human being and action, tend of their inner logic to undermine the dignity of creaturely being in its original defenselessness qua given: the worth of being generally in the “uselessness” of its transcendental meaning as true, good, and beautiful, and as at once ordered toward worship of the Creator; and also the much greater personal worth of human being, which indeed abides in him especially in the silent givenness of his earliest and latest moments of life. The claim introduced here is large and complex, and presupposes a particular philosophy of human being and action, developed in light of the Christian doctrine of creation. Indeed, the Catholic context of the argument implies also a distinct reading of the Second Vatican Council and of the vigorous debates within modern Catholic thought regarding human being and action and the doctrine of creation. My task here, however, will be limited to indicating the salient points of my proposal in terms of America’s Protestant- Enlightenment view of man and creation; of Benedict XVI’s idea of the cultural significance of the monastic quaerere Deum ; of John Courtney Murray’s reading of America; and finally of Dignitatis Humanae ’s notion of religious freedom – before returning again in conclusion to Leo XIII’s Testem Benevolentiae .

III

The announced criticism regarding America’s semi-pelagian David L. Schindler 149 tendency of course may seem prima facie to fit the Enlightenment thought prevalent at the time of the Founding, but scarcely the Protestant Christianity for which the realities of Christ and God’s grace were utterly central in human life. In fact, however, and as already suggested, Enlightenment thought and America’s dominant Puritan Protestant thought paradoxically reinforce each other at an ontological level, coincident with their emphatic and overt differences in religious sensibility. How so? I do not treat the following features of American Protestantism necessarily in a definite order of importance. I mean only to say that they all play an integral role in America’s original self- understanding. There is, first of all, Luther’s rejection of monasticism, which is tied to his reconceiving man’s worldly calling (Beruf ), an idea that was accepted by Calvin even as it was given a more radical meaning by the latter. Now, this emphasis on one’s worldly calling carried the important positive claim that ordinary life, the life of marriage and worldly labor and the like, was a proper context for the realization of holiness in one’s earthly existence. The problem, for the Protestant Reformers, is that sin had created a distance between God and man, and that the eschatological feature of the monastic vocation consequently seemed to them utopian, or prematurely “otherworldly.” The fundamental presupposition of monasticism, that eternity was already present in time, or indeed that some genuine anticipation of heavenly life was possible already in earthly existence, seemed to them presumptuous. The Protestant elimination of monasticism, and its particular way of understanding the Christian’s worldly calling, thus presupposed a distinct view of the relation between eternity and time and the temporal order. God was no longer to be found properly in , but only by means of , the things of the world. Heaven could never be said to be truly at home on earth, with its immanent presence giving form to the things of this world. The purpose of our lives, emphasized especially by the American followers of Calvin, was thus not so 150 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America much to in form and hence also trans form the world, as simply to use it in order to get beyond it to one’s individual salvation. The relation between heaven and earth, in other words, was less ontological than moral in nature: a matter most properly not of what was already initially given in creation, but of what was realized by man’s will under the power of God’s merciful grace. It is important to be clear: it is not that every aspect of earthly life was not for the Puritans to be ordered by the call to sanctity. The pertinent point, rather, is that heaven and earth had no intrinsic relation, in the sense that the call to sanctity would entail a movement simultaneously (albeit asymmetrically) toward both heaven and earth: toward the Creator already present within his creation, and toward creation as naturally open to the Creator. The Anglo-American Calvinists, or Puritans, emphasized the idea of predestination and man’s sinfulness, and eliminated the sacramental nature of the church. The church played no infallibly effective role as mediator of God’s presence to and in the world. Specifically, and most pertinently, the church played no infallibly effective ( ex opere operato ) role in the mediation of God’s forgiveness of sins in the sacrament of penance. The result was that signs of God’s forgiving grace of mercy had to be found elsewhere: not in the church as such, or as sacrament, but in the individual lives of Christians themselves. These signs could not be found via any properly contemplative or mystical acts, for reasons I will note in a moment. On the contrary, the signs were to be found in the behavior of individual Christians. The pertinent question was whether this behavior exhibited signs of a life organized in terms of glorifying God, indicating thereby the presence of God’s salvific will. Note, in other words, that this virtuous behavior was not emphasized as a cause but as an effective sign of God’s grace, of one’s being among the salvati rather than the damnati . The Puritan rejection of a sacramental church, along with its doctrine of predestination, involved an individualizing of ecclesial David L. Schindler 151 and also social-political life. The idea of a “holy community,” with its “Christocracy,” of course suggests a kind of corporate body, but one that nevertheless has its roots primarily in each individual’s realization of his ethical duty to preserve and show the effectiveness of his divine election. Moreover, sin fractured the natural integrity of man’s originally given relation to God, and thereby also of each man’s relation to others. The consequence was that social-political relations originated in the voluntary action of each toward the others. The classical view that the state was naturally necessary because of the originally given social nature of man was thus rejected. However complicated the concrete relations between state and church in the history of Puritanism, the congregationalist tendency of the Puritan church logically required a contractualist reading of the origin of the state, and a corresponding shift in the purpose of political authority away from the classical idea of the common good. As mentioned, the Puritans sought to organize life around the call to glorify God, and this meant “rationalizing” life in all its aspects. Every activity, every act of freedom and intelligence, every doing and making, had to be harnessed and made into an instrument of God’s glorification. Leisure and the “useless” – what is rested in for its own sake – may be said to be the bête noire of Puritanism. The point is to be busy rationalizing everything, with no natural sense of an anterior letting be of the other, of a patient indwelling of the other that gives the first form to human knowledge and action. This activist or constructivist temper of mind, again, is to be understood in light of the Puritan sense of the sinfulness of man and the consequent disorder within creation. Such sinfulness implied a God who can no longer be seen in his creation, in a contemplative or mystical manner. Nature cannot be seen in its originally given truth and goodness by God, and thus for its own sake. It cannot be seen in its goodness qua being, but only quia factum or actum , or as enacted or made by man in his dynamic of rationalization in majorem Dei gloriam . 152 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America

We can also understand in this light why the Puritans were quick to adopt modern science. As Columbia University sociologist Robert Merton argued in his important work in the first half of the twentieth century, the Puritans of the seventeenth century largely embraced the modern scientific methods as developed by Francis Bacon, for example. These methods were characterized by a utilitarian- empiricist temper, and thus by the idea of knowledge as a matter primarily of power and control rather than of “seeing” or understanding. Central to the methods of modern science, in other words, was a kind of theoretical manipulability (in the terms of twentieth- century Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas), or again a conflation of making and knowing (in the terms of twentieth-century Canadian philosopher George Grant). Along with its acceptance of these methods, the Puritans embraced a mechanical worldview that rested on the assumption that matter is passive. In so doing, they rejected Aristotle’s physics, which understood movement in nature in terms of principles and powers internal to nature. They also rejected Aristotle’s ethics, which stressed human nature’s capacity for being virtuous and performing virtuous acts. These emphases of Aristotle in his study of physical nature and human nature were deemed a threat to the sovereignty of God and an enemy of grace. The methods and content of modern science were thus assumed by the Puritans as necessary aids in the complete rationalization of life. Let us return, then, to the criticisms noted earlier regarding America’s voluntaristic freedom, instrumentalist or technologistic intelligence, and positivistic religion, all of which I suggested are bound up with semi-pelagianism. It should now be clear why I take such patterns of life and thought, rooted however unconsciously in semi-pelagianism, to be characteristic not only of those who were avowedly Enlightened, but also of the deeply religious Puritans – why these patterns are in fact reflective of what was a paradoxical relation between Enlightenment thought and Puritan thought in America. The profound differences in religious sensibility that David L. Schindler 153 founded the opposition between Enlightenment thought and Puritan thought carried, from within their radically different religious starting points, a common ontological sense of God as distant from the world. Such an ontology fractured the integrity of the originally given and thus intrinsic relation of the creature to the Creator and of each creature with all others, and thereby of the relation of earth to heaven and time to eternity. But let me again highlight the paradox of ascribing to Puritans the implication of semi-pelagianism. It was the basic burden of Puritanism to reject any hint of pelagianism. As we have noted, all of the Puritans’ patterns of life and thought were meant expressly to affirm the primacy of God in earthly affairs, the absolute primacy of God’s grace in bringing about and sustaining man’s moral behavior. As I have been at pains to make clear, my criticism presupposes this, and bears rather on the implied logic or ontological order of human being and action before God that the Puritans took to be necessary for sustaining God’s primacy. This logic was expressed, again, in a thorough rationalizing of human life and thought understood to provide an indispensable sign of the effectiveness of God’s merciful grace. My criticism, once again, presupposes the positive achievements of Puritanism in generating and supporting an abiding sense of the importance of moral virtue for civic life in America. Indeed, in light of the above, we should now also highlight Puritanism’s contribution to the recovery of the importance of ordinary life in realizing the call to holiness, and, in this context, the importance also of the lay dimension of the Christian presence in the world and its public order. This strong moral sensibility and the worldly-lay dimension of the call to holiness are distinctly important marks and accomplish- ments of American Christianity. My criticism means to identify the ontological assumptions that will allow us to sustain these achievements in a more integrated form, in light of what seems to me a more adequate understanding of creation: by indicating, in the name 154 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America of Pope Benedict and the monastic quaerere Deum , a way of uniting America’s indigenous moral sense with a more adequate religious sense, and America’s indigenous concern for ordinary life and for the lay or worldly dimension of holiness with a more adequate view of the relation between eternity and time. Here, then, is the point: there is in America’s dominant religiosity no adequate sense of the givenness of man’s relation to God and to others – within the church, within themselves, or within the world around them. Not within the church, because the church lacks a sacramental character. Not within themselves, because the relation to the Creator has been fractured by sin in such a way that man no longer retains a naturally given integrity of relation to God and is thus no longer naturally homo religiosus ; and he is also, consequently, no longer naturally related to other creatures inside relation to the Creator. Finally, not within the world, because man does not indwell a cosmos of being that is transcendentally true and good and beautiful as given. In a word, there is for Puritan Protestantism no always-already given supernatural presence of God mediated to man in and through the church, in support of an always-already given natural order of things that truly image God and refract his presence in the world. On the contrary, there is only a human act of freedom and intelligence which, because it does not initially-naturally participate in but rather has fractured relation to God and others, must go in quest of that relation, if only as a necessary sign of the reality of this relation’s effective presence. The basic human act, lacking participation in an anteriorly given order of relations to God, to others, and to the world of things, must now itself first enact this order, if only as a sign of a relation that one otherwise could not be sure of. This at root is what is meant by my identifying America’s will as voluntaristic, its reason as instrumentalist, and its religion as positivistic, all of these summed up in an (unwitting) ontological pelagianism. The crucial point in each case is that the human act is initially empty of any David L. Schindler 155 order of relation to God or to others that is always-already – that is, naturally – given, and that can thus always be first trusted and rested in: any order of relations that the self can and should most basically let be. It is just this lack of an original letting be, in the face of the original givenness of being, that most properly identifies America’s false sense of creaturely autonomy and thus her secularism, which coincides with her sincere and vigorous but ontologically inadequate religiosity.

We move on to consider Benedict XVI, focusing especially on Benedictine monasticism and its search for God that the pope has emphasized, most recently during his trip to the United Kingdom. We should now be able to see that this focus on monasticism is scarcely arbitrary with respect to the question of America. For, as we have noted, the elimination of monasticism is integral to the logic implicit in the unfolding of America’s characteristic patterns of life. What does Pope Benedict have to say about monasticism, and what does it suggest with respect to America’s peculiarly liberal culture? What does monasticism say about the nature of the Christian’s relation to and presence in the world, and indeed about the nature of created reality itself as a place where truth, goodness, and beauty can be found in their being as naturally given? As the pope said in his address to “Representatives of the World of Culture” during his visit to France in 2008, 1 the Benedictine “quaerere Deum – to seek God and to let oneself be found by him, . . . is no less necessary than in former times. . . . What gave Europe’s culture its foundation – the search for God and the readiness to listen to him – remains today the basis of any genuine culture.” And: “within the monks’ seeking, there is already contained, in some respects, finding”: there is “always an initial spur [that] arouses the will to seek.” Benedict calls this search for God and readiness to 156 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America listen to him “the truly philosophical attitude.” It is this attitude that guides the monks in their study, enabling them to “perceive in the world itself the Word, in the midst of words.” It disposes the monks to recognize “‘with the ears of the heart’ the inner laws of the music of creation, the archetypes of music that the Creator has built into his world and into men,” and this prompts the monks’ speech to break into the song of praise that is the liturgy. Further,

since the search for God . . . requires active engagement with the means by which he makes himself known – his creation and his revealed Word – note that he makes himself known in his creation –, it was only natural that the monastery should have a library and a school. It was the monks’ dedication to learning as the path on which to encounter the Incarnate Word that was to lay the foundations of our Western culture and civilization.

