One of the current popular preoccupations (both before and since the recent election) has been the destructive divisiveness and political polarization that characterize contemporary American society. Everywhere we look, Americans appear more divided than at any time in our recent history. Certainly, our two political parties have moved apart, which is to say that the once central middle ground previously occupied by moderate-to-liberal Republicans and moderate-to-conservative Democrats has largely disappeared. This has happened steadily over the last 50 years, thanks to a multitude of political factors, which students of the subject have easily identified. It is likewise obviously problematic that we have increasingly re-sorted themselves socially, politically, geographically, and most evidently educationally.
In the post-war world in which I grew up, American pluralistic politics used to be characterized by what were commonly called "cross-cutting cleavages." That described a situation in which different groups and interests overlapped, in which voters allied with one another along different lines on different issues depending on their different interests, in which all the aspects of one's life did not all align together. One can trace some appreciation of this back to James Madison's Federalist 10, and it was the staple of mid-20th-century American pluralist political thought. In contrast, "reinforcing cleavages" occur when the groups and issues which one identifies with all fall on the same side of the political spectrum. The problem is not that there are disagreements among different groups with different interests, which is, of course, inevitable; but that the differences are increasingly reinforcing, rather than cross-cutting. All of which at best tests - and at worst corrodes - our capacity to advance the country's interests and the common good.
Many have compared this situation to the pre-Civil War period in American history. It was, of course, precisely in that period of division and polarization - in 1857, the same year as the infamous Dred Scott decision that helped make the Civil War inevitable - that the Paulist Fathers' founder, Servant of God Isaac Hecker, proposed to Blessed Pope Pius IX that Catholicism might “act like oil on troubled waters” and so “sustain our institutions and enable our young country to realize its great destiny.”
Isaac Hecker lived from 1819 to 1888. (Today would have been his 205th birthday.) His life spanned the Second Great Awakening, the rise (and fall) of Jacksonian democracy, the U.S. Civil War, and the Gilded Age, formative periods for 19th-century America with lingering lessons for us now in the 21st century.
For Hecker, the Roman Catholic Church - as the Body of Christ which continues the mission of Christ’s Incarnation in the world - was a powerfully unifying force, binding citizens together, and thus blunting the dangerously sharp cutting edges of conflict and dissension, fusing the private interests of individuals and factions into a common social and civic unity.At the heart of what he said and wrote, was this basic appreciation of what he had experienced in the Catholic Church as the Body of Christ which continues Christ’s life and work in the world - and the individual and social effects which flow from openness to that divine activity. As he wrote in his final book, published the year before he died, “The church must justly be said to be the expansion prolongation, and perpetration of the Incarnation” (The Church and the Age).
Hecker’s charism is thus a continuing invitation to read and reread our time and place through the unique experience of the Church’s life and then to share that experience with the world in our particular time and place. So, while many of Hecker’s 19th-century hopes and aspirations have obviously been contradicted by historical developments, we may still rightly seek inspiration in Hecker’s vision of social reconciliation through religious renewal. In our own time of religious division and decline, we may do well to look at our church life more intensely through this particular lens.
Hecker’s proposed solution to the problem of polarization was the Roman Catholic Church, which he himself had discovered as the solution to his own spiritual search. That search had started at an early age, in the era of religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening, which was even more socially and politically conscious than the earlier, colonial-era First Great Awakening. Much of the distinctive character American culture and its mingling of religion and politics stem from this period. It was when the U.S. became what Chesterton would famously call (1922): “a nation with the soul of a church.”
In our contemporary idiom, Hecker had been “spiritual but not religious” for the first 25 years of his life. The story of his spiritual search eloquently exemplifies the appeal of such searching and speaks to the spiritual longings of some in our own society today. What was significant about Hecker’s “spiritual but not religious” period, however, was that he did not remain that way. For Hecker, seeking was never an end in itself. The point of seeking was finding. Once the object was found, the search ended. Having found fulfillment in the Catholic Church, he never desired to look farther. Rather, he desired to devote his life to helping others – especially other seekers, such as he himself had been – to find the truth in the Catholic Church. His missionary activity reflected his deep devotion and fidelity to the Church. Above all, he prized the unity and universality of the Church, which had attracted him to it in the first place. Reflecting upon his experience many years later, Hecker wrote that he “not only became a most firm believer in the mysteries of the Christian religion, but a priest and a religious, hopes thus to die.” For us today, living in an era when people find it increasingly hard to make substantial commitments, those are words well worth meditating upon.
