American Catholics: A History

I grew up when schools still taught history. Also I attended to a Catholic parochial school. So the history we learned about the European settlement of the future United States started with the Spanish and French explorers, settlers, and missionaries, in contrast to an Anglo-centric narrative focused on the 13 coastal colonies. Years later a grad school classmate mentioned visiting the site of the first Mass in the U.S. I knew he meant the site in Maryland, but I couldn't resist saying it was a long trip fromPrinceton to St Augustine, Florida! He got my point. Of course, we need to recognize and appreciate the central role of New England in constituting our American character, but as a Catholic I am also always conscious of the other people (some of whom got here earlier) who also played important parts in our American story.  

So, in anticipation of Independence Day this year, I have treated myself to Leslie Woodcock Tentler's new account of American Catholic history, American Catholics: A History (Yale University Press, 2020). And it was with the greatest satisfaction that I noted how the author devotes the first part of her book, "On the Fringes of Empire," to the stories of Spanish and French explorations and settlements and the Catholic missionaries who were so central to them. That, of course, was just the beginning of the great ethnic and cultural variety that has been American Catholic life and which, Tentler suggests, "constitutes a metaphor of sorts for our shared experience as a nation." She asks: "What is more central to our national history than the creation of one out of many - the building of a nation almost entirely peopled by immigrants and their descendants?" (Servant of God Isaac Hecker saw something similar, if somewhat uncritically, in the 19th century, ascribing this simultaneous accomplishment of "the republic and the Catholic Church" to "divine guidance, forming the various races of men and nationalities into a homogeneous people.)

Tentler divides her history into five parts, beginning each with a brief profile of an exemplary figure from the period. For Part I, She profiles colonial-era, Jesuit missionary priest Eusebio Kino. (Kino represents Arizona in Statuary Hall, along with three other priests - Saint Junipero Serra for California, Saint Damien de Veuster for Hawaii, and Fr. Jacques Marquette for Wisconsin.) Part II, "Growing with the Nation, 1815-1870," opens with a profile of Dominican missionary priest Samuel Mazzuchelli, who served both on the "frontier" and in Dubuque. Part III, "A Turbulent Passage, 1871-1919," opens with the story of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, rightly recognized now as patron saint of Italian and other immigrants. Part IV, "Exuberant Maturity, 1920-1962," begins with convert John C. Cort, Catholic Worker activist and founder of the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, admittedly "hardly a typical Catholic of his own or any other generation" (and the only one of the five I had never heard of before). Finally, Part V, "A World Unbound, 1963-2015," profiles Patricia Crowley, one of the leaders of the 1950s Christian Family Movement and lay member of the 1960s Papal Birth Control Commission. The profiles are short (as is the book(, but the selections speak volumes.

Tentler's treatment of the "frontier" experience in Part II is a healthy reminder of how priest-poor the U.S. Church was at that time and the consequent infrequency of access to the sacraments that characterized much American Catholic experience, especially in the first half of the 19th century. The situation was different in the cities, where most Catholics converged, making the Catholic Church the largest denomination in the U.S. by the 1850s. For many 19th-century American Catholics, however, their Catholicism was hardly what we later came to expect in the 20th century. "Many of the Catholics arriving from Ireland in the antebellum years had hardly been catechized at all. Nor had they been habituated to anything approaching the regular practice of their religion." And, although that was an era of strong anti-Catholic nativism, Tentler tells a story of much less well known positive patterns of getting along between Catholics and non-Catholics. She also highlights the remarkable role played by Religious Sisters in the Church's life - notably in schools and hospitals - and the positive effect the Sisters' ministry had on non-Catholic opinion, particularly during and after the Civil War. Catholics' participation in that war (on both sides) also highlights the sensitive subject of the American Church's relationship with slavery and its imperfect record on race.

As one would guess from the Mother Cabrini profile, Part III highlights the immigrant experience and the era it produced. Nine million immigrants came to the U.S. in the first decade of the 20th century! Tentler describes both the strain this put on the Church's resources and how effectively and successfully the Church - clergy, women religious, and laity - responded. She profiles in particular the paradigmatic experiences of Italians (then called "the worst Catholics that ever came to this country") and Poles. Assimilation succeeded also in the religious realm, as more and more Catholics, men as well as women, became more regular in observance. Tentler also covers the complex and confusing internal factional fights within the 19th-century American Church, culminating in the Americanist crisis - and then later the Modernist crisis that followed - and their largely different impacts on clergy and laity. That the Church so successfully weathered all this set the stage for her most successful era that was to follow.

