Domesticating Foreign Struggles: The Italian Risorgimento and Antebellum American Identity

5. Republican Debates II: The Religion of the Republic

Designing and ambitious men . . . declare that America is for the world; that the sentiment of an enlarged and comprehensive humanity is to put aside and replace the glowing and vitalizing spirit of nationality. . . . This is a most specious and hollow-hearted doctrine. . . . Americans must be Americans; Americans must govern America. —Frederick Saunders and Thomas B. Thorpe, A Voice to America, 1855 5Republican Debates II The Religion of the Republic When Gaetano Bedini, archbishop of Thebes and former governor of the provinces of the Papal States, landed in New York on 30 June 1853, he could not have foreseen that his visit to the United States would be, as he later described it, “così piena di spine” a “thorny” and dangerous mission that would end in precipitous flight. He had been instructed by Pope Pius IX to present a letter from the pope to the government of Washington, hold interviews with the prelates of the American Catholic Church to acquire information respecting the interests and conditions of Catholicism in the United States, and then proceed to Brazil, where he was to assume the diplomatic position of apostolic nuncio. { 131 } Initially, everything went as expected. Bedini, accompanied by the archbishop of New York, John Hughes, was kindly received by President Franklin Pierce and other government officials. Trouble started during the two churchmen’s tour of the West. Bedini used his authority to try and settle in favor of the clergy the controversies over lay trusteeship that affected parishes throughout the United States. Catholic parishes were undergoing a much debated and contested shift from a congregational style of church government, which gave considerable power to the lay members of the church, to a more conservative, European form of church administration in which the laity had no authority in spite of their economic contributions .1 Bedini’s support for this hierarchical model of clerical supremacy over the more representative, democratic one was interpreted not only as an attempt on the part of the Church of Rome to interfere with American affairs but as an assault against a form of church organization inspired by the republican institutions of the country. That Bedini was in John Hughes’s company made things worse. Hughes was well known for his attack in the early 1840s against the teaching of the King James version of the Bible in the public school system, as well as for an 1850 sermon on the “Decline of Protestantism” in which he had predicted that the United States, including its government, would soon be converted to Catholicism.2 The first sign of public opposition to Bedini was an article in the Detroit Tribune that complained that a U.S. steamer stationed on the northern lakes had been put at his and Hughes’s disposal and was transporting them from point to point in their business connected to the Catholic Church at the expense of the American government. Stating that the interests of the Church of Rome were antithetical to those of the American republic, the Tribune declared that every true American democrat should object to the government’s dispositions , and deplored the compliance of the steamer captain with orders that endangered the safety of the nation. Attacks against Bedini, however, became severe only when the Italian exile Alessandro Gavazzi accused him of having ordered the execution of the patriot Ugo Bassi in 1849, when Bedini was papal commissary of Bologna and returned to the city with an Austrian army after the fall of the republican government in Rome. Most probably, Bedini was merely guilty of not having prevented the execution rather than of having commanded it, but Gavazzi, a former priest and chaplain to Garibaldi’s revolutionary army who had been invited to deliver a series of antipapal lectures in the { 132 } chapter five United States by the anti-Catholic American and Foreign Christian Union, depicted him as the principal agent of the gruesome tortures to which Bassi had allegedly been subjected before his death. According to Gavazzi, Bedini , who had ordered that Italian patriot Bassi be scalped and skinned alive, was a true representative of a despotic Catholic Church attempting to extend its influence over the free United States. In the aftermath of Gavazzi’s accusations, riots exploded in several American cities. Demonstrations against Bedini took place wherever he stopped on his tour, in Pittsburgh, in Cincinnati, Carthage, and Cleveland , Ohio, and in Covington, Kentucky. Placards were affixed all...