We may thus say, in a word, that the search for God and the readiness to listen to him enabled the monks to recognize the world of being as true and good and beautiful in its givenness as created, indeed as able to show forth the reality of God and incline them toward both study and worship. To be sure, this recognition involved not only study and liturgy but also labora or work. But note how work is now understood. Monastic work does not leave behind the philosophical attitude, with its contemplative letting be. On the contrary, the monks’ culture of the word is both presupposed in and gives rise to the culture of work, which is now understood as “sharing in the work of the Creator.” This sharing or participatory character is key. Human work rightly understood presupposes and is informed by the readiness to listen to God and to the creatures created by God. Without this anterior readiness to listen, human beings inevitably tend to confuse their work with the absolutely originate work of God the Creator, thus arrogating to themselves what Benedict terms “the status of a god-like creator.” They tend precipitously to become masters of the David L. Schindler 157 world. Benedict is not, of course, suggesting by these statements that everyone needs literally to become a monk, but only that everyone needs to undertake the filial search for God and readiness to listen to him that is characteristic of the monk. This, then, leads to the second point regarding Benedict’s appeal to the necessity of monasticism for any authentic human culture. The God whom the monks seek is the “unknown god” proclaimed by Paul at the Areopagus: the god “whom men do not know and yet do know – the unknown-known; the one [all men] are seeking, whom ultimately they know already and who yet remains the unknown.” As Benedict notes, “[t]he fundamental structure of Christian proclamation,” the search and finding characteristic of the monks, in other words, presupposes roots already in non-Christians, indeed, in man as such as he exists in history. “The deepest layer of human thinking and feeling,” Benedict says, “somehow knows that [God] must exist, that, at the beginning of all things, there must be not irrationality but creative Reason” – though this implicit “knowledge” slides toward unreality in the absence of Revelation and the Christian proclamation. What Benedict says here is undergirded by what he says elsewhere regarding what he terms the ontological dimension of conscience, namely, the anamnesis or memory of God, that is “identical with the foundations of our being.” What is termed natural law thus includes movement toward God, one bearing an implicit memory of having come from him and having been initiated by him. We recognize God somehow implicitly not only as our end but also as our beginning. What Benedict is pointing toward here is also affirmed in John Paul II’s notion of “original solitude,” which Benedict affirms and develops. Original solitude characterizes the primordial structure of man’s being, and refers to man’s original being alone with God – “original” here in the sense not simply that it occurs first, but that it is recuperated in some basic if only implicit way in every one of 158 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America man’s acts in history. This original solitude means not only that man is different from all other creatures of the visible universe, but that man’s relationality begins most radically in his aloneness before God. The point of this aloneness, in other words, is not that man is originally without relation, but that man’s relationality, his original being-with, is a being-with God (ontologically) before it is a being- with other human beings. Man’s being-with God, as creaturely, is first a being-from, in the manner of a child. It is a filial relation. This constitutive relationality to God, or original solitude with God, of course becomes at once for John Paul II an “original unity” between man and woman, which is to say, an original community of relation among all human beings. This original unity, together with original solitude, are the ground for Benedict’s emphatic affirmation in Caritas in Veritate that humanity is a single human family. Human beings bear a common relation to the Creator, and, Benedict insists, this common relatedness needs today to be recovered in its metaphysical infrastructure. An important indication of what is implied in this twofold original relatedness is given in a 1996 article by Ratzinger on “Freedom and Truth,” where he states: “Since man’s essence consists in being- from, being-with, and being-for, human freedom can exist only in the ordered communion of freedoms.” 2 Order, in other words, is the condition of freedom, “a constitutive element of freedom itself.” 3 Ratzinger sums up: “The child in the mother’s womb is simply a very graphic depiction of the essence of human existence in general.” 4 In sum, all of what Pope Benedict says about the monks and their way of life, and in different terms about anamnesis and original solitude/unity and constitutive relations, is understood by him to have its roots already in the nature of historical man as such. The monks’ search for God presupposes the unknown-known god in whom all men live and have their being. The memory and original experience of God embedded somehow in the heart of every human David L. Schindler 159 being carries the natural seed of the philosophical attitude that approaches the world most basically in nonutilitarian fashion, enabling men to view being as at once (“convertibly”) true, good, and beautiful, in its givenness (by God). It is within the framework of this presupposition that Pope Benedict’s claim is warranted that monasticism is the basis of any authentic human culture. At the root of human action as understood by the monks is a readiness to listen to God and to all his creatures. At the root of human action, in other words, is a letting be vis-à-vis all of created being in its being-given as gift and thus as good. It is this primordial letting be in the face of being as gift that alone can sustain an authentic human culture, displacing the ontological pelagianism that today threatens the integrity and dignity of the human in its rightful creatureliness. I turn now in my final section to the question of where Father John Courtney Murray stands with respect to the earlier discussion of American culture and the anthropology implied in Pope Benedict XVI’s appeal to monasticism.

In treating Murray, I will focus on three points.

(1) First, there is his well-known chapter in We Hold These Truths , “Is It Basket-Weaving?” Framing his question in terms of the relation between nature and grace, Murray asks what Catholics should make of the achievement of America. Acknowledging that there are impurities in this achievement, he nevertheless says that the American economy, the American polity, and the American “mastery of nature” each represent an achievement of what he calls the res humana . Each represents an instance of “nature confronting grace.” 5 The American economy does so in the sense that poverty has been abolished at the level of principle. Although people still 160 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America live in unacceptable conditions of poverty, “the means for its solution exist and are known. A general freedom from want is not a politician’s promise, but an economic certainty.” 6 The American polity does so in the sense that the sovereignty of the people now lies in the equal footing of everyone in the power to judge “the prince and the legislative act.” 7 Furthermore, in America the competence of the government “was confined to the political as such and to the promotion of the public welfare of the community as a political, i.e., lay, community.” 8 Moreover, “[i]n matters spiritual the people were committed to their freedom,” and to this spiritual task “the contribution of the state would be simply that of rendering assistance in the creation of those conditions of freedom, peace, and public prosperity in which the spiritual task might go forward.” 9 Finally, America’s “mastery of nature” represents an instance of “nature confronting grace” in the sense that “America illustrates in uniquely striking fashion the commonplace that there has been a constantly ascending progress in man’s knowledge and control of nature.” 10 This of course does not mean that a similar situation obtains “in matters of man’s spiritual and moral progress.” 11 Nonetheless, says Murray, “the ‘Cartesian dream’ of men ‘ commes maîtres et possesseurs de la nature ’ has assumed real substance” in America. 12 According to Murray, in sum, “the problem of a Christian humanism is really in [America’s] midst in an indigenous form, not elsewhere paral- leled.” 13 In the second part of this chapter, and as a means of completing the terms in which he means to pose the question regarding the achievement of America from a Catholic perspective, Murray provides a sketch of two humanisms, eschatological and incarnational. Eschatological humanism emphasizes withdrawal from human culture and the insubstantiality of those achievements relative to man’s final, supernatural, and eternal end. Incarnational humanism, on the other hand, rests on the dictum that “grace perfects nature, does not destroy it.” 14 Thus, “[t]he Christian heart must David L. Schindler 161 cultivate a contempt for the world, but diligently cherish its reverence for the work of the Creator, who is Creator not only of heaven but of earth, of the visible as well as the invisible.” 15 Murray insists that these two humanisms are not mutually exclusive, but that each gives rise to its own “distinct style of life.” 16 Each has its legitimate points of emphasis, and each has its own risks. Murray concludes, however, by indicating what he takes to be the spirit set by the Church herself. The Church in her doctrinal affirmations, he says, “is confident, even optimistic. True religion and profound humaneness . . . are not rivals but sisters.” 17 What it is important to understand here, he notes, is that “the wound of nature, which is our heritage from the original sin,” is more profound and crippling “in the line of will in its relation to the good” than it is “in the line of intelligence in its relation to the true.” 18 For this reason the Church is rightly seen to prefer an incarnational humanism. The burden of Murray’s argument regarding what the Church is to make of America’s characteristic achievements is thus twofold: (a) those achievements are authentic realizations of nature, such that (b) given the Church’s rightful preference for incarnational humanism, her task relative to America becomes essentially one of completing what is a naturally perfect res humana , through moral correction or the addition of grace and the supernatural. There are large theoretical issues evoked here regarding nature vis-à-vis grace and sin – or indeed the integrity of nature as realized in the one actual order of history – as well as regarding the distinction between eschatological and incarnational humanism, issues that cannot be adequately dealt with on their own terms in the present context. My primary concern is the ontology of human being and action presupposed in Murray’s judgments, such that he takes the achievements of American culture in economics, politics, and technological science to suffice as instances of “ nature confronting grace” (emphasis mine). In other words, according to Murray America’s achievements have realized a nature that is sufficiently 162 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America

“pure” that they carry no significant demand for transforming conversion as distinct from simple completion, and consequently for any interior change of order and direction as implied by conversion.

(2) Before pondering the implications of Murray’s cultural judgments here, however, we need to consider two further elements of Murray’s interpretation of America. Also in We Hold These Truths , Murray sets forth his argument regarding America’s distinctive idea of civil unity in the face of religious pluralism. The key, he says, is that the one civil society in America, while accommodating all of the religious communities that are divided among themselves, “does not seek to reduce to its own unity the differences that divide them.” 19 He writes: “Neither may undertake to destroy the other. Each subsists in its own order. And the two orders, the religious and the civil, remain distinct, however much they are, and need to be, related.” 20 In America, this civil unity that respects religious differences takes legal form in the religious articles of the First Amendment to the Constitution. As is well known, Murray argues that these articles are best understood as “articles of peace,” as distinct from “articles of faith.” Were they “articles of faith,” they would somehow express “certain specifically sectarian tenets with regard to the nature of religion, religious truth, the church, faith, conscience, divine revelation, human freedom, etc.” 21 On the contrary, “articles of peace have no religious content. They answer none of the eternal human questions with regard to the nature of truth and freedom or the manner in which the spiritual order of man’s life is to be organized or not organized.” 22 Murray says that those who dogmatize about the meaning of the First Amendment do so, given America’s peculiar historical circumstances, in the name of either certain Puritan-Protestant religious tenets, or certain ultimate suppositions of secular-deistic and rationalistic liberalism, or, finally, a secularizing Protestantism David L. Schindler 163 which “consider[s] the church to be true in proportion as its organization is commanded by the norms of secular democratic society, and bring[s] about a coincidence of religious and secular- liberal concepts of freedom.” 23 If the religious clauses of the First Amendment could be read as “articles of faith,” their dogma would surely be one or other, or some mix, of these three. What alone allows Catholics to accept the juridical order of the American state, Murray therefore says, is not that this state implies “truthful” answers with respect to the eternal questions regarding truth and freedom, but that it implies no answers at all – Enlightenment, Protestant, or Catholic – to these questions. The state is simply incompetent in such matters. The First Amendment to the Constitu- tion contains only “articles of peace.”

(3) The final point regarding Murray concerns his interpretation of the Second Vatican Council in relation to his argument with respect to America. The Council’s affirmation of the right to religious freedom in Dignitatis Humanae , says Murray, is identical in object or content to that affirmed in the U.S. Constitution. He emphasizes that the right to religious freedom is a matter of formal recognition of religious freedom in political terms, as distinct from metaphysical or theological ones. 24 This right, in other words, is to be conceived in the first instance as “negative, namely an immunity from coercion in religious matters.” 25 However, Murray suggests in this connection that Dignitatis Humanae is not as clear as the American Constitution that the right to religious freedom should be understood as political and not ideological in nature – as articles of peace and with no implication of articles of faith. 26 Given the distinction between the continental-laicist and American liberal traditions, Murray puzzles over “the prominence given [in Dignitatis Humanae ] to man’s moral obligation to search for the truth, as somehow the ultimate foundation of the right to religious freedom.” 27 In the same vein, he questions the emphasis of Dignitatis 164 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America

Humanae on the need for government to foster the religious life of the people. As he puts it, the right to religious freedom is “simply an immunity,” 28 and “I don’t see how you can promote an immunity– making someone more and more immune. This just doesn’t make any sense to me; it never has.” 29 Hence Murray concludes that the demand that government show religion favor is actually tied, not to the logic of the right to religious freedom, properly speaking, but rather to the fact that “society itself may benefit from [such favor] in terms of justice and order,” 30 or indeed to what is otherwise at best a legitimate pastoral as distinct from strictly theoretical-political concern. 31 In short, Murray contends that Dignitatis Humanae ’s emphasis on the moral obligation to seek the truth, and on the state’s need to foster conditions favorable to religion, is due primarily to the Council Fathers’ failure to appropriate fully the distinction between the continental-laicist and American liberal traditions, and hence to appreciate the properly juridical nature of the latter’s idea of rights. Indeed, tying the right to religious freedom to man’s duty to search for the truth, according to Murray, leads to problematic tendencies he says are evidenced in both contemporary communist governments and some Catholic ones, namely, “that they already have the truth; that they represent the truth, which is also the good of the people; that, consequently, they are empowered to repress public manifestations of error.” 32 Further in this context, Murray says that, in conceiving freedom and rights as juridical, we see that the purpose of government is best expressed now in terms of maximizing freedom, and of securing the public order that enables each person equally to exercise his freedom. Thus, although the common good includes much more than just public order, it is the concern for public order that is for Murray the specific function of government.33

David L. Schindler 165

What are we to make of Murray’s position as outlined, in light of our earlier reflections?

(1) Let me respond first in terms of Murray’s distinction between articles of peace and articles of faith. The problem, in a word, is that articles of peace in Murray’s sense do not exist. There is not, and can never be, a government whose constitutional-legal “civil unity” is purely political or juridical in nature. No government can in fact avoid claims regarding the meaning of man in relation to God, ontological claims bearing religious and (natural) theological implications. No government can thus legitimately claim simple incompetence in matters of ontology and religion. This does not mean that the state as such ought to be directly concerned with judging the truth of any particular religion, or can or ought to make itself the final arbiter of the truth about man. It means simply that the state, in making judgments about the right to religious freedom, necessarily invokes one way or another, however unconsciously, some implied view of man relative to his ultimate origin and end. Murray’s argument regarding articles of peace and articles of faith misses this ever-present implication of ontological meaning. Such a criticism may appear to beg the question. For, according to Murray, the First Amendment of the American Constitution and Dignitatis Humanae both mean clearly to affirm civic freedom as distinct from ontological freedom. But that is just the point I am introducing: civic freedom in the purely juridical sense is itself already a freedom fraught with ontological implications vis-à-vis the meaning of creation. How is this so in the case of Murray’s particular reading of civic or juridical freedom? As a proper foundation for the distinctly political-juridical meaning of the right to religious freedom, and indeed of rights generally, Murray provides an argument which, he says, can be constructed 166 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America from “the principles of the Declaration [ Dignitatis Humanae ] itself, assembled into an organic structure.” 34 Given the argument’s comprehensive formulation, I quote it at length:

The argument begins from the dignity of man as a moral subject. Man is intelligent. Therefore he is capable of, and called to, an understanding of his own existence – its meaning and purpose. Man is free. Therefore he is called personally to realize, in love and through a lifelong process of choice, the sense of his own existence. Hence the mark of man as a person is his personal autonomy. Inseparable, however, from personal autonomy is personal responsibility. This is twofold. First, man is responsible for the conformity between the inner imperatives of his conscience and the transcendent order of truth. Second, man is responsible for the conformity between his external actions and the inner imperatives of conscience. These responsibilities are moral and altogether stringent. Man bears them as a moral subject, as he confronts, so to speak, his vertical relationship to the transcendent order of truth. However, on the horizontal plane of intersubjective relationships, and within the social order, which is the order within which human rights are predicated, man’s fulfillment of his personal responsibilities is juridically irrelevant. The major reason is that no authority exists within the juridical order that is capable or empowered to judge in this regard. . . .

What is juridically relevant, however, and relevant in the most fundamental sense, is the personal autonomy which is constituent of man’s dignity. More exactly, resident in man’s dignity is the exigence to act on his own initiative and on his own responsibility. This exigence is of the objective order; it is simply the demand that man should act according to his nature. And this exigence is the basic ontological foundation, not only of the right to religious freedom, but of all man’s fundamental rights – in what concerns the search for truth, the communication of opinions, the cultivation of the arts and sciences, the formation and expression of political views, association with other men for common purposes, and, with privileged particularity, the free exercise of religion.

