Russell Shaw - Catholics in America: Religious Identity and Cultural Assimilation from John Carroll to Flannery OConnor

RUSSELL SHAW

Religious Identity and
Cultural Assimilation
from John Carroll to
Flannery OConnor

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Cover:

Wikimedia Commons images
(from top to bottom)

Archbishop John Hughes

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
Brady-Handy Photograph Collection

Orestes A. Brownson

Portrait by George Peter Alexander Healy (1863)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Mother Frances Cabrini

Archbishop John Carroll

Painting by Rembrant Peale (1811)

James Cardinal Gibbons

( October 18, 1917)
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Flannery OConnor

Photograph by Robie Macauley (October 9, 1947)

Cover design by Davin Carlson

2016 Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-62164-143-8 (PB)

ISBN 978-1-68149-709-9 (EB)
Library of Congress Control Number 2014949942
Printed in the United States of America

A Tale of Two Flags

In my parish church, as also, I suppose, in many another Catholic church in the United States, two flags are prominently displayed. One is the Stars and Stripes. The other, unfamiliar to most Americans, including many Catholics, is the gold and white flag of Vatican City, with the papal coat of armsthe keys of Peter and the papal tiaraimposed upon the vertical white band. In many churches, the two flags flank the sanctuary as if to salute the sacred ritual celebrated there. In mine, they hang from the choir loft at the back of the church, where they seem to be maintaining a benign surveillance of the congregation.

In all my years of visiting Catholic churches, Ive never heard anyone, priest or layperson, say a word about the symbolism of the two flags, perhaps because its so obvious that it doesnt need explaining. Their message plainly is twofold: first, that Catholics have a dual loyaltyto the Church and to the United States; second, that there is no conflict here . On the contrary, their reply to the ancient question, Can you be a good Catholic and a good American? appears to be an implied, Who says I cant?

For a long time, that response was entirely reasonable. It was the starting point and basis for the program of Americanization pursued by Catholic leaders from John Carroll onward. In the early years of the twentieth century, Harvard philosopher George Santayana, a self-described aesthetic Catholic, marveled that American Catholics busy assimilating into American culture could so happily embrace something so profoundly hostile to their faith. Some years later, however, a letter dispatched to the Vatican by the princely George Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago offered an unusually candid explanation of why Catholic assimilation was not just reasonable but absolutely necessary.

Responding to an impassioned protest to Rome by Polish priests angered by his attempts to prevent Polish-born members of his Windy City flock from retaining their Polish cultural identity, with Catholicism central to it, Mundelein declared it of the utmost importance that nationality groups in America should fuse into one homogeneous people... imbued with the one harmonious national thought, sentiment and spirit. This, he told Rome, was the idea of Americanization, and anything else would be a disaster for the Catholic Church in the United States.

For the most part, that has remained conventional wisdom to this day. Now, though, this may be changing. In recent years, its become increasingly clear that the Church needs to rethink the old project of unconditional assimilation into American secular culture. Yes, assimilation has been the preferred strategy of Catholic leadership since John Carroll. But should it always be? A persuasive argument can be made that it neednt and shouldnt. For the cost of assimilation to the Church has grown unacceptably high as the secular culture has become ever