In 19th-century Europe, in the wake of the French Revolution and its aftermath, the Catholic Church was struggling to survive as an institution against an increasingly individualistic and irreligious liberal political order that sought to constrain it. In reaction, the 19th century Church sought to counteract the growing social fragmentation and to reconnect increasingly isolated individuals into a community by preserving, repairing, or restoring religious bonds. One approach was to assert the Church’s claims to authority as vigorously as possible and to insist upon the Church’s political privileges and institutional rights in relation to the state and upon the traditional constitutional arrangements (for example, the union of throne and altar) that appeared most compatible with the Church’s social and political position, if only because of the security this seemingly offered in the face of frightening and unpredictable change.
(A somewhat contemporary version of that is “Integralism,” which is enjoying a certain renaissance among conservative Catholic intellectuals, but which, whatever may be said as an abstraction, seems unlikely to have any serious prospect of relevance in an American context, something Hecker certainly understood.)
Hecker’s religious alternative to that primarily political approach envisaged a social solution in which citizens, converted to Catholicism as the answer to their deepest human aspirations would be empowered, by combining true religion and democratic political institutions, to develop society along Catholic lines. His was a thoroughly religious form of discourse, uniquely capable of addressing social and political concerns.
Whereas for Hecker’s famous contemporary Karl Marx (1818-1883), religion meant alienation and its survival in society showed the inadequacy of its purely political separation from the state, for Hecker Roman Catholicism was the fulfillment of the most authentic aspirations of human nature; and its power to transform society through the conversion of citizens more than compensated for the Church’s loss of political power thanks to its separation from the State.
In one of his last Catholic World articles, published in the year he died, Hecker, quoting an anonymous acquaintance, said “he didn’t care for union of church and state if he could have union of church and people.” Such comments convey how he continued to conceptualize religion’s role in the transformation of society, and how he confidently expected this to accomplish more effectively what others hoped for from politics.
Hecker never wavered in his conviction that what he had found in Catholicism – and what he had been able to find only in Catholicism – could and would be America’s answer as well. Having himself experienced the divided and fragmented character of modern society, Hecker had found an alternative in the mission of the Church, as the organic temporal expression of Christ’s life, to continue Christ’s work by pouring oil on the troubled waters of the world. According to Hecker, to discern the Church’s action clearly, “and to cooperate with it effectually, is the highest employment of our faculties, and at the same time the primary source of the greatest good to society” (The Church and the Age).
On this basis, Hecker rooted the renewal of American society in a Catholic religious renewal inseparable from the spiritual renewal of his fellow citizens made possible by grace. Hecker’s important insight was that, since all creation is always ultimately ordered to grace, even certain new situations and social arrangements, which are perceived as obstacles, (like American democracy and separation of church and state) may actually be new opportunities for individual and social transformation through the Church’s ongoing realization of Christ’s incarnation. Today we might also ask what other novelties which might be perceived as obstacles might really be opportunities?
Hecker was well aware that his spiritual insights into American democracy’s compatibility with Catholicism and what Catholicism had to offer to America hardly corresponded to conventional wisdom – on either side of the Atlantic. He never wavered, however, in his conviction that what he had been able to find only in Catholicism could and would be America’s answer as well. He combined Catholic universalism and a distinctly American self-understanding of the relationship between religion and society in a providential perspective, which could work politically within the framework bequeathed by classical liberalism’s separation of society and state.
Admittedly, much of what Hecker admired about America, including its egalitarianism and sociability, no longer characterizes the contemporary post-industrial, late-capitalist, centralized state the U.S. has largely become. Likewise, American Catholicism - the religious remedy he posited for the social fragmentation which the United States still experiences - has changed as well. While conversions continued both during and after Hecker’s lifetime, they have never been in the numbers necessary to make the kind of impact on society Hecker had hoped for. What did make an impact, then and now, has been immigration, which has historically uniquely positioned the American Catholic Church to play a prominent part in the desperately required mission of cultural, ethnic, and racial reconciliation in this country, assuming the Church in America can summon the will to play that part.
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