The Other Americanism: David J. O'Brien's Catholic Engagement with U.S. History

The Other Americanism: David J. O’Brien’s Catholic Engagement with U.S. History Joseph A. McCartin O ne cannot begin to grasp David J. O’Brien’s rich legacy or his enormous importance as an American Catholic historian without considering this trinity of simple, yet in many ways quite loaded descriptors: “American,” “Catholic,” and “historian.” These three words define O’Brien in a deep and profoundly interconnected way. During more than forty years of prolific scholarship, activism, and inspiring teaching, O’Brien’s career has been characterized by his steadfast fidelity to this trinity of commitments: fealty to his national community, his Catholic faith, and his craft. To have maintained these commitments over the last forty years was no doubt at times a challenge, for developments within the Church, America, and the historical profession alike complicated the relationship among O’Brien’s trinity. In the end, no single one of his many prodigiously researched, thought-provoking books is likely to prove as important in defining his legacy as his example of fidelity. Not only did O’Brien keep faith with his commitments when developments complicated that effort, he did so with grace, humility, and good humor, ever attentive to the changes taking place around (and within) him, ever open to the voices of those who did not share his views. In short, he modeled a union of faith and intellect that was matched by few scholars of his time—in any field. To appreciate O’Brien’s fidelity, consider both the changes that he witnessed over the course of his career and his reaction to those changes. When he graduated from Notre Dame in 1960, he and his generation believed they stood at “the center of American Catholicism.” In those days, he later recalled, “you could be and I could be, as enthusiastically as one can be, Catholic and American.” In the Cold War era, “it seemed that at last Catholicism and Americanism had become one and the same.”1 79 1. David J. O’Brien, From the Heart of the American Church: Catholic Higher Education and American Culture (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1994), 17-18; O’Brien, Public Catholicism (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 198. The preeminent American theologian of that period, John Courtney Murray, S.J., helped young Catholic intellectuals like O’Brien see compatibility rather than conflict between their faith and the “American proposition.”2 But that compatibility would seem less certain in subsequent years. As writer Russell Shaw contends, Murray had “argued the compatibility of Catholicism and the American system at a time when they were compatible.” Following Murray’s death in 1967, Shaw argues, a “secularized barbarism” arose in the United States, best exemplified by legalized abortion, which placed Catholicism and Americanism at odds.3 Sharing this reading of events, a growing number of Catholic voices since the 1970s disparaged the American “culture of death,” questioned the compatibility of Americanism and Catholicism, and called for the creation of a Catholic counter-culture self-consciously opposed to mainstream culture. Asserting one’s place as simultaneously Catholic and American became a more complicated endeavor as such voices became more numerous and influential over the course of O’Brien’s career. As O’Brien himself explains, the story of American Catholicism was increasingly “retold around” Catholicism’s “difference and distance from the rest of American culture, from other Americans and from the American part of ourselves” in a way that encouraged Catholics to “find their identity, and an illusion of integrity, by taking a resolute stand against America, as if Americanization was a gigantic mistake.” O’Brien never joined this trend. He kept his simultaneous attachments to Catholicism and Americanism. Indeed in a valedictory lecture he gave to students and faculty at the College of the Holy Cross in 2006, he would still “pray for a renewal of Catholic Americanism.”4 If the relationship between Catholicism and Americanism grew more complex and contentious during O’Brien’s career, the same was true of the relationship between Catholicism and historical consciousness. O’Brien helped lead a generation of scholars who produced a renaissance in American Catholic historical writing. He and his colleagues took U.S. Catholic history out...