David L. Schindler 167

All these rights are immunities from coercion. Given the exigence of the person to act on his own initiative and responsibility, coercion appears as a thing of no value to the person. 35

Finally, concluding this argument, Murray says that to speak thus of a right “is to imply a juridical relationship, within which to the right of one there corresponds a duty on the part of others with regard to whatever the object of the right is – in our case, immunity from coercive action.” 36 Thus the foundation for human dignity, and consequently for the right of religious freedom, resides most basically for Murray in man’s personal autonomy: his exigence to act on his own initiative. Clearly this exigence is tied to an inner responsibility of man to his conscience, to nature, and to a transcendent order of truth. This responsibility, however, is juridically irrelevant, because no authority in this latter realm is legitimately empowered to judge such matters. Given the exigence to act on one’s initiative as basic in one’s conception of the human act, it follows that the basic meaning of a right is negative: immunity from coercion. Because my primary and most basic exigence as a human being is to exercise initiative with respect to the other, the basic duty of the other, from the point of view of the state, is to avoid obstructing as far as possible each person’s exercise of initiative. To be sure, Murray is at pains to point out that his idea of the human being as exigent to act on his own initiative is meant merely to provide a foundation for the rights that remain juridical in their content and object as concerns of the state. But that is just my point: the juridical conception of rights, in the priority it grants to the human act in its (would-be) purely formal character as an exercise of choice or initiative, itself expresses a particular ontology of freedom. As Murray’s argument itself makes clear, it is the formalist reading of the human act that alone warrants the purely juridical idea of rights. His metaphysics of human freedom and his juridical notion of rights, in other words, express in different contexts, philosophical 168 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America and political respectively, a single understanding of the human person. Those who follow Murray typically respond to criticisms of a formalist conception of political order, again, by insisting that these miss the distinctive genius of America: that is, not that America guarantees a healthy exercise of freedom in terms of choosing and living out appropriate views regarding the nature and destiny of man, but that she establishes the constitutional indifference toward all such views necessary for a genuinely free appropriation of any one of them. It establishes the neutral legal ground enabling each person or cultural institution – church, family, school – to propose what it takes to be the substantive truth regarding the human being, and to form its members in this truth. The criticism of a formalist conception of the political thus, according to these followers of Murray, is directed toward the wrong target: it is to the individual person and these “private” institutions that questions regarding ontological substance should be directed. The primacy of cultural institutions over the state in matters of ontological truth is emphatically to be affirmed. The conventional liberal form in which this primacy is asserted here, however, begs the burden of my argument: that the would-be merely juridical state itself already, eo ipso , harbors a hidden religious ontology drawn from members of America’s predominantly Puritan-Enlightenment civil society. Thus citizens and cultural institutions within America’s liberal state to be sure remain, in principle, (externally) free to choose and live their own ideas of man. The problem is that, in its execution of would-be purely juridical legal procedures, this state is already complicit with a formalist understanding of the human act. Such a state’s efforts to protect each person’s and cultural institution’s exercise of freedom, therefore, coincide logically with a tendency – unconscious but for all that still coercive – to influence this exercise in a formalist direction: to infuse each person and institution with the idea of freedom as a logically indifferent act of David L. Schindler 169 choice between contraries. Such persons and institutions may well continue, among themselves and despite this state coercion, to teach that acts of human freedom and intelligence are exercised always inside a naturally given order of relations to God and others. The relevant point is simply that acts so conceived will continue to have legally protected public status only insofar as, from the point of view of the state, they are recast in purely formal terms. These acts will continue to have such status, in other words, only qua formally conceived exercises of choice. A final point. Murray says that rights and freedom in their political sense are the key to recognizing the Church’s embrace, in Dignitatis Humanae , of the principle of the legitimate secularity – as distinct from Continental laicization – of society and state. That is, civil government, in light of this juridical viewpoint and according to Dignitatis Humanae , is to be “confined to a care of the free exercise of religion within society.” 37 He writes: “In ratifying the principle of religious freedom, the Church accepts the full burden of the freedom which is the single claim she is entitled to make on the secular world.” 38 The older Church doctrine, which was “more Aristotelian and medieval in inspiration, rested on the conception of common good as an ensemble of social virtues and values.” 39 In contrast, according to the more recent doctrine reflected in Dignitatis Humanae , which is “more profoundly Christian in inspiration,” “the primary function of government is juridical, namely, the protection and promotion of the exercise of human and civil rights, and the facilitation of the discharge of human and civil duties by . . . citizen[s].” 40 Moreover, “[i]n the secular society, under the secular state, the highest value that both state and society are called upon to protect and foster is the personal and social value of the free exercise of religion.” 41 Accordingly, the state and society are “not only distinct from the Church in its origin and finality; [but] also autonomous in [their] structures and functions.” 42 The aim and object of the Church in the world is thus not “to restore ancient 170 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America sacralizations” or “to find new forms of sacralizing the terrestrial and temporal order in its structures and processes,” but to purify these structures and processes and secure their sure direction “to their inherently secular ends.” 43 Murray’s juridical state, which displaces the idea of the common good with that of public order as the specific function of government, is thus expressly bound up with a definite conception of the autonomy of the institutions of society and of the rightful nature of the Church’s task in their regard. The Church’s task is limited to protecting the exercise of rights and supporting the freedom necessary for civil-institutional structures and processes to reach their terrestrial and temporal ends, ends that have been abstracted from their naturally given order of relation to God and eternity. We have seen what this implies concretely for Murray, in terms of what he takes to be the “purely” natural achievements realized in America’s economic, political, and scientific-technological structures and procedures. But we need now to indicate more precisely in ontological terms the meaning of the criticism I have introduced regarding the formalism of Murray’s political order, as this formalism is articulated here in terms of his idea of legitimate autonomy and secularity of the temporal-terrestrial order.

(2) As indicated, the political right to religious freedom is for Murray a matter of ordering external relations between physical persons in such a way as to protect equally each person’s exercise of freedom. This juridical idea of rights is founded in and mediated via a human act conceived in terms of the exigence of each person to exercise his own initiative. This exigence for initiative, viewed formally, is thereby viewed in its separation from relations to God and others. Clearly Murray does not deny that these relations are given with man’s nature. He merely brackets them in accounting for the foundations of human dignity as pertinent to political order. Such David L. Schindler 171 relations, in other words, are strictly not necessary or relevant for an adequate idea of human rights in its various contexts: “in what concerns the search for truth, the communication of opinions, the cultivation of the arts and sciences, the formation and expression of political views, association with other men for common purposes, and, with privileged particularity, the free exercise of religion.” 44 The problem is that Murray’s formally conceived human act fails to take sufficient account of the immanence in man of the Creator’s activity that is implied in his act of creating man. Each person does indeed originate his own human action, but only as participant in what has always, first and abidingly, been originated by another. The heart of the matter is that each human act presupposes a memory of the unknown-known God, a seeking of God that is in some significant sense already a “finding.” Each exercise of the human act presupposes an order of relation to God, and indeed to other creatures inside relation to God, that is given in and with the foundations of human being. This memory and this givenness imply a “letting be” as the originary form of the free-intelligent human agere . The order of relations to God and others is thus not merely the object of human agere , but also the always already given, and immanent, condition of human agere that gives the latter its anterior and most basic form. This basic form of the human act carries an implicit logic at once of gratitude , as the expression of one’s originary sense of being somehow from another, and of service, as the expression of one’s originary sense of being somehow for another. The implicit logic involves a responsive movement toward God that desires to worship him, and toward others that first and most basically lets them be in their inherent, transcendentally given, truth as good. It is crucial again to see, with Pope Benedict, that recognition of this original sense of being from another, with its implied logic of gratitude and service and worship, is not simply a function of Christian faith. On the contrary, it is inchoately present in every 172 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America human being. It involves an originary unknowing knowing and loving that comes to fullness only in the encounter with Jesus Christ. The pertinent point here is simply that this sense is first given to the human creature in and with his act of being created. The upshot, relative to Murray, is not that the “exigence to act on [one’s] own initiative and on his own responsibility” is not the foundation of human dignity, but that this exigence originates in response and as a response to God and others: it is called forth by what is always anteriorly given to man by God, at once in and through others. Acting on one’s own initiative thus involves a filial spontaneity, even as acting on one’s own responsibility presupposes a simultaneous-anterior responsibility to others. Because he overlooks the implications of the immanent presence of God in the creature, Murray, in his account of the human act that serves as the foundation of man’s dignity and rights, leaves us logically with an (absolutely) primary origin and a secondary (or “secondarily primary,” if you will) origin of human action that remain simply outside of, and in this sense extrinsic to, each other. This extrinsicism is perhaps best understood as a subtle version of what Servais Pinckaers calls “freedom of indifference”: a freedom defined in terms of a self-determination that initially excludes being determined by another, or again looks on initially determining factors as intrusions upon rather than as intrinsic to the proper and most basic activity of the will. This extrinsicist understanding logically shifts the burden of accounting for the relation between God and the human self one-sidedly to the self: to the one who, not finding the Giver somehow already given to and present within him and calling him forth, must now elect on his own to go in search of him. Such an extrinsicism thus backs logically into what we earlier termed semi-pelagianism, or the idea that the creature first (in an ontological sense) goes forward on its own power, in order to meet the power of the Creator. This semi-pelagianism, with its human act as originally ontologically empty of the implication of relation to David L. Schindler 173

God and others, expresses itself in a moralist-instrumentalist idea of freedom and intelligence and a positivist idea of religion and religiosity. Note that I do not mean to impute such a conception to Murray in the exact form characteristic of America’s dominant Puritan and Enlightenment tradition. I mean rather to suggest that there exists in modernity an extrinsicist account of the human act relative to God that has a distinctly Catholic provenance, and that this modern Catholic version of extrinsicism has tended to obstruct thinkers like Murray from identifying in their proper religious-ontological nature the problems of American cultural life as shaped by Puritan- Enlightenment thought. Recall in this context Murray’s statement that, if one were to read “dogma” into America’s First Amendment, that dogma would be a mix of certain Puritan-Protestant tenets, on the one hand, and certain ultimate suppositions of secular-deistic and rationalistic liberalism, on the other. He denies the legitimacy of this dogmatic reading, and concludes his argument by asking two summary questions: “[I]s the no-establishment clause a piece of ecclesiology, and is the free-exercise clause a piece of religious philosophy”?45 His answers are “no” and “no.” My answers, on the contrary, are “yes” and “yes”: yes, not in the sense that America legally sanctions one church over another, but that she sanctions, unwittingly and thus unintentionally, religious bodies and approaches to religion that presuppose a positivist conception of religiosity and characteristically express themselves in moralist-instrumentalist conceptions of human action. America legally sanctions the extrinsicist notion of the relation between God and man, eternity and time, that are presupposed in and drive these conceptions. The relevant point, then, is that such conceptions of religion and human action and the relation of eternity and time are not empty of implications for one’s understanding of the church and of the secular in relation to the church. On the contrary, they imply an ontology of 174 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America creation that denies the idea of man as naturally homo religiosus , the idea which is presupposed, for example, by churches of a sacramental nature. They imply, not no ecclesiology and religious philosophy, but merely those complicit with America’s dominant Puritan- Protestant and Enlightenment traditions. The difficulty, then, is that Murray, in his formal notion of freedom, overlooks the implicit memory of God lying at the interior core of the human act. He thereby renders Puritanism and the Enlightenment invisible as ontologies with ecclesiological and religious, and thus “dogmatic,” implications.

(3) This examination of Murray’s argument regarding America, in sum, yields the following consequences. First, in the name of defending a state that is incompetent in matters of the truth regarding the ultimate origin and end of man, Murray defends a state that hiddenly imposes an implied view regarding just such a truth. Second, in the name of defending the state’s constitutional-legal indifference with respect to God and religion, he defends a state whose constitutional order hiddenly embeds the idea of a “substan- tively indifferent” human act, leading logically to legal enshrinement of a positivist as distinct from natural religiosity, and thus of what is already, paradoxically, a secularized religiosity. Third, in the name of a formal exigence for exercising initiative, and a “political” idea of rights attached to this formal exigence, Murray defends a primarily negative sense of rights as immunities from coercion. But this idea of the human act and of rights implies an essentially formalistic conception of justice, according to which the proper purpose of government becomes that of refereeing between competing exercises of initiative, or of securing public order as distinct from realizing the common good. The problem, however, is that such a justice contains no principled or substantive way of adjudicating between human beings when their exercises of initiative directly conflict, that is, when the presence and activity of David L. Schindler 175 one person appears profoundly and directly intrusive, and thus indeed coercive, with respect to another person. Consider again what is implied by the exigence to act on one’s own initiative as the foundation of human dignity. On such a view, Murray says, the fundamental right is the right to immunity. He then says that right in this sense implies “a juridical relationship, within which to the right of one there corresponds the duty on the part of the others with regard to whatever the object of the right is – in our case immunity from coercion.” 46 But note what this implies. The juridical duty of the state extends to the protection of each person only qua the immunity from coercion that flows from each person’s exigence for exercising initiative. To put it another way, the right of each self, as legally enforced by the state, is to secure his exigence for initiative precisely against the possible intrusive action of the other. The relevant point, then, is that the duty of the state includes no principled reference to the others that the self is from or for , to the order of relation to others that originally-abidingly co-constitutes the self and his action. The result, again, is that there can be no principled adjudication between the self and the other in the hard cases where such adjudication is essential, that is, in those cases where the intrusive- ness of one person vis-à-vis another is most profound and direct, and the exigences for initiative that found the respective rights of the one and the other appear to be radically disproportionate and thus unequal. I have in mind, for example, cases where the “strong” person in the health and maturity of life is “involuntarily” burdened by the “weak” person existing at the most fragile and silent origins or end of life, the “weak” person who thus apparently lacks, or only minimally possesses, an exigent capacity for exercising initiative. What Murray’s formalist foundations of human dignity and juridical-negative rights can properly do in such cases is merely balance the exigences of these competing persons as formally and fairly as possible in light of the interests of public order. What such a 176 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America formal-juridical understanding cannot do is sustain a principled legal way for recognizing the inherent, unconditional rights of the “weak” in the face of the “strong,” for the sake of a genuinely common or social good. Note that I am not suggesting that Murray himself did not reject a purely proceduralist reading of rights. On the contrary, he insisted that such a proceduralist reading overlooked the foundations of rights in man’s natural human dignity. My point, rather, is that the formal exigence for exercising initiative which for him most basically establishes that dignity, and yields the essentially negative conception of rights as immunities, itself logically entails a proceduralist legal order. The point, in other words, is that Murray can avoid this logical entailment only by revising his formalist account of the foundations for human dignity; that is, by integrating man’s naturally given order of relations to others into the formal exigence for initiative that he takes (in a significant sense rightly) to establish human dignity. Fourth, in the name of defending a legitimate secularity and thus autonomy of the state and civil institutions, Murray gives us what is already, from the perspective of a natural homo religiosus , the first meaning of secularism, even if not (yet) of an aggressive sort. He conceives the ends of temporal-terrestrial structures and processes in abstraction from the relation to God and thus order toward (and from) eternity that is operative in the depths of every human being. He therefore provides no principled way for either the state or the church, in their respective ways and in the legally supported public order, to recognize the inherent and implicit openness, as distinct from logical indifference, of these structures and processes to the transcendent and eternal order. Finally, and in sum, we recall Murray’s reading of America’s achievements. In its economic order, its political order, and its “mastery of nature” and attendant science and technology, argues Murray, America presents Catholics with instances of “nature David L. Schindler 177 confronting grace.” But we can now see the sense in which these arguments fail to take account of man’s originally given order of relations to God and others. Wealth, for instance, in proper ontological sense, is richness in these relations that are integral to man’s original meaning – even as such relations themselves of course, rightly understood, demand a sufficiency of wealth in the more customary quantitatively measurable forms. Further, an adequately conceived notion of political rights needs to take integrated account of man’s original responsiveness to God and others, with its implied logic of gratitude and service; take integrated account, thus, of the sense in which this exigence for gratitude and service to God and others serves not only as a context, but already as the anterior form, of one’s rightful claim on others. Finally, a mastery of nature rooted in an adequate ontology of creation needs to take account of the human act as most basically a letting be, and hence of knowing as anteriorly contemplative in its doing and making, especially in light of the modern Western conception of science and technology as a matter most basically of power, or of experiment formed in (theoretical) manipulation. Elsewhere I have attempted to show further how America’s mostly unwitting fragmented ontology of creation, with its volun- tarist, instrumentalist, and positivist human act, imposes a hidden unity on what is typically, and in a significant sense of course also rightly, taken to be liberal culture’s ever-increasing pluralism; how this peculiar unity tends logically toward what Benedict XVI and John Paul II have referred to as the paradoxes within liberal democratic societies of a “dictatorship of relativism” and a totalitari- anism of “the ‘strong’ over the weak”; and finally how this unity, for all of its hiddenness, yields not a religiously neutral or legitimately secular idea of statecraft, but rather an already secularistic one.

