Americanismus Redivivus

Depending upon the sources you consult and your own ideological proclivities, “Americanism” was either a dangerous heretical tendency among certain members of the hierarchy and clergy of late 19th-century Church in the United States or a figment of the overheated imaginations of certain reactionary European ecclesiasts. In any case, once Leo XIII had been persuaded enough of its reality to issue Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae in January, 1899, whatever of such a movement had actually ever existed disappeared deep underground, and American Catholicism was already on the way to earning its mid-century reputation for unswerving loyalty to the Papacy and unquestionable orthodoxy in doctrine.

But quite apart from the historical status of any movement espousing the tendencies and ideas condemned in the 1899 encyclical, the underlying fear that American Catholics might allow certain premises of their secular culture eventually to infiltrate their understanding of their religion has proven, in the long run, not to have been entirely baseless. Much of the American way of attempting to implement the decrees of the Second Vatican Council seems best explained by the resurfacing of a “Americanist” vein in this country’s Catholicism. It was as though, after the strain of a long-sustained effort to maintain attitudes in religious matters which were becoming increasingly foreign to our other habits of mind and heart as fully assimilated Americans, the promulgation of the council's decrees finally allowed us to relax into our native and more natural modes of thought and behavior.

A survey of self-identified Catholics undertaken three years ago on behalf of the Boston Globe, though methodologically flawed, as the Catholic Action League’s C. J. Doyle has pointed out, nonetheless squares with what I have found in my own conversations with “cradle Catholics” in the same area of the country in which the survey was conducted. To quote from the League’s own refutation of the study:

That survey reported that overwhelming majorities of Catholics in the Archdiocese of Boston reject Catholic teaching on abortion, contraception, and homosexual sodomy, and favor the ordination of women, married men, and homosexuals to the priesthood. It also claims that 39% of Catholics want a schismatic American Church.

This is the current list of public opinion preferences, presumed by the sponsors of the survey to constitute an ecclesiastical vox pop, usually refered to as the sensus fidelium by those anxious to throw over it some veil of theological legitimacy. To the secular media, the hierarchy's unwillingness to accede to these preferences is yet another sign of how "out of touch" it is with the people in the pews, although there is a good deal of evidence that many of those who self-identify as Catholics and yet hold these opinions have long ago deserted the pews.

It is the notion that the opinions and "beliefs" of such people should somehow be normative for the Church that smacks of the kind of "Americanism" condemned a little over a century ago. Underlying this notion are two typically American, but not typically Catholic, assumptions: first, that all legitimate authority is derived from the consent of the governed, so that "policies" (and it is significant how often Church doctrines are so called in the media) should reflect the current opinions of those over whom authority is exercised; second, that moral progress is just as inevitable as material progress, and that the American people are at the sprearhead of such progress. (A good deal of United States foreign policy seems, at the moment, to be premised on the latter assumption.)

"Americanism" in this sense may or may not have been a widespread problem among Catholics in this country around 1899. There can be no doubting that it is a widespread problem here and now.