In that fourth period of "Exuberant Maturity," the Catholic population, after a brief dip thanks to the decline of European immigration and the Depression, grew, and "Catholics' confidence surged with their numbers, as did Catholics' political influence." It was an era of consolidation and powerful bishops with a public presence. It was a period of vibrant parish life, centered on an upsurge in Eucharistic piety, and active lay organizations, and the phenomenal institutional expansion of Catholic education. It was also the era of increasing Catholic isolation on the issue of birth control. But it was politically a confident time too. After the traumatic defeat of Al Smith came the FDR coalition, of which Catholics were a significant component (and probably would have been anyway even if FDR hadn't quoted Quadragesimo Anno) and eventually even the election of a Catholic president. That was, of course, the Catholic world in which I was born and experienced my foundational religious formation. To apply Winston Churchill's famous phrase about the Edwardian era: "The old world in its sunset was fair to see."

But it was sunset, as the final section, "A World Unbound," inevitably shows. Tentler begins, unsurprisingly, with Vatican II, which she believes was generally well received. "Since American Catholics had long ago made their peace with political modernity, many of the council's reforms came as welcome validation." Even so the changes proved sufficiently startling as to produce an inevitable institutional crisis. She notes for example, how the Council had neglected to "address the meaning of priesthood in an updated church." Perhaps the Council didn't anticipate how much updating was going to happen. That was clearly the case with the liturgy, the are where the impact hit ordinary Catholics most immediately. For all her enthusiasm for the Council, Tentlere admits that the liturgical reform we finally got came from Pope Paul's commission more than form the council itself. Maybe more to the point, as other divisions developed in the 1960s, "differences over the liturgy assumed an overtly political cast." The Mass "ceased to be an invariable source of Catholic unity." The key point she makes is that "Had the council never happened, the cultural ferment of the 1960s might plausibly have had the same effect,' for example, in regard to attitudes about authority and sin. "The culture of fear that permeated preconciliar Catholicism was bound to elicit a backlash as Catholics rose in educational attainment and social standing." Overall, she provides a good survey of postconciliar Church life - its stresses, but also the vitality of new movements such as the charismatic renewal and cursillo and even Call to Action. Inevitably, of course, the crises in the priesthood and religious life (especially among Sisters) gets a lot of attention. She focuses perceptibly on the effect of the erosion of communal support for religious vocation and lifestyle. This largely reflected changes in the wider culture, of course, but the internal erosion of community life in religious orders has also played  a prominent part, as she notes especially in regard to Sisters. She praises how since the Council "growing numbers of sisters have challenged Catholics to a new mode of selflessness." But, she asks, "Can this challenge survive sisters' near disappearance? If it does not, we will all be the poorer." In material terms, one inevitable result has been church closings, which have "severed Catholics from their pasts, both personal and communal" and have "distanced Catholics from a distinctively Catholic orientation to the material world."

Tentler truly recognizes and, I think, wants to celebrate the varied accomplishments of the postconciliar period. But she wonders about its future. "Can lay leadership ever fully substitute for the labor and inspiration of the male and female religious who underwrote not just the Catholic schools but also the various Catholic movements for spiritual renewal and social reform?" And how can the Eucharist continue as "the principal source of Catholic unity and identity ... if the Catholic future brings more and more priestless Sundays?"
Tentler's focus throughout her five-part history of almost 500 years of American Catholic experience is "What did it mean to be a 'good Catholic' at particular times and in particular places? How many Catholics, and which ones, were best able to approximate the ideal? What about the religious imaginations of the seemingly lukewarm?" Her effort to answer those questions effectively probes the complex edifice of American Catholic communal history and may leave the reader ready to seek to learn even more about the amazing story she tells.

More Than a Cup of Water

Had it not been for the pandemic, this would have been my last Sunday Mass at Immaculate Conception. But then came COVID-19, and as a result I am still here – for another 6 months anyway.

Coming and going is, sadly, an occupational hazard of priestly life, particularly in religious communities. It is a hazard because, generally speaking, people are healthier and happier the more stable and less disrupted their lives are. 

Jesus was obviously a disruptor, intentionally so. Even so, he certainly understood that he was asking a lot of his apostles. Having himself as a child been a political refugee from Herod’s terror, Jesus would have directly experienced the stress of leaving home and facing an uncertain welcome elsewhere. So he softened his challenging call to embrace instability and disruption a bit by putting in a plug for hospitality. Whoever receives you receives me. … And whoever gives a cup of cold water to one of these little ones to drink – amen, I say to you, he will surely not lose his reward [Matthew 10:37-42].