178 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America

VII

We return in conclusion to the issue of Americanism. Are not those theologians who defend the Americanist project right that the Second Vatican Council vindicated the theology of Murray as it concerns the distinctly American liberal order? Given present limits, I will respond here only in terms of Dignitatis Humanae . The Council’s defense of the inherent right to religious freedom is a significant achievement, and a significant development in the Church as she faces the secular order. The proper question is not whether we should recognize this right to freedom, but in what sense. Murray is correct that Dignitatis Humanae affirms this right in its negative or political sense as an immunity from coercion. Insufficient attention, however, is typically given to the fact that he himself had significant reservations regarding the “Declaration on Religious Freedom” in its final form, for the redaction of which he was not present due to health problems. Specifically, as indicated above, Murray puzzled over “the prominence given to man’s moral obligation to search for the truth, as somehow the ultimate foundation of the right to religious freedom.” 47 Dignitatis Humanae states, for example, that “everybody has the duty and consequently the right to seek the truth in religious matters so that, through the use of appropriate means, he may prudently form judgments of conscience which are sincere and true.” 48 The document says elsewhere that “all men are bound to seek the truth, especially in what concerns God and his Church, and to embrace it and hold on to it as they come to know it,” and that “these obligations bind man’s conscience.” 49 It is crucial to see, of course, that Dignitatis Humanae affirms these duties in the context of affirming an ineliminable right to freedom:

Truth can impose itself on the mind of man only in virtue of its own truth, which wins over the mind with both gentleness and power ( suaviter simul ac fortiter ). So while the religious freedom David L. Schindler 179

which men demand in fulfilling their obligation to worship God has to do with freedom from coercion in society, it leaves intact the traditional Catholic teaching on the moral duty of individuals and societies toward the true religion and one Church of Christ. 50

It is in accordance with their dignity that all men, because they are persons, that is, endowed with reason and free will and therefore bearing personal responsibility, are both impelled by their nature and bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth. . . . But men cannot satisfy this obligation in a way that is in keeping with their own nature unless they enjoy both psychological freedom and immunity from coercion. . . . Therefore the right to this immunity continues to exist even in those who do not live up to their obligation of seeking the truth and adhering to it. 51

The religious acts whereby men . . . direct their lives to God tran- scend by their very nature the order of terrestrial and temporal affairs. Therefore the civil authority, the purpose of which is the care of the common good [ bonum commune ] in the temporal order, must recognize and show favor [ favere ] to the religious life of the citizens. But if it presumes to control or restrict [ dirigere vel impedire ] religious activity, it must be said to have exceeded the limits of its power. 52

[The civil authority] must help create conditions favorable to the fostering of religious life so that citizens will be really in a position to exercise their religious rights and fulfill their religious duties . . . .

If, in view of the circumstances of a particular people, special civil recognition is to be given to one religious community in the constitutional organization of a State, the right of all citizens and religious communities to religious freedom must be recognized and respected as well. 53

Complex issues arise here regarding the intentions of Dignitatis Humanae in the matter of truth and freedom which cannot be addressed properly in the present forum. I cite statements from that 180 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America document only for the purpose of clarifying what seems to me the right direction for resolving this matter. It is commonly accepted that, in its unequivocal affirmation of the principle of the right to religious freedom, Dignitatis Humanae did not attempt to resolve the questions of the foundations for this right and thus regarding how the right was most properly to be conceived. As we have seen, Murray says that the foundations of the right to religious freedom lie in a human dignity understood primarily in terms of a formally conceived exigence to act on one’s own initiative, differentiating this view from that of those who would tie this right primarily to the truth and man’s obligation to seek it and embrace it. My contention is that those who take human dignity, on the one hand, and the obligation to truth, on the other, to represent exclusive or opposing foundations for this right share, however paradoxically, a common ontology of human being and action, vis-à-vis the ontology outlined in the name of Benedict. Both of these claims regarding the nature of foundations presuppose, albeit from their opposite directions, an extrinsic – tending toward inverse – relation between truth and freedom. Thus Murray, on the one hand, separates the question of freedom from the question of truth for purposes of political-public order because he thinks that affirming a link between the two fails to yield a principled commitment to the right to freedom. Archbishop Lefebvre, on the other hand, to take the most famous example on the opposing side, thinks affirmation of the primacy of human dignity with its presupposed freedom undermines the importance and indeed necessity of truth for an adequate civil order. But both views, precisely from within what is their otherwise stark difference, and vis-à-vis the ontology of human being and action implied in the monastic quaerere Deum , share a common failure to see that the human person, and thus human dignity, are constituted at once by an order of truth at the heart of which lies freedom, and by a freedom that is exercised only within an always anteriorly given order of truth. David L. Schindler 181

In other words, Murray is correct that realization of the right to religious freedom represents a major achievement of the Second Vatican Council. But this achievement is not correctly conceived as an achievement of freedom alongside the truth about man and God. Indeed, such a conception of the relation between freedom and truth, as indicated, itself expresses a claim of truth, one that paradoxically binds freedom and truth together in an extrinsic relation, in and through what is a single formalist conception of human action. In contrast, the Council, in its meaning as developed in the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, binds truth and freedom in an integrated way, in and through a conception of the human person as an ordered unity of truth and freedom. More precisely, the individual human person is originally constituted at once in his substantial unity and within an ordered community of relations to God and other creatures. Each human being is a unique actualization of a personal order of truth qua love that is first given, and herein lies the foundation of human dignity, and thus of rights. The free and intelligent human act that properly signifies and expresses this personal order of being is at root a naturally ordered act of love. Because this act, as spiritual, is self-reflexive, man remains of his nature free to act contrary to this order of love. But because this free act is already ordered in and for and by a love that is originally given, man, even when he acts contrary to this order, cannot but retain in his depths some exigent desire to love and know the truth about God and others implied in his original givenness. It is not possible in the present forum to show the particulars of how this unity in the natural structure of the human person, between a truth that is inherently free and a freedom that is inherently “truthed,” resolves the key issues evoked in the debates regarding the rightful meaning of Dignitatis Humanae or, a fortiori, regarding the anthropology of the Council more generally. I have meant only to indicate how this unity secures a principled way of accommodating simultaneously the legitimate concerns of both those who would 182 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America found the right to religious freedom on human dignity and those who would found this right on the truth about man. Finally, we return again to where we began, to Testem Benevo- lentiae , the document standing at the historical origins of the problem of Americanism. As noted earlier, this encyclical identifies the problem of how Catholics in America are to adapt to modern civilization in its American form, and points out particular problematic tendencies in this regard. These tendencies revolve around a certain emphasis on freedom, and a relative primacy of the natural over the supernatural virtues, as well as of the active virtues over both the passive virtues and the traditional religious vows, all of this for the purpose of enabling Catholics to realize an effective apostolic presence in America’s modern culture. The tendencies thus all concerned what was to be rightly conceived from the perspective of Catholicism as a legitimate secularity or autonomy. Murray and his disciples take the Second Vatican Council to represent the Church’s mature understanding and acceptance of the American liberal tradition and its essential ideas regarding human freedom and rights, and thus to vindicate the basic terms of the earlier Americanists in their responses to Testem Benevolentiae . And indeed, as we have indicated, it is true that the Second Vatican Council, and the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, affirm a principled commitment to the human freedom and rights that inspire the best intentions of American liberalism. At the same time, however, the Council and these pontificates call deeply into question the ontology that (hiddenly) informs the logic of freedom and rights proper to this liberalism. It is well known that Murray was concerned about a growing secularism in America. However, his privileging of freedom’s formal exigence for initiative had already manifested its own inner logic, in his judgment that American culture – economic, political, and academic, or scientific-technical – was structurally healthy. According to him, what the culture needed to avoid a slide into secularism was the perfecting addition of David L. Schindler 183 morality and supernatural virtue: a moral and spiritual correction, but precisely not one that reached inside the ontological order undergirding that tradition’s idea of the human act. However, it is just America’s liberal ontological order, as inclusive of a positivist morality and religion, which, however hiddenly, establishes America’s logic of secularity as already, in its own peculiarly virulent way, a logic of secularism. My proposal is that it is the influence of this peculiar form of autonomy on American Catholics that Leo XIII was attempting to get at in Testem Benevolentiae , even if he did not articulate the problem in completely adequate terms. The positive content of the religious anthropology and ontology latent in his criticisms to be sure has been developed and clarified over time, notably in the Second Vatican Council and the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. But the issues raised in Testem Benevolentiae are at root those raised by Benedict when he says that we need today to reconsider the legitimate meaning of laïcitè , and to recover a living sense of the monastic search for God and the readiness to listen to him, and of man’s primitive philosophical attitude as implied by these, if we are to recuperate an authentic human culture. It is these issues, now more amply and precisely formulated, that lie at the root of Leo’s concerns regarding a rightful sense of adaptation to modern American liberal culture, thus establishing these concerns as still relevant. What lies at the heart of Leo’s concerns is the proper understanding of the independence and autonomy, and “activity” and “passiv- ity,” of human being and action, and indeed of the traditional monastic vows, in their basic meaning before God. Once again, this insistence on the legitimacy of Leo’s concerns with respect to America, and on the ontological character and depth of the issues raised by him, entails no denial of what I affirmed earlier as the exceptionalism of America’s method of freedom in politics and economics, creative intelligence in science and 184 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America technology, and inveterate religiosity. These signal important human achievements even as, at the same time, in their American liberal form, they remain profoundly ambiguous. They stand in need not only of perfecting moral or supernatural addition, but of inner ontological re-formation, if their just intentions are to be truly secured and America is to realize an authentic human culture.

*****

Pope Benedict XVI, in Caritas in Veritate , retrieves the idea of integral human development that was first introduced by Paul VI. Benedict also recalls John Paul II’s statement in Centesimus Annus affirming “the positive value of an authentic theology of integral human liberation.” Benedict reminds us that Centesimus Annus calls for a comprehensive new plan of integral human development, not only in the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe but also in the West. He notes explicitly that this duty with respect to the West is “still a real duty that needs to be discharged.” 54 Caritas demonstrates in this light that the West’s institutions, economic- social but also political and academic and technical, stand in significant need of integral human development, in and through the call to love God and others given to and hence shared by all human beings from their creation. The present paper has attempted to show some of what this integral human development implies with respect to America’s peculiarly liberal institutions and peculiarly religious- secular culture.

Formerly a Weaver Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar (Austria), Professor Schindler taught for thirteen years in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where he received tenure in 1985 and, before that, for four years at Mount St. Mary’s College, where he received tenure in 1978. Since 1982 he has been editor-in-chief of the North American edition of Communio: International Catholic Review , a David L. Schindler 185 federation of journals founded in 1972 by Hans Urs von Balthasar, Joseph Ratzinger, Henri de Lubac, and other European theologians. He serves as editor of the series Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought with Eerdmans Publishing Company. Professor Schindler has published over seventy articles in the areas of metaphysics, fundamental theology, and biotechnology, and the relation of theology and culture. He is author of Heart of the World, Center of the Church , published by T & T Clark and Eerdmans. His most recent edited collection (with Doug Bandow) is Wealth, Poverty, and Human Destiny (ISI). Other edited collections include Beyond Mechanism: The Universe in Recent Physics and Catholic Thought ; Act and Agent: Philosophical Foundations of Moral Education (with Jesse Mann and Frederick Ellrod); Catholicism and Secularization in America ; and Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work . Pope John Paul II appointed Professor Schindler a consultor for the Pontifical Council for the Laity in 2002.

1 Benedict XVI, “Address at the Meeting with Representatives from the World of Culture,” September 12, 2008; available from http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2008/september/docume nts/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20080912_parigi-cultura_en.html . 2 Joseph Ratzinger, “Freedom and Truth,” Communio (American edition) 23 (1996): 34. 3 Ibid., 29. 4 Ibid., 27. 5 John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1960), 185. 6 Ibid., 179. 7 Ibid., 181. 8 Ibid., 182. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 183. 11 Ibid., 183. 12 Ibid. 186 Benedict XVI’s Theology and Its Meaning for America

13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 189. 15 Ibid., 189-90. 16 Ibid., 193. 17 Ibid., 195. 18 Ibid., 196. 19 Ibid., 45. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 48. 22 Ibid., 49. 23 Ibid. 24 DRF , 568. 25 Ibid. 26 DRF , 569. 27 DRF , 570. 28 DRF , “Discussion,” 580. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 DRF , 571. 32 Ibid. 33 DRF , 575-76. 34 DRF , 571. 35 DRF , 571-72. 36 DRF , 572-73. 37 John Courtney Murray, “The Declaration on Religious Freedom,” in War, Poverty, Freedom: The Christian Response (New York: Paulist Press, 1966), 3- 16. 38 Ibid., 4 39 Ibid., 5. David L. Schindler 187

40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 3-4. 42 Ibid., 3. 43 Ibid., 4. 44 DRF , 571. 45 Murray, “Civil Unity and Religious Integrity: The Articles of Peace,” in We Hold These Truths , 51. 46 DRF , 573. 47 DRF , 570. 48 DH , par. 3. 49 DH , par. 1. 50 DH , par. 1. 51 DH , par. 2. 52 DH , par. 3. 53 DH , par. 6. 54 Caritas in Veritate , 23.

Catholic Relief Services (CRS): An American Catholic Presence in International Civil Society? 1

Joseph S. Rossi, S.J. Loyola University Maryland

CRS, as the bishops’ agency, acts in the person of the Church. CRS officials were managing a charitable apostolate of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). They had, however, been distributing condom information material on which they had prohibited putting the CRS logo. If they were doing what they could not make clear that the Church is doing, how could they then be conducting a charitable apostolate in the Church’s name?

N HIS NOW -FAMOUS April 2, 2008 article in the Catholic World Report entitled “The Church Betrayed? Why does Catholic I Relief Services (CRS) forbid putting its logo on the ‘educational’ materials it provides about HIV and condoms?”2 Dr. Germain Grisez, Professor of Christian Ethics at Mount Saint Mary’s University, 3 began by stating that the Catholic Church would be well served if everyone doing works of mercy in her name were as clearheaded and holy as St. Vincent de Paul. 4 He noted that the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Theresa’s congregation, live up to that ideal in trying to help people actually or potentially afflicted with AIDS. Some Catholic agencies working in that field, however, seemed to misunderstand the Church’s charitable apostolate and perhaps were betraying the Church, while acting in her name. 5

190 CRS: An American Catholic Presence?

Raising Questions

I do not see how CRS policymakers can reconcile their need to distance the Church from such material with their responsibility to carry on a charitable apostolate in the Church’s name. 6

Grisez went on to state that the Church never acts on her own in carrying out Jesus’ mission. Jesus is always with the Church when it preaches and teaches, administers the sacraments, and does charitable works. Thus, the Church fulfills Christ’s command to spread the Gospel and makes him really present, manifesting his love to each of his brothers and sisters in every nation until the end of time. “When Catholic charitable agencies properly fed the hungry or provided health care, those who receive help meet Jesus, learn how much he offers, and are given a new opportunity – perhaps a unique one – to respond to his love and share in his kingdom.”7 Acting authentically as the Catholic Church’s representative, CRS served Christ well for several decades, Grisez noted, during which its charitable works aided many of the world’s afflicted people experience his love, and surely helped Jesus “lead some of them all the way home.”8 In 1986, Grisez recounted, CRS began an HIV/AIDS program, in which its policymakers avowed they were faithfully fulfilling Jesus’ and his Church’s mandate:

Since the Church promotes integral human development, [CRS] does not restrict itself to a medical response to the HIV epidemic but extends its care to include the social, emotional, development, and spiritual needs of those affected by HIV and AIDS. 9

This statement from Pope John Paul II is quoted in a document, “CRS’ Position on the Prevention of Sexual Transmission of HIV,” dated December 2007. 10 It was e-mailed to CRS country representatives on January 11, 2008, by Jennifer Overton, the agency’s senior Joseph S. Rossi, S.J. 191 technical advisor for HIV, who was in charge of preparing it. In her cover letter, Overton made it clear that the guidance the position paper provided was authoritative: “The document was approved by the ELT [Executive Leadership Team] and should be used to guide CRS supported programming.”11 In an article in Our Sunday Visitor , dated February 17, 2008, Russell Shaw and John Norton were the first to report on the CRS position paper and its cover letter. They interviewed some CRS executives and Archbishop Timothy Dolan, then of Milwaukee, chairman of the CRS board, and reported their preliminary reactions. 12 Dr. Grisez found his curiosity aroused by this article, and he determined to study carefully the CRS position paper. The introduction to that paper stated that it provided “updated information about the effectiveness of some preventive methods. CRS’ policy has not changed.”13 Grisez wondered whether this policy had been in effect since 1986. 14 Some statements in the CRS paper reassured Grisez – for instance, that all HIV programs supported by CRS “promoted abstinence until marriage, and mutual fidelity within marriage,” a point repeatedly developed in the paper:

These behaviors are the only means that completely avoid exposure to the risk of sexually transmitted HIV infection. These specific behaviors have always been the cornerstone of the Catholic Church’s teaching with respect to human sexuality. 15

The position paper also reported with enthusiasm protests against the promotion of condoms because this encouraged sexual activity outside marriage, warned that consistent and effective condom use is not easily achieved, and pointed out that there were many places where condom use has increased and HIV has not declined. It emphasized that “in every country worldwide in which HIV has declined there have been increases in Abstinence and/or faithful behaviors.”16 192 CRS: An American Catholic Presence?

Grisez also quoted approvingly that with respect to providing information about condoms, “CRS does provide complete and accurate information about condoms to its partners as part of its HIV activities.”17 CRS insisted that the information was provided “in the context of the Catholic Church’s teaching on sexuality and condom use,” and added, “CRS does not finance, promote or distribute condoms.”18 Finally, CRS wanted to “ensure that partners were not giving inaccurate, misleading or no information at all on condoms – and that the focus and priority remain on abstinence and fidelity.”19 Dr. Grisez acknowledged that those statements did not show that the CRS policy on providing information about condoms was unsound; nonetheless, it was troubling, because it then went on to distinguish between promoting condoms and giving information about them:

Promoting condoms means suggesting, encouraging or urging people to use a condom during sexual intercourse to prevent HIV transmission; providing full and accurate information means giving the facts about condom use including the benefits, risks and failure rates. 20

Providing information about condoms’ benefits, Grisez insisted, was likely to lead to their use. Condoms are designed to prevent bodily fluids from mixing when people engage in sexual activity. Giving information about condoms benefited people who wished both to engage in sexual activity and to prevent the bodily fluids from mixing, thereby encouraging those people both to engage in sexual activity and to use condoms. 21 In explaining the importance of providing information about condoms, CRS policymakers did not shy away from clarifying their intent:

Individuals at risk of HIV transmission need access to the best teaching on prevention and the latest evidence on risk reduction in Joseph S. Rossi, S.J. 193

order to make fully informed decisions in order to prevent infection and reduce the risk of transmission of HIV. 22

However, the CRS document went on to say, even if information about condoms’ risks and failure rates is included, information about their “benefits” will not significantly reduce the likelihood of transmitting HIV unless it leads to their consistent and correct use by those engaging in the risky behavior. From this statement Grisez concluded that CRS policymakers seemed to intend to encourage such people to use condoms consistently and carefully – that is, they seemed to be promoting the use of condoms. 23 The position paper articulated CRS’ own policy by quoting two sentences from a document of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops: “People need education and motivation, so that they will choose wisely and well. Providing information that is both accurate and appropriate is a logical and necessary starting point.”24 Those two sentences appear in the USCCB November 1989 document, “Called to Compassion and Responsibility: A Response to the AIDS Crisis .” However, Grisez thought that the two sentences were taken out of context for use in the CRS paper. In the relevant passage of their 1989 document, the bishops point out that one of many problems with the response to AIDS was “the refusal to discuss publicly the direct link between sexual activity and intravenous drug use on the one hand and HIV/AIDS on the other.”25 The bishops’ proposed solution was that “people must be shown the right thing to do and encouraged to make right choices.”26 The bishops further (1) insisted on “lasting changes in the way people act,” (2) said nothing about condoms, and (3) strongly affirmed “that to eradicate some diseases, people must desist from the behavior that spreads them.”27 In that context, Grisez believed, the sentences about “providing information” quoted in CRS’ paper did not warrant the claim that the bishops support providing information about condoms. 28 194 CRS: An American Catholic Presence?

Although Grisez did concede that CRS policymakers did not have the support of the USCCB 1989 document that their position paper quotes, they could claim the support of a December 1987 document – not issued by the USCCB as a whole, but only by its administrative board – entitled “The Many Faces of AIDS.” That document said that public educational programs “could include accurate information about prophylactic devices [i.e., condoms] . . . as potential means of preventing AIDS. We are not promoting the use of prophylactics, but merely providing information that is part of the factual picture.”29 That statement was considered unsatisfactory by many U.S. bishops and was severely criticized by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In a letter to the U.S. bishops, Cardinal Ratzinger indicated that public programs providing such information not only tolerated evil but also facilitated it. He then added:

The problem of educational programs in specifically Catholic schools and institutions requires particular attention. These facili- ties are called to provide their own contribution for the prevention of AIDS, in full fidelity to the moral doctrine of the Church, without at the same time engaging in compromises which may even give the impression of trying to condone practices which are im- moral, for example, technical instructions in the use of prophylactic devices. 30

This letter was published in Origins on July 7, 1988, and, along with it, Origins reprinted the paragraph from “The Many Faces of AIDS” that supported providing information about condoms. But Cardinal Ratzinger’s letter guided the development of the USCCB’s November 1989 document – the one from which, Grisez insisted, the two sentences used in the CRS position paper were taken out of context. He concluded, therefore, that it was hard to believe that CRS policymakers had been unaware of this history of the U.S. bishops’ thinking on preventing the transmission of HIV. 31 Joseph S. Rossi, S.J. 195

As witnesses to God’s revelation in Jesus, the USCCB did not need to put the lamp of its teaching under a bushel basket. But the CRS position paper, Grisez continued, required that those who implement its policy on providing information about condoms do just that: “Any written educational material that contains information about condoms must not carry the CRS name or logo.” 32 To Grisez, the position paper also indicated inadvertently that not all CRS’ partners agreed with its policy on providing information about condoms. If partners “do not want to provide information on condoms,” CRS could not insist that they provide it, but CRS could “decide to discontinue support to a project if it does not comply with CRS’ policy on full and accurate information.”33 If its partners supplied inaccurate information, CRS staff should “provide information to educate” them, and find out why they aren’t using it: “Is it that they are not aware or that they are just ethically opposed? After discussing with the partner, if they do not change the information they are providing, CRS would be compelled to discontinue funding as per CRS’ policy.”34 Grisez concluded from this statement that CRS seemed to consider as unacceptable any partner’s noncompliance with their views about providing information regarding condoms. 35 Such orders from CRS’ Baltimore headquarters apparently had not been universally well received. Grisez postulated that perhaps some partners had been insulted by what they perceived as American condescension, as well as repelled by some of the “educational” materials offered by CRS officials. He then noted one instance where this might have been the case. It was a “Flipchart for Client Education” 36 mailed out by the AIDSRelief team to some CRS partners in October 2007. In a video on the CRS website, Kenneth Hackett, president of CRS, explained the origin of AIDSRelief.

196 CRS: An American Catholic Presence?

A few years ago, we started a program in both sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. It covered nine countries. We called the project the AIDSRelief project, and basically it was an attempt to extend both antiviral therapy and support to people in need in those nine countries. The video explains that CRS now “leads a five- member consortium that implements the AIDSRelief project.” 37

The flipchart was mailed out on a CD, along with related materials. With the CD, Jared M. Hoffman, an executive at CRS’ Baltimore headquarters, sent a cover letter, which he signed as “AIDSRelief/Chief of Party” and addressed to “Colleagues” in many countries. 38 The letter explained that the flipchart was a tool “based on an earlier WHO (World Health Organization) product meant for use by health facility and community health workers counseling people with HIV, their families, and communities.”39 In adapting WHO’s material, AIDSRelief Zambia collaborated with the Zambia Ministry of Health and the Johns Hopkins Center for Communica- tion Programs. Hoffman stated that the comprehensive and accurate information on prevention contained in the material was consistent with CRS policy, and he was confident that the flipchart would be useful in all settings, requiring only minor adaptations to ensure local competence. Hoffman also pointed out that CRS had ownership rights to the document and that any changes to the flipchart had to be consistent with CRS policy. 40 Therefore, it would be necessary for all CRS colleagues to verify their proposed adaptations with Sister Phyllis Hughes in CRS’ Power Quality Supervising Depart- ment prior to printing and distribution. 41 Grisez noted that the label on the disk did not identify its source, but that Hoffman did explain this: “CRS has chosen not to include the CRS or AIDSRelief logo on the flipchart, due to the potential sensitivity of the information contained in these materials among Church partners.” Obviously anticipating objections, Hoffman continued: “If you are concerned about the reactions of the Bishops Joseph S. Rossi, S.J. 197 and the Church in your country, we would be glad to provide you with support in presenting this information to your partners.”42 As to the content of the document itself, Grisez thought that while the first section of the flipchart began auspiciously with “Safer sex behavior – Abstinence,” before long it pointed out that “Partners who abstain from sex can still enjoy other expressions of affection,” and then goes on in some detail about obtaining sexual pleasure by what is euphemistically called “massage,” presented as acceptable for both young adolescents and married couples. 43 What was missing from the flipchart, Grisez commented, was also significant. While it was stated repeatedly that only complete abstinence provided 100 percent assurance that sexual activity would not transmit HIV, the flipchart nowhere stated the failure rate of condoms. 44 The flipchart stated, “Some studies show that, with consistent condom use, the HIV infection rate among uninfected partners was less than 1 percent per year.” It also cited a 2001 document of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases that reported a summary of twelve studies of people who said they always used condoms and experienced 0.9 incidents of HIV transmission per 100 persons, which means that in an average group of 111 people, one each year would experience HIV transmission. 45 Grisez remarked that while such odds might not sound dire, people using condoms to try to prevent HIV transmission were likely to do so for many years, not just one. “If a physician offered long-term treatment without warning patients of similar odds of an important negative side effect, he or she would be guilty of ethical malpractice.”46 Moreover, the flipchart never mentioned another important fact about condoms highlighted in the CRS’ position paper, namely: “There are many obstacles to consistent and correct condom use.” People persuaded by “education,” such as that provided by the flipchart, might think they could enjoy safer sex if they use condoms, and, therefore, could resolve to use them; but as with other determinations, people often break this one. So, Grisez insisted, the 198 CRS: An American Catholic Presence? real-life chances of HIV transmission by people who undertake the use of condoms are much greater than the optimistic odds cited above. Consequently, promoting condom use as “safer” sex was likely to be self-defeating, as was made abundantly clear from CRS’ own position paper about the comparative impact of promoting abstinence and condoms in various countries around the world. 47 Considering both what the flipchart included and what it omit- ted, Grisez believed that it was hard to imagine an “educational tool” more effective for “suggesting, encouraging or urging people to use a condom during sexual intercourse to prevent HIV transmission”48 – in other words, for promoting condoms. Were the bishops and other CRS policymakers aware of what AIDSRelief was offering its partners around the world? Since CRS was an agency of the U.S. bishops, its officials should act as their agents. If CRS officials had been pretending to follow the bishops’ policy while disregarding it, they had betrayed their responsibility and misled the bishops. 49 Following this logic, Grisez stated that CRS, as the bishops’ agency, acts in the person of the Church. CRS officials were managing a charitable apostolate of the USCCB. They had, however, been distributing material on which they have prohibited putting the CRS logo. If they were doing what they could not make clear that the Church is doing, how could they then be conducting a charitable apostolate in the Church’s name? 50 But, and here I quote Grisez,

