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Reviews in American History 31.4 (2003) 580-587



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Embracing American Democracy, Catholic Style

R. Laurence Moore


John T. McGreevy. Catholicism and American Freedom. A History. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. 406pp. Notes and index. $26.95.

One can write two widely differing accounts of the nineteenth-century Catholic Church. The first is an impressive success story. It details how the Papacy, whose political reach was challenged by nationalist forces all over Europe, but especially by the anti-clerical leaders in the movement for Italian unification, overcame the opposition to revitalize the church. In his long tenure as Pope from 1846 to 1878, Pius IX worked to re-center all aspects of Church administration, liturgy, and theology in Rome. A Catholic revival, dubbed Ultramontane, greatly increased the number of priests and nuns and regularized Catholic parish life across national boundaries. Expanding the spiritual influence of the Church exacted a price, however. Herein begins the second and much less triumphant narrative of nineteenth-century Catholicism. Pius IX, and to an almost equal extent his successor, Pope Leo XIII, made foes of two important "isms" that were legacies of the Age of Revolution—liberalism and nationalism. Although Pius IX's enmity is understandable—he lost his temporal power over the Papal States because of those two forces—his battles put him on the wrong side of history in many parts of Europe.

In the United States, the cradle of the modern privileging of individual rights over any public authority, the reputation of Pius and of his successors for "medievalism" fueled Protestant fears that Catholics were inherently un-American. According to one American, "Our culture is a Protestant, and not a Catholic culture; it is a Protestant culture begun in dissent and retaining dissent as its chief characteristic." According to another, Catholicism is "inconsistent with the American principles of liberty and democracy, complete freedom of expression, separation of church and state, and secular control over public education." These are not the words of nineteenth-century Know-Nothings whipping up crowds into frenzied efforts to burn Catholic churches and convents. They are, respectively, the views of Howard Mumford Jones and Henry Steele Commager, two respected American academics writing in the middle of the twentieth century. [End Page 580]

In his thoughtful and thought-provoking book Catholicism and American Freedom, John T. McGreevy traces an intellectual history of American Catholicism as it sought to become an influential player in efforts to define the nature of American democracy. He concedes that Papal encyclicals regularly placed American Catholic leaders in a disadvantageous position. The bulk of the American church hierarchy in both the nineteenth and twentieth century was Ultramontane and conservative. Catholic liberalism that often enlivened European debates was, according to McGreevy, moribund on this side of the Atlantic. The American clergy raised no collective dissent to the Papal view that separation of church and state should never be taken as a Catholic ideal. In the 1950s John Courtney Murray was a lonely dissenter who was told to write about something other than church/state issues. Only when Pope John XXIII convened Vatican II did Catholicism take a stand on issues of religious tolerance and church-state separation that satisfied American Protestants.

McGreevy's purpose is not to defend the Vatican's complaints about the American Constitution or to pretend that Catholic thought easily made itself comfortable with the ideals of republican democracy. The idea of freedom based on individual rights, one espoused by nineteenth-century liberals, without doubt conflicted with Catholic values stressing hierarchy, social stability, and the rights of truth claims derived from natural law. Catholicism, like most forms of Protestantism up to the end of the eighteenth century, did not define freedom as the right to walk in paths contrary to God's plan. The self was safely autonomous only within a hierarchical society that made duty to God more important than duty to any temporal power. On the other hand Catholics, who by 1850 counted more members than any other religious denomination in the United States, laid vocal claim to being part...

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