Jesus’ words reflected the high value in which hospitality and welcoming were held in his society, something also illustrated in our reading from the Book of Kings [2 Kings 4:8-11, 14-16a]. The Shunemite woman gave Elisha more than a cup of cold water. She gave him dinner and a room! In this, she foreshadowed the generous women in the Gospels, like Martha and Mary, who offered hospitality to Jesus and his disciples, welcoming them into their home, serving ever since as models for the high spiritual value the Church has placed on reaching out and welcoming down through the centuries right up to our own time.

Inspired by Jesus’ own words in his parable about the Last Judgment, “I was a stranger and your welcomed me,” Saint Benedict’s Rule for monks famously prescribes that all guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as if they were Christ himself. Nor have hospitality and welcoming been confined to monasteries. When 17-year old Annie Moore crossed the threshold of the New World as the first immigrant to pass through the new Ellis Island immigration Facility on January 1, 1892, she was welcomed by, among others, Father Callahan of the Mission of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, who blessed her and gave her a silver coin, a symbolic expression of hospitality and welcome. Annie Moore’s story – along with the stories of so many others, among them my own grandparents and the parents and grandparents of so many of us assembled here today – ought especially to impress themselves on our consciousness, both as Catholics and as Americans. For we have always been a Church of migrants and strangers, in more ways than one. Migrants, strangers, and other marginalized communities have always been the face of our Church in this country – in our parishes and in our schools and in our other social ministries.

But, as we assemble today, as we do every Sunday, to profess our faith as migrants and strangers passing through this world en route to our final homeland, we have been forcefully reminded especially during this past month of our country’s complicated history, and of our many failures as a country, as a Church, and as individuals – what the US bishops already 20 years ago described as “failures of understanding and sinful patterns of chauvinism, prejudice, and discrimination that deny the unity of the human family, of which the one baptism is our enduring sign.” [Welcoming The Stranger Among Us: Unity In Diversity, USCCB, 2000]

As fallen and sinful human beings, we will always inevitably fall short of Jesus’ challenge to a new way of living, to a new way of being human together. But by baptism into Christ, we are no longer permitted to be strangers to one another, for we have been brought beyond the ordinary human limitations of family and race, and raised instead with Christ to live in newness of life, responding to one another and welcoming one another as we would never otherwise have known how to do or dared to have tried.

As Pope Francis said when he spoke to Congress in 2015: “if we want security, let us give security; if we want life, let us give life; if we want opportunities, let us give opportunities. The yardstick we use for others will be the yardstick which time will use for us.”

Homily for the 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, June 28, 2020.

Reckoning with Woodrow Wilson

In a Saturday email to the members of the Princeton community, University President Christopher Eisgruber announced that, on his recommendation, the Princeton University Board of Trustees, which as recently as 2016 had voted to keep Woodrow Wilson's name on the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (photo) and Wilson College, has now voted to change the names of both those campus institutions. 

According to Eisgruber,  "the trustees concluded that Woodrow Wilson’s racist thinking and policies make him an inappropriate namesake for a school or college whose scholars, students, and alumni must stand firmly against racism in all its forms." The Board thus altered the previously operative presumption "that names adopted by the trustees after full and thoughtful deliberation … will remain in place, especially when the original reasons for adopting the names remain valid.” 

Taking an iconclastic approach toward the legacies of the past periods whose values were different is problematic at best and ultimately an impoverishment of civilization. I was certainly saddened when the Taliban blew up the pre-islamic 6th-century giant Bamyan Buddhas in 2001 and when ISIS destroyed to pre-Islamic ancient cultural treasures of Palmyra and Mosul. But that is not what we are talking about here. Rather we are considering the presently relevant legacy of a relatively recent historical figure whose beliefs and behavior have adversely affected the history of the past century.

Admittedly. unlike the infamous Confederate monuments erected explicitly to recall the "Lost Cause" and in support of "Jim Crow," Princeton's extravagant honors to its former President were well intentioned at the time and were hardly meant to celebrate slavery or segregation. Naming the School of Public and International Affairs after Wilson was likely an easy call in 1948 at a time when Wilsonian liberalism very much colored the academic and cultural establishment's take on American history and when invoking Wilson's famous dictum "Princeton in the Nation's Service" still resonated without complexity or controversy. Likewise, naming the University's first "residential college" after Wilson was a logical and appropriate acknowledgment of positive aspects of Wilson's efforts during his tenure as the university's president. As President Eisgruber noted, "Princeton honored Wilson not because of, but without regard to or perhaps even in ignorance of, his racism."