If and insofar as they have not been conducting a charitable apostolate in the Church’s name, they are betraying the Church herself – not only the bishops, but all the faithful, and even Jesus himself, the Church’s Head. 51

Moreover, it seemed to Grisez that some partners had been pressed to cooperate despite their moral objections. Negative reactions of bishops and local churches in other countries seem to be regarded by CRS as a problem to be dealt with, rather than as expressions of conscientious judgment to be respected. Joseph S. Rossi, S.J. 199

Grisez concluded that what had transpired at CRS should be investigated. The CRS Board was ultimately responsible for its operations. He urged the Board to begin by examining the items described in his article. The questions those items raise suggested many further questions. The Board would need to employ one or more appropriate, competent, independent agencies, as the National Review Board used the John Jay College of Criminal Justice to conduct studies bearing on clerical sexual wrongdoing. Any group employed should be given access, within the limits of canon and civil law, to CRS records, publications and unpublished materials, employees, and partners. 52 In Grisez’s judgment, the investigation should not be limited to the promotion of condoms, but should extend to CRS practices and activities in general. It should look for deviations from civil law, canon law, relevant policies of the USCCB, and good business practices with respect to abuse of resources and other matters. If wrongdoing was found, the inquiry should try to determine which executives or other employees were responsible. When completed the inquiry results should be published, and the CRS Board should see to it that future operations be transparent. In fact, regardless of what an inquiry turned up, it seemed clear to Grisez that CRS officials have not been fully open and above-board about what the agency was doing. That lack of accountability had to cease. 53

If the appearances of betrayal with respect to condoms are verified or other serious wrongdoing is found, those responsible should be fired and replaced by capable people with a good understanding of the Catholic charitable apostolate and a firm commitment to act as faithful agents of the Church. 54

Grisez ended his article with praise for Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who had become Chair of the CRS Board in November 2007. He trusted that Archbishop Dolan would not compound any 200 CRS: An American Catholic Presence? wrongdoers’ iniquity by looking the other way, and he hoped that other Board members would cooperate with him. 55

The Response

On March 25, 2008, Grisez sent to Archbishop Dolan, as Chair of the Board of Directors of CRS, his article that would soon be published in the Catholic World Report , along with his reasons for writing it. Grisez was confident that Dolan had not been aware of the situation at CRS and would want to investigate it carefully and deal with it appropriately. After consultation with friends, Grisez had judged that it would strengthen Dolan’s hand in this procedure if he publicized what he had found: that “CRS’ policy rightly excludes promoting the use of condoms, but the policy was not being observed.”56 Three days later, on March 28, 2008, Dolan responded to Grisez, assuring him that he took his “concerns very seriously.” He was, however, “convinced of [CRS’] firm commitment to obey Church teaching in all its endeavors.” His intention was to submit the documentation provided by Grisez to both the USCCB Commit- tee on Doctrine and the Committee on Pro-Life Activities, for their review. He would ask them to ensure that the procedures being followed by CRS were consistent with Catholic teaching, or to recommend any changes so that this would be the case. The archbishop noted that Kenneth Hackett, president of CRS, was in complete agreement. 57 On April 10, 2008 Michael Wiest, executive vice president of CRS, responded to Grisez’s critique of CRS’ policies on the prevention of HIV and AIDS. After proclaiming that CRS was dedicated to responding to the needs of those suffering from HIV and AIDS, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, he professed that in its work CRS was adhering to the teachings of the Church and the Joseph S. Rossi, S.J. 201 policies of the USCCB. Wiest reiterated the CRS position paper in question stating,

All HIV programs supported by CRS promote abstinence until marriage, and mutual fidelity within marriage. These behaviors are the only means that completely avoid exposure to the risk of sexually transmitted HIV infection. . . . Additionally, CRS was not financing, distributing or promoting the use of condoms. 58

Nonetheless, Wiest continued, CRS was taking Dr. Grisez’s critique very seriously. He had asked the USCCB to review its HIV and AIDS guidelines and educational materials relative to key aspects of its programming. The review would include input from the USCCB offices on Doctrine and Pastoral Practices, and Pro-Life Activities. CRS, he assured his readers, would take appropriate action, if any, based on this review. 59 The CRS’ defense of its policy was that if more information were provided to participants, these participants would be less likely to use condoms. CRS provided information about the correct use of condoms, and revealed in their paper how unlikely it was that people used condoms properly. So, their revealing the risks of condom use might dissuade participants from using condoms. The underlying message, CRS professed, was abstinence. 60 CRS also disagreed with Grisez’s accusations that its position paper took out of context some statements made by the USCCB – that is, “people need education and motivation, so that they will choose wisely and well. Providing information that is both accurate and appropriate is a logical and necessary starting point” – and that CRS has manipulated what the USCCB said in order to fit their own informational needs. What the USCCB said, CRS went on, is that abstinence is the best way to stop the pandemic from spreading. CRS pointed out that its position paper was consistent with both Cardinal Ratzinger’s statement of “full fidelity to the moral doctrine of the Church” and Grisez’s reading of the USCCB statement. 61 First, the 202 CRS: An American Catholic Presence? position paper was faithful to the Church’s moral doctrine because CRS provided information about the proper and consistent use of condoms to prevent people from using them. It pointed out that the likelihood that the average person uses condoms appropriately is very small. Similarly, its position paper went to great pains to discuss the effectiveness of prevention education. It mentioned, for instance, a study in Madagascar where HIV education promoted abstinence, and sexual activity decreased among unmarried youth from 2003 to 2006 by 10.4 percent. So, Cardinal Ratzinger’s comments, CRS believed, did not apply to its position paper. 62 Second, CRS insisted that its use of the USCCB statement that people need education was well employed, because of its skepticism over the appropriate use of condoms. If people knew about the probability that they were using condoms incorrectly, then they would not attempt to use them. Such a policy, in fact, promoted abstinence, which was consistent with the moral doctrines of the Catholic Church. 63 CRS concluded its defense by stating that Dr. Grisez has jumped to unwarranted conclusions about the position paper without taking into account some of the more unmistakable readings of the distinction between providing information in the interest of full disclosure and promoting the use of condoms. 64 On April 23, 2008, Archbishop Dolan wrote a letter to “My Brother Bishops” in his capacity as chairman of the Board of CRS to share information “concerning recent criticism related to CRS’ internal HIV guidance documents, and ancillary programming tools.” 65 He insisted that “in no cases does CRS promote, purchase or distribute condoms,” and that CRS’ positions “are fully in keeping with Conference policies as far back as 2003.” He further noted “all HIV programs supported by CRS promote abstinence until marriage and mutual fidelity within marriage.” 66 As to the charge that CRS was not adhering to Church teaching because it was promoting condoms and omitting its logo on an HIV informational Joseph S. Rossi, S.J. 203 tool, Dolan said, “CRS’ name does not appear on HIV pedagogical flipcharts because the tools belong not to us, but to the government of Zambia’s Ministry of Health.” In fact, he noted, “CRS was able to convince the government of Zambia to include discussions on abstinence, behavior change and fidelity in marriage within the material, information that was absent in previous drafts.” 67 Although CRS’ name was not on the flipchart, the Church’s teachings were included “by virtue of CRS’ efforts,” he said. Nonetheless, in light of Grisez’s criticism, he was asking CRS management to provide “our guiding documents” to the appropriate USCCB committees. 68 In the second paragraph of his letter, Dolan unintentionally – Grisez did not believe purposely – misinterpreted Grisez’s article. 69 First, Dolan told the bishops that Grisez had accused CRS of failing to adhere to Church teaching regarding condoms. In fact, Grisez had said nothing whatever in his article about Church teaching regarding condoms. In a cover letter to Dolan, along with the text of his article and the CRS documents mentioned in it, dated March 25, 2008, Grisez had pointed out that it was true that “the Church has not yet taught clearly about the morality of using condoms to prevent transmitting HIV.” 70 In fact, in an e-mail of March 29, 2008, Grisez had responded that CRS’ practice of distributing materials that its leadership judged must not bear its name and logo did not violate Church teaching. 71 So, Dolan’s statement that Grisez accused CRS of failing to adhere to Church teaching regarding condoms was not only untrue but misleading with respect to his real concern, namely, the apparent deviation of CRS as an agency of the Church from activity appropriate to the Church’s apostolate. 72 Second, Dolan also advised the bishops that Grisez had stated in his article that CRS’ failure to put its logo on a Zambian Govern- ment HIV Informational tool indicated that CRS management was “distancing itself from Church doctrine by omission.” In fact, Grisez did not say this. He did state accurately that CRS forbade putting its name and logo on information about condoms and by that prohibi- 204 CRS: An American Catholic Presence? tion distanced itself from those materials. He stated that he did not see how “CRS policymakers can reconcile their need to distance the Church from such material with their responsibility to carry on a charitable apostolate in the Church’s name.” 73 Finally, in his letter to the bishops, Dolan had deduced that “the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops as a whole, and CRS Board bishops in particular, are thus called to task for allegedly failing to adequately oversee CRS, their own agency.” Grisez’s article did not call to task the CRS Board bishops, much less the USCCB as a whole, for failing to oversee CRS. Rather, it did two things: (1) Grisez made it clear that his concern was apparent wrongdoing by CRS officials and the possibility that the bishops have been misled, and (2) he proposed a thorough investigation of CRS by its Board because evidence from its own documents showed that it was promoting the use of condoms, in violation of its own stated policy. 74 In a letter of June 12, 2008, Dr. Grisez pointed out these uninten- tional misrepresentations to Archbishop Dolan (copied to Cardinal Francis George as president of the USCCB) and asked that he rectify them in another letter to the American bishops, since “[m]y reputation with bishops as a Catholic scholar in theology is especially important to me.” 75 In June 2008, at the spring meeting of the USCCB in Orlando, there was an internal, behind-the-scenes discussion concerning the CRS’ policy presented in its document “CRS’ Position on the Prevention of the Sexual Transmission of HIV.” As is often the case with USCCB meetings, some of the weightiest discussions took place under privileged circumstances. In this privy session the bishops discussed CRS policies in light of the Grisez critique. Some U.S. hierarchs privately applauded Dolan’s response, believing that Grisez’s essay was precipitous. That sentiment, however, was hardly universal within the American hierarchy. The USCCB Committees on Doctrine and Pro-Life Activities were Joseph S. Rossi, S.J. 205 mandated by the USCCB Board to “conduct a review of the documents and offer recommendations to Archbishop Dolan.” The episcopal committees offered this review as advice to, and assistance for, Archbishop Dolan as chair of the CRS Board. 76 When completed, the results of the review were sent to Archbishop Dolan. The gist of the review was that the CRS materials should be revised along the lines suggested in the Grisez essay. Furthermore, it was suggested to the CRS Board that it should present whatever revisions it adopted to the USCCB Committee on Doctrine before making them public. CRS, through Archbishop Dolan, assured the Conference that the group would take “appropriate action” based on the recommendations from the Doctrine and Pro-Life Committees. 77 Archbishop Dolan did not respond to Grisez’s letter of June 12 until July 21, 2008. In a handwritten note to Grisez thanking him for his “recent letter,” Dolan apologized for his “tardiness in replying,” because he had been “on-the-road” (sic) too much. He also apologized that his April 23 letter had “led to misrepresentation” of Grisez’s article. Dolan said that it was clear to him and to officials at CRS that Grisez had “a lot of respect for the CRS apostolate, and simply wanted to make sure it remained true to its Catholic identity and mission.” 78 He went on to say that Grisez would be pleased to learn that the two investigating USCCB committees agreed with many of his concerns and had instructed “that the document that caused your original consternation no longer be distributed by CRS, and that the policies and praxis of CRS on this issue be reformed in line with the USCCB recommendations.” Dolan also assured Grisez that his “eventual correspondence with my brother bishops will make clear our debt and gratitude to you.” 79 On July 29, 2008, Dolan wrote once again to the bishops of the United States to keep them advised about CRS efforts to remain “always faithful to Catholic moral principles in its acclaimed programs to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic.” Dolan told the bishops that in response to the advice from our conference commit- 206 CRS: An American Catholic Presence? tees, the controversial teaching document, “Flipchart for Client Education: HIV Prevention, Treatment and Care,” would no longer be distributed by CRS. In addition, he had asked Bishop George Thomas, a member of the CRS Board, to work with Dr. John Haas of the National Catholic Bioethics Center (NCBC) to collaborate on an update of “CRS’ Position on the Prevention of Sexual Transmis- sion of HIV,” making sure that all the recommendations proposed by the two USCCB committees are incorporated. The revised document would then be returned to the USCCB committees for a final review. CRS would then keep the NCBC on retainer for future counsel and review of moral questions. 80 Almost two years later, on May 21, 2010, a letter cosigned by the chairs of the Committees on Doctrine and Pro-Life Activities 81 sanctioned that a revised CRS document, now entitled “CRS Policy on Abstinence and Mutual Fidelity Program,” was “satisfactory” and “acceptable as a presentation of Church teaching.” 82 A source in the Office of the Committee on Doctrine informed me on September 22, 2010 that the committee’s judgment does not speak to the “prudence” of CRS’ policy, nor does it imply that the committee “would have written the document in the same way.” 83 As of the date above, Dr. Grisez alleges that he has not heard “anything more from anyone officially” since Archbishop Dolan sent him a copy of his July 29, 2008 letter to the bishops of the United States. 84

Father Joseph S. Rossi is a member of the Society of Jesus and the Professor of American Catholic Life and Thought in the Department of Theology at Loyola University Maryland. He has degrees in sociology, theatre, film criticism and history, the history of the Catholic Church, and theology. His Ph.D. is from the Catholic University of America. He is the Resident Scholar at the International Catholic Organizations Information Center at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. He has published two books and many articles on Catholics at the U.N. and other Joseph S. Rossi, S.J. 207 topics in American Catholic history. At present he is writing a book on contemporary Catholic Non-Governmental Organizations at the U.N.

1 Catholic Relief Services is the official overseas aid and development agency of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. It was founded in 1943 and its headquarters is in Baltimore, Maryland. CRS has NGO (non-governmental organization) status at the United Nations through its membership in Caritas Internationalis, a global Catholic movement “working in solidarity for a fairer world.” 2 Germain Grisez, “The Church Betrayed?” The Catholic World Report (April 2, 2008): 1-10. The Catholic World Report , published by Joseph Fessio, S.J., is an international monthly news magazine that describes itself as a publication that “tells the story from an orthodox Catholic perspective.” 3 Mount Saint Mary’s University is located in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Dr. Grisez is the author of The Way of the Lord Jesus , a three-volume summary of Catholic moral theology published by Alba House. 4 “The Church Betrayed,” 1. 5 Ibid. 6 Germain Grisez to Timothy M. Dolan, June 12, 2008, unpublished. 7 “The Church Betrayed,” 2. 8 Ibid. 9 Pope John Paul II, “Christ, Hope for Africa,” Message for the Thirteenth World Day of the Sick, February 11, 2005, Yaoundé, Cameroon. 10 Catholic Relief Services, “CRS Position on the Prevention of Sexual Transmission of HIV,” December 2007, 1. 11 Jennifer Overton to CRS Country Representatives, January 11, 2008, 11:08 a.m. 12 Russell Shaw and John Norton, “Church Charity Mandates ‘Full’ Info on Condoms: Internal Policy Document Cites Downsides of Condom Promotion in AIDS Prevention,” Our Sunday Visitor (February 17, 2008): 2-4. Shaw is a contributing editor and Norton is editor of Our Sunday Visitor . 13 “CRS Position on the Prevention of Sexual Transmission of HIV,” 1. 14 “The Church Betrayed,” 3. 15 “CRS Position on the Prevention of Sexual Transmission of HIV,” 1. 208 CRS: An American Catholic Presence?

16 Ibid, 2. N. Hearst and S. Chen, “Condom Promotion for AIDS Prevention in the Developing World: Is it Working?” Studies in Family Planning 35, n. 1 (2004): 39-47. 17 “CRS Position on the Prevention of Sexual Transmission of HIV,” 2. 18 Ibid, 1. 19 Ibid, 2. 20 Ibid, 3. 21 “The Church Betrayed,” 3-4. 22 “CRS Position on the Prevention of Sexual Transmission of HIV,” 3. 23 “The Church Betrayed,” 4. 24 United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Called to Compassion and Responsibility: A Response to the AIDS Crisis,” November 1989, 6. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 “The Church Betrayed,” 4. 29 Administrative Board of the United States Catholic Conference, “The Many Faces of AIDS: A Gospel Response,” December 7, 1987, 6. 30 “On the Many Faces of AIDS: Letter to Archbishop Pio Laghi from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger,” Origins (July 7, 1988), 1. Origins is a documentary news service of the Catholic News Service. 31 “The Church Betrayed,” 5. 32 “CRS Position on the Prevention of Sexual Transmission of HIV,” 3. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 “The Church Betrayed,” 5. 36 World Health Organization (WHO), Fact sheet No. 243, “Effectiveness of male latex condoms in protecting against pregnancy and sexual transmitted infections,” June 2000. 37 “The Church Betrayed,” 6. 38 Jared M. Hoffman to “Colleagues,” October 2007, unpublished. Joseph S. Rossi, S.J. 209

39 Ibid, 1. 40 Ibid. 41 The Shaw-Norton article in Our Sunday Visitor referred to Sister Hughes as the “manager of CRS’ HIV/AIDS unit.” 42 Jared M. Hoffman to “Colleagues,” 2. 43 WHO, Fact sheet No. 243, 25. 44 “The Church Betrayed,” 7. 45 WHO, Fact sheet No. 243, 51. 46 “The Church Betrayed,” 7. 47 Ibid, 8. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid, 9. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid, 8. 52 Ibid, 9. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid, 10. 56 Grisez to Dolan, March 25, 2008, unpublished. 57 Dolan to Grisez, March 28, 2008, unpublished. 58 Michael Wiest, “Catholic Relief Services responds to article by Germain Grisez,” Insight Scoop (April 10, 2008). 59 Ibid. 60 Michael Wiest, “Did the CRS Violate Church Doctrine,” April 1, 2008, 1-2. 61 Ibid, 2. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid, 2-3. 65 Dolan to “My Brother Bishops,” April 23, 2008, 1. 210 CRS: An American Catholic Presence?

66 Regina Linskey, “CRS chairman says agency practices church teachings on condoms,” Catholic News Service, April 30, 2008. 67 Dolan to “My Brother Bishops,” 2. 68 Ibid. 69 Grisez to Dolan, June 12, 2008, unpublished. Grisez rather boldly confided to Dolan, “I do not think you deliberately intended to defame me. Indeed, I suspect that your letter was drafted by Michael Wiest or some other CRS official.” 70 Grisez to Dolan, March 25, 2008, unpublished, 2. 71 Grisez to Dolan, March 29, 2008. In this e-mail Grisez went on to state: “Nevertheless, the Catholic Church cannot carry out her apostolate by providing information from which she must distance herself, and CRS, as an agency of the Catholic Church, should only engage in charitable activities that pertain to the Church’s apostolate.” 72 Grisez to Dolan, June 12, 2008, 1. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid, 2. 75 Ibid. 76 Telephone interview between the author of this article and staff of the USCCB Committee on Doctrine, September 22, 2010. At the time, Bishop William E. Lori, bishop of Bridgeport, Connecticut, was chair of the USCCB Committee on Doctrine, and Cardinal Justin Rigali, archbishop of Philadelphia, chaired the Pro- Life Committee. 77 Dolan to “Brother Bishops,” July 29, 2008, unpublished. 78 Dolan to Grisez, July 21, 2008, unpublished. 79 Ibid. 80 Dolan to “Brother Bishops,” July 29, 2008. 81 Most Reverend Donald W. Wuerl, archbishop of Washington, chair of the USCCB Committee on Doctrine, and Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, archbishop of Galveston-Houston, chair of the USCCB Pro-Life Activities Committee. 82 Unpublished document, USCCB Committee on Doctrine. 83 Telephone interview between the present author and staff of the USCCB Committee on Doctrine, September 22, 2010. 84 Germain Grisez to Joseph S. Rossi, September 22, 2010. Life in the Late Republic: The Catholic Role in America after Virtue

+ Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap. Archbishop of Denver

XACTLY SEVETNY YEARS AGO , in 1940, Father John Courtney Murray gave a series of three college talks. For his E theme, he chose the “concept of a Christian culture.” After his death, his Jesuit brothers fused the talks into a single essay called “The Construction of a Christian Culture.” 1 It’s a modest word change. But that title – the construction of a Christian culture – is a good place to begin our thoughts this morning. Most people know Murray for his work on Vatican II’s Decree on Religious Liberty. In his 1960 book We Hold These Truths – which has never gone out of print – Murray argued the classic Catholic case for America. Like that of any important thinker, his work has friends and critics. The critics respect Murray’s character and intellect. But they also tend to see him as a victim of his own optimism and a voice of American boosterism. I understand why. Over the years, too many people have used Murray to justify too many strange versions of personal conscience and the roles of church and state. But for me, Murray’s real genius is tucked inside his words from 1940. They are worth hearing again. Murray said that “a profound religious truth is at the basis of democratic theory and practice, namely the intrinsic dignity of human nature; the spiritual freedom of the human soul; its equality as a soul with others of its kind; and its superiority to all that does not share its spirituality.” He said that “the task of constructing a culture is essentially 212 The Catholic Role in America after Virtue spiritual, for culture has its home in the soul.” As a result, “all man’s cultural effort is at bottom an effort at submission to the truth and the beauty and the good that is outside him, existing in an ordered harmony, whose pattern he must produce within his soul by conformity with it.” These are beautiful thoughts. They’re also true. The trouble is, they bear little likeness to our real culture in 2010. Murray spoke at a moment when the word “gay” had more connection to joy than to sexual identity, and when the word “truth” could be used without ambivalence or irony. Times have changed. We would all quickly get fatigued by a litany of what’s gone strange with America. There’s so much of it: from our consumerism and narcissism; to our sexual dysfunctions and family breakdowns; to our bad schools and moral illiteracy; to what Eric Voegelin called the “intellectual terrorism of institutions [like] the mass media, university departments, foundations and commercial publishing houses.” 2 Listing problems and then complaining about them achieves little. More importantly, as Murray would say, it isn’t a Christian response. If Jesus tells us to be leaven in the world, and to make disciples of all nations – and of course, he does – then we have missionary obligations. Those duties include the renewal of our country’s best ideals. But we can’t shape the future unless we know the facts of present-day life, and we can’t understand the present unless we know the past it came from. Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote that “memory is [the] fulcrum of freedom for man in history.” The less we understand the past, “the more do present facts appear in the guise of irrevocable facts of nature.” 3 I believe that. And it explains some of the hardships American Catholics will now need to face. There’s a passage in the Old Testament from the Book of Judges. It says that after Joshua led the people across the Jordan and secured the Promised Land, “[Joshua] dismissed the people, [and] the people of Israel went each to his + Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap. 213 inheritance to take possession of the land. And the people served the Lord all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great work which the Lord had done for Israel.” But after Joshua died, “and all that generation were also gathered to their fathers; [then there] arose another generation, after them, who did not know the Lord or the work which he had done for Israel.” 4 The people of Israel forgot their God because they weren’t taught. And if American Catholics no longer know their faith, or its obligations of discipleship, or its call to mission – then we leaders, parents, and teachers have no one to blame but ourselves. Having said that, let me offer a portrait of our current terrain in very broad strokes. I grew up in Kansas. When I began my book Render Unto Cae- sar in 2006, I had in my mind the America I always knew – or thought I knew. But that America, I admit, has been passing for fifty years, and probably longer. When major Protestant and Catholic scholars – public intellectuals like Robert George and Timothy George, men with national weight – felt in 2009 that a manifesto like the Manhattan Declaration was needed, it affected me. In its urgency for defending the sanctity of life, the dignity of marriage and the family, and the rights of religious conscience, the Manhattan Declaration came as a caution – for me, and for many other people – that a certain kind of America no longer exists. This is ironic. Back in the 1930s, after visiting the United States, the great Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: “American democracy is founded not upon the emancipated man, but, quite the contrary, upon the kingdom of God and limitation of all earthly powers by the sovereignty of God.” 5 The great British historian Paul Johnson said much the same – that America was “born Protestant.” And for good reason: America’s earliest settlers were children of the Reformation. The Enlightenment ideas that helped shape America’s foundation were themselves, in part, a product of earlier Christian 214 The Catholic Role in America after Virtue thought. And Governor John Winthrop’s historic homily, “A Model of Christian Charity,” given to Puritan colonists before leaving for the New World in 1630, expressed in a moving way the moral vision that has ever since flavored the American experiment. In a sense, America is not really the child of 1776, but of Reformation theologies and their results. These Protestant roots have given us many good fruits: a culture of personal opportunity and freedom, respect for the individual, religious liberty, and reverence for the law. Other effects have been less happy: radical individualism, revivalist politics, a Calvinist hunger for material success as proof of salvation, and a nearly religious sense of national destiny and redemptive mission. Our Enlightenment roots pose another problem. In America and Britain, the Enlightenment took a form tolerant and even friendly toward religion. In France it turned harsh and antireligious. But as scholars Peter Gay and Jonathan Israel have separately argued, there was essentially only one Enlightenment in its basic principles, and it was fundamentally antireligious and specifically anti-Christian. 6 If this is true, then the main factor muting Enlightenment prejudice in America has been our tradition of widespread religious belief. And if faith declines, then hostility to religion must rise. What’s most striking about the American Founding, of course, is the absence of any large Catholic role. The different strands in our nation’s early history had one common theme: hostility to the Catholic Church. That prejudice, in one form or another, has continued down to the present day. As a result, Catholics, as Catholic believers, have always been strangers in a strange land. The American Founders wanted to create a novus ordo saeclo- rum, “a new order of the ages.” But they had a strong sense of original sin. They also knew that history matters. Man can’t be reinvented out of nothing. Nor can he be made perfect by his own devices. So they borrowed heavily from a reliable source: Roman republican forms, law, institutions, architecture, and virtues. When + Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap. 215 friends called Charles Carroll – the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence – an “American Cicero,” it was the highest form of praise. Bradley Birzer notes this, by the way, in his very good new Carroll biography. 7 Comparisons between Rome and America therefore make sense. The differences, of course, are obvious. Rome was always a slave-dependent, agrarian society. It was never a “democracy” in the Athenian or modern American sense, much less an industrial power. But the similarities are also important, starting with structures of law and public life. Also significant are the parallel experiences of corrupting power, and success bearing the seeds of its own failure. As St. Augustine noted in City of God , Roman success was built not just on greed, pride, and violence. It also flowed from the early Roman virtues of piety, austerity, courage, justice, and self-mastery. For Augustine, these virtues had an unfortunate and self-defeating basis in paganism. But in their natural effects, they were wholesome – so long as the Romans actually practiced them. All of these Roman virtues were revered in the thinking of the American Founders. As with Rome, the fruits of American power now surround us. But success has always its cost in personal and national illusions. As a people, we seem to become more foreign to our origins every year. The quality of education is declining. So is religious practice. Mediating institutions are diminishing. The size of government is growing. So is public and personal debt. Government and economic structures often seem remote and complex. As the late Christopher Lasch argued, the realities of American life have created a “culture of narcissism” that seems to foster anxiety, self-absorption, and dependency. 8 Augustine’s view of Rome can have an unpleasantly modern ring: He wrote that “[The pagans] are nowise concerned that the republic be less depraved and licentious. Only let it remain undefeated, they say, only let it flourish and abound in resources; let it be glorious by its victories, or still better, secure in peace; and 216 The Catholic Role in America after Virtue what matters it to us? This is our concern: that every man be able to increase his wealth so as to supply his daily prodigalities.” 9 Of course, American politics has always been messy. This isn’t new. It’s the nature of ordered liberty. But in the long run, a healthy civic life depends on permanent virtues rooted in nature’s God, not “values” developed by ourselves. To their credit, nearly all of the Founders saw government as grounded in a divine authority greater than citizens themselves. St. Augustine believed that political action and public service could be worthy Christian paths, so long as they are guided by the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity, and a humble awareness of human limits. So it would be bracing to imagine his thoughts about America in 2010 – a nation where politics often seems dominated by market research, judicial activism, the ascendancy of positive law, lobbying, the vast expense of campaigning, simplified messaging, the complexity of government structures, party tribalism, and a dumbing down of the electorate. American democracy needs an intelligent, reasoning citizenry – persons with free will and the maturity to use it. Yet American students now often fail to compete in global comparisons because of failures in public education. As Daniel Boorstin warned almost fifty years ago, technological changes in our mass media – in the ways we deliver information – have had other, unintended consequences. Technology has modified the tools and the “language” of our public discourse, and therefore the way Americans think, feel, and act. Put other way, America was created and sustained by a print culture; and it is really not clear how well its institutions and traditions can survive in an electronic, image-oriented, technologically transformed world. 10 These issues are compounded by declines in attention span and popular print literacy, the centralization of media ownership, rising costs and the need for profit, less time and resources available to journalists, and the drift away from professional skill and ideological + Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap. 217 detachment in newsrooms. As a result, many citizens experience reality from inside a media cocoon of entertainment and simplified news, while vital information and context go unreported. Now, I have offered a hard portrait for a beautiful Sunday morning. But I think we serve the truth by telling the truth as best we can. Sunday is the day we celebrate the Risen Christ, the real source of our freedom and joy. Christian faith in the Risen Jesus converted an empire. It changed the course of history and gave meaning to an entire civilization. And in the Risen Christ, I believe God is now calling us, starting with those of us here today, to do the same. The integration of faith and reason in Western culture has ensured its humanity and genius. America’s welcome of religious faith among its people has been the key to its decency and vitality. But we need to remember Leszek Kolakowski’s warning that the words of the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self- evident,” are not at all self-evident to the modern intellectual world. 11 We also need to remember J. L. Talmon’s caution that democracy too can become “totalitarian.” 12 The inquisitors of today’s developed societies are secular, not religious. The real enemies of human freedom, greatness, imagination, art, hope, culture, and conscience are those who attack religious belief, not believers. Real hope – not empty optimism but the virtue of hope, the virtue Georges Bernanos called “despair, overcome” – is impossible without faith in realities unseen. Unbelief – whether deliberate and ideological, or lazy and pragmatic – is the state religion of the modern world. The fruit of that orthodoxy is a compression and destruction of the human spirit, and a society without higher purpose. This is the logic of the choices that America is already making. But they can be unmade. And they can be redeemed. I want to close by going back to John Courtney Murray. As I said earlier, Murray is sometimes seen as being too high on America, too naïve about its flaws, too grand about its possibilities. And he truly 218 The Catholic Role in America after Virtue did love the best ideals of our country, because those ideals are worthy of honor. But in “The Construction of a Christian Culture,” he also said this:

American culture, as it exists, is actually the quintessence of all that is decadent in the culture of the Western Christian world. It would seem to be erected on the triple denial that has corrupted Christian culture at its roots, the denial of metaphysical reality, the primacy of the spiritual over the material, of the social over the individual. . . . Its most striking characteristic is its profound materialism. . . . It has given citizens everything to live for and nothing to die for. And its achievement may be summed up thus: It has gained a continent and lost its own soul.

Moreover, in the same text he says, “in view of the fact that American culture is built on the negation of all that Christianity stands for, it would seem that our first step toward the construction of a Christian culture should be the destruction of the existing one. In the presence of a Frankenstein, one does not reach for baptismal water, but for a bludgeon.” He wrote those words seven decades ago. We can only guess what he might write today. For Murray, there is no real “humanism” without the cross of Jesus Christ. And dismantling the inhuman parody we call “modern American culture” begins not with violence but with the conversion of our own hearts. This is the only kind of revolution that lasts; the only kind with the power to change everything. The problem in American Catholic life is not a lack of money or resources or personnel or social influence. These things can be important. But they are never fundamental. The central problem in constructing a Christian culture is our lack of faith and the cowardice it produces. We need to admit this. And then we need to submit ourselves to a path of repentance and change, and unselfish witness to others. The reality of life in the late years of the American republic is that “we have sought first the + Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap. 219 kingdom of earth,” as Murray said, “and we begin to discover that in the process, millions upon millions have been disinherited from both the kingdom of earth and the Kingdom of God.” The role of Catholics in America is exactly the opposite of what we’ve been doing for half a century or more – compromising too cheaply, assimilating, fitting in, fleeing from who we really are as believers, and in the process, being bleached out and digested by the culture we were sent to make holy. C. S. Lewis once famously said that Christianity is a “fighting religion.” 13 He didn’t mean a religion of violence. He meant that Christianity is a religion of candor in naming good and evil, zeal in advancing the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and courage in struggling against sin. Your task as Catholic scholars in the years ahead is to strengthen that spirit in each other – and to instill it in the students, colleagues, and all the people you reach with the extraordinary skills God has given you. If you do only that, but do it well, then God will do the rest. Murray wrote: “Only when our dwelling is in the heavens can we hope to fulfill our vocation on earth. . . . If we do not understand the world and why it was made, what right have we to meddle with it? If we do not know that man is made in the image of God, how dare we . . . attempt to fashion his life?” The construction of a Christian culture begins by lifting our own hearts up to God, without plans or reservations, and letting Him begin the work. It sounds like a small thing. It is a small thing. But as Christians know better than anyone, worlds and empires can turn on the smallest “yes.” Thanks, and God bless you.

Archbishop Charles J. Chaput joined the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, St. Augustine Province, in 1965. After earning a bachelor of arts in philosophy from St. Fidelis College Seminary in Herman, Pennsylvania, in 1967, he completed studies in psychology at the Catholic 220 The Catholic Role in America after Virtue

University of America in 1969. He earned a master of arts in religious education from Capuchin College in Washington, D.C., and was ordained to the priesthood in 1970. Archbishop Chaput received a masters of arts in theology from the University of San Francisco in 1971. He served as instructor in theology and spiritual director at St. Fidelis from 1971-74, and as executive secretary and director of communications for the Capuchin Province of St. Augustine in Pittsburgh from 1974-77. In 1977, Archbishop Chaput became pastor of Holy Cross Parish in Thornton, Colorado, and vicar provincial for the Capuchin Province of Mid- America. He was named secretary and treasurer for the province in 1980, and he became chief executive and provincial minister three years later. Archbishop Chaput was ordained Bishop of Rapid City, South Dakota, in 1988, and Pope John Paul II appointed him Archbishop of Denver in 1997. As member of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Tribe, Archbishop Chaput is the second Native American to be ordained bishop in the United States, and the first Native American archbishop.

1 John Courtney Murray, S.J., “The Construction of a Christian Culture,” in Bridging the Sacred and the Secular: Selected Writings , ed. J. Leon Hooper (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1994), 101–23; also available from http://woodstock.georgetown.edu/library/Murray/1940A.htm. 2 Eric Voegelin, “Why Philosophize? To Recapture Reality!” in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 34: Autobiographical Reflections , ed. Ellis Sandoz (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 119. 3 Reinhold Niebuhr, Faith and History (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1949), 19. 4 Judges 2:6-7, 10. 5 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 104; text also appears in his collected writings No Rusty Swords (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1977). 6 See Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Enlightenment Contested (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1995). 7 See Bradley J. Birzer, American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll (Wilming- ton, Del.: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2010). + Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap. 221

8 See, for example, his The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1979). 9 Augustine, City of God, bk. 2. 10 See Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961; New York: Vintage, 1992). 11 Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 146. 12 See J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: Norton, 1970). 13 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952). Appendix

Fellowship of Catholic Scholars

MEMBERSHIP INFORMATION

For information about joining the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, visit our website at www.catholicscholars.org , or contact:

Rev. Msgr. Stuart Swetland, S.T.D. Executive Secretary, Fellowship of Catholic Scholars c/o Mount St. Mary’s University 16300 Old Emmitsburg Road Emmitsburg, MD 21727 Phone: 301-447-3453 [email protected] or

Mrs. Amy Fontecchio Business and Convention Manager Phone: 484-693-0620 [email protected]

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

1. We Catholic scholars in various disciplines join in fellowship in order to serve Jesus Christ better by helping one another in our work and by putting our abilities more fully at the service of the Catholic faith.

2. We wish to form a fellowship of scholars who see their intellectual work as expressing the service they owe to God. To Him we give thanks for our Catholic faith and for every opportunity He gives us to serve that faith.

3. We wish to form a fellowship of Catholic scholars open to the work of the Holy Spirit within the Church. Thus we wholeheartedly accept and support the renewal of the Church of Christ undertaken by Pope John XXIII, shaped by Vatican II, and carried on by succeeding pontiffs. 224

4. We accept as the rule of our life and thought the entire faith of the Catholic Church. This we see not merely in solemn definitions but in the ordinary teaching of the Pope and those bishops in union with him, and also embodied in those modes of worship and ways of Christian life, of the present as of the past, which have been in harmony with the teaching of St. Peter’s successors in the See of Rome.

5. The questions raised by contemporary thought must be considered with courage and dealt with in honesty. We will seek to do this, faithful to the truth always guarded in the Church by the Holy Spirit and sensitive to the needs of the family of faith. We wish to accept a responsibility which a Catholic scholar may not evade: to assist everyone, so far as we are able, to personal assent to the mystery of Christ as made manifest through the lived faith of the Church, His Body, and through the active charity without which faith is dead.

6. To contribute to this sacred work, our fellowship will strive to: • come to know and welcome all who share our purpose; • make known to one another our various competencies and interests; • share our abilities with one another unstintingly in our efforts directed to our common purpose; • cooperate in clarifying the challenges which must be met; • help one another to evaluate critically the variety of responses which are proposed to these challenges; • communicate our suggestions and evaluations to members of the Church who might find them helpful; • respond to requests to help the Church in its task of guarding the faith as inviolable and defending it with fidelity; • help one another to work through, in scholarly and prayerful fashion and without public dissent, any problem which may arise from magisterial teaching. 7. With the grace of God for which we pray, we hope to assist the whole Church to understand its own identity more clearly, to proclaim the joyous Gospel of Jesus more confidently, and to carry out its redemptive mission of all humankind more effectively.

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MEMBER BENEFITS

All members receive four issues annually of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly, which includes scholarly articles, important documentation, book reviews, news, and occasional Fellowship symposia. All members are invited to attend the annual FCS convention held in various cities where, by custom, the local ordinary greets and typically celebrates Mass for the members of the Fellowship. The typical convention program includes: daily Mass; keynote address; at least six scholarly sessions with speakers who are customarily invited to help develop and illustrate the theme of each convention chosen by the FCS Board of Directors; a banquet and reception with awards; and a membership business meeting and occasional substantive meetings devoted to subjects of current interest in the Church. Current members receive a copy of the Proceedings of each convention, and every three or four years all members receive a Membership Directory with current information on Fellowship members (addresses, telephone numbers, emails, etc.).

NATIONAL AWARDS

The Fellowship grants the following awards, usually presented during the annual convention.

The Cardinal Wright Award – Presented annually to a Catholic judged to have done outstanding service for the Church in the tradition of the late Cardinal John J. Wright, former Bishop of Pittsburgh and later Prefect for the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome. The recipients of this award have been:

1979 – Rev. Msgr. George A. Kelly 1980 – Dr. William E. May 1981 – Dr. James F. Hitchcock 1982 – Dr. Germain Grisez 1983 – Rev. John Connery, S.J. 1984 – Rev. John A. Hardon, S.J. 1985 – Herbert Ratner, M.D. 1986 – Dr. Joseph P. Scottino 1987 – Rev. Joseph Farraher & Rev. Joseph Fessio, S.J. 1988 – Rev. John F. Harvey, O.S.F.S. 1989 – Dr. John Finnis 1990 – Rev. Ronald Lawler, O.F.M. Cap. 1991 – Rev. Francis Canavan, S.J. 1992 – Rev. Donald J. Keefe, S.J. 226

1993 – Dr. Janet E. Smith 1994 – Dr. Jude P. Dougherty 1995 – Rev. Msgr. William B. Smith 1996 – Dr. Ralph McInerny 1997 – Rev. James V. Schall, S.J. 1998 – Rev. Msgr. Michael J. Wrenn & Dr. Kenneth D. Whitehead 1999 – Dr. Robert P. George 2000 – Prof. Mary Ann Glendon 2001 – Thomas W. Hilgers, M.D. 2002 – Rev. J. Augustine DiNoia, O.P. 2003 – Prof. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese 2004 – Sr. Mary Prudence Allen, R.S.M. 2005 – Prof. Gerard V. Bradley 2006 – Dr. Patrick Lee 2007 – Rev. Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap. 2008 – Dr. John M. Haas 2009 – Sr. Sara Butler, M.S.B.T. 2010 – Rev. Kenneth Baker, S.J. 2011 – Rev. Francis Martin

The Cardinal O’Boyle Award – This award is given occasionally to individuals whose actions demonstrate courage and witness in favor of the Catholic faith, similar to that exhibited by the late Cardinal Patrick A. O’Boyle, Archbishop of Washington, in the face of the pressures of contemporary society which tend to undermine the faith. The recipients of this award have been:

1988 – Rev. John C. Ford, S.J. 1991 – Mother Angelica, P.C.P.A. 1996 – John & Sheila Kippley 1997 – Rep. Henry Hyde 2002 – Sen. Rick Santorum 2003 – Hon. Mel Martinez & Mrs. Kathryn Tyndal Martinez 2004 – Rep. Christopher J. Smith & Mrs. Marie Smith 2005 – Helen Hull Hitchcock 2006 – Sen. Samuel D. Brownback 2007 – Dr. Peggy Hartshorn 2008 – Richard M. Doerflinger 2009 – Mother Agnes V. Donovan, S.V. & the Sisters of Life 2010 – Archbishop Charles Chaput 2011 – Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

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The Founder’s Award – Given occasionally to individuals with a record of outstanding service in defense of the Catholic faith and in support of the Catholic intellectual life. This award has been presented to the following individuals:

2002 – Rev. Joseph Fessio, S.J. 2003 – Rev. Ronald Lawler, O.F.M. Cap. 2004 – Rev. Msgr. George A. Kelly 2007 – Dr. Ralph McInerny 2008 – Rev. James V. Schall, S.J. 2009 – Rev. Msgr. William Smith & Rev. Msgr. Michael Wrenn 2010 – Rev. John F. Harvey, O.S.F.S. 2011 – Dr. Kenneth D. Whitehead

PRESIDENTS OF THE FELLOWSHIP OF CATHOLIC SCHOLARS

2008 – Rev. Joseph W. Koterski, S.J., Fordham University 2004 – 2008 Dean Bernard Dobranski, Ave Maria Law School 2003 – 2004 Prof. Gerard V. Bradley, Notre Dame Law School 2002 – 2003 Dean Bernard Dobranski, Ave Maria Law School 2001 – 2002 Rev. Thomas F. Dailey, O.S.F.S., DeSales University 1995 – 2001 Prof. Gerard V. Bradley, Notre Dame Law School 1991 – 1995 Dr. Ralph McInerny, University of Notre Dame 1989 – 1991 Rev. Kenneth Baker, S.J., Editor, Homiletic & Pastoral Review 1987 – 1989 Dr. William E. May, John Paul II Institute on Marriage & the Family 1985 – 1987 Rev. Msgr. George A. Kelly, St. John’s University 1983 – 1985 Rev. Earl Weiss, S.J., Loyola University 1981 – 1983 Rev. Msgr. William B. Smith, St. Joseph’s Seminary 1979 – 1981 Dr. James F. Hitchcock, Saint Louis University 1977 – 1979 Rev. Ronald Lawler, O.F.M. Cap., Diocese of Pittsburgh