It is, moreover, only fair to acknowledge that "Wilson remade Princeton, converting it from a sleepy college into a great research university. Many of the virtues that distinguish Princeton today -- including its research excellence and its preceptorial system -- were in significant part the result of Wilson’s leadership." While I have long been critical of Wilson's World War I intervention and its catastrophic effects on Europe, there is much of his legacy to Princeton that was and remains admirable. We are, after all, complicated creatures - all of us.

That said, still the darker aspects of Wilson's legacy cannot forever be ignored. As President Eisgruber wrote: "Wilson’s racism was significant and consequential even by the standards of his own time. He segregated the federal civil service after it had been racially integrated for decades, thereby taking America backward in its pursuit of justice. He not only acquiesced in but added to the persistent practice of racism in this country, a practice that continues to do harm today."

It is that legacy of long-term harm - both in regard to race (and, I would add, in international relations) that challenges and ultimately undermines that old liberal establishmentarian consensus about Wilson's proper place in our history.

Nor was that consensus ever quite so unanimous as its adherents and promoters believed. 

In 1919 after King George V had met with Wilson at Buckingham Palace,  the king told an aide: “I could not bear him. An entirely cold academical professor – an odious man.”

What Will We Want from a Post-Pandemic World?

I drove to a local bookstore yesterday. All my life I have loved bookstores, and they have often been a place for me to go to pass a free hour or two. That may be a commentary on the overall lack of excitement in my life. Even so, wasting time in a bookstore is one of the things I have most missed these past few months. So, having heard that the store was open again, I made a brief visit, just for the sheer joy of having somewhere to go, even if I was too cowardly to browse any actual books or buy anything in the cafe. Perhaps next time!

What do I want from next time? As more and more of us emerge (rightly or, more likely, wrongly, given that the disease is actually on the increase in much of the country), as we emerge from physical and moral isolation, from physical and anti-social distancing, what will we look for? And how will we relate to one another from behind our masks?

Will it be back to business as usual? Surely, the suspension of society has revealed so many of our society's defects - surprisingly so, perhaps, but no less definitively. Surely, the intense sadness that has gripped our communities cries out for something different - not just for more of the same that has served us so poorly so far!

Clearly, the simple pleasures one took for granted until recently - browsing a bookstore, sharing a meal in a restaurant, visiting a friend - represent the tip of the iceberg of what we value and want from our world. Their absence has dug down deeply below the surface of such expectations.

What form might such expectations take today and tomorrow in a world that has had to learn to live without such simple pleasures? Both for better and for worse, what form will our fellowship take?  In what new ways will our heightened fragility strengthen or enfeeble us to express our shared humanity and care for our common home?

Relocating TR

In On the Concept of History, written at the end of his life by the German Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin, (1892-1940), he noted “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” If that is true of what we do in history, is it not also as true of us who make history? Certainly it was true in a demonstrable way of Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), soldier, statesman, conservationist, and the 26th President of the United States (1901-1909), now in the news this week because of the decision to remove his monumental equestrian statue (photo) from the entrance to New York's famed Museum of Natural History.

I have walked past TR's statue many times over the years, without paying all that much attention to it, except perhaps being favorably reminded by it of his family's connection with the museum and of his own noteworthy role as an early environmentalist (or, as we would have said then, a conservationist). His great-great-grandson, Kermit Roosevelt III, who supports the statue's removal, seemed to me to strike the right balance. "That's a statue that people thought at the time was celebrating about him, but people's thinking at that time was very inflected by white supremacy. ... He wanted a society where what's best about our natural parks, our natural resources was shared widely and available to everyone and I think he should be remembered as an egalitarian and a conservationist."

I think Kermit got it just right. TR represented - embodied even - both what was best and what was worst about the Progressive Era in American politics, its morally advanced aspirations and its morally problematic prejudices. He himself embodied that ambivalence in his own personality - a stalwart supporter of progressive policies and advocate for economic and social justice, whose "cowboy" thinking about foreign relations was infected with an excessively aggressive appetite for ostentatious military conflict and with then widely shared racial prejudices.

TR's example ought to remind us of something which should be of no surprise to those who still believe in original sin - that good and evil impulses continually coexist in most of us and thus also in the societies and institutions we create. When reckoning with the legacy of monumental historical figures who have made a major impact on our society and need to be remembered, the honest thing to do and the most culturally constructive thing to do is to acknowledge both the good they did and aspired to do and the darker side of their legacy and that of their contemporaries - and not to allow either to cause us to forget or ignore the other.

Memorials to TR abound in this country - from his hometown New York City to Mount Rushmore. This particular monument, with its problematic images of other races, no longer serves a suitable social purpose and will properly be moved to some less ostentatious location and more socially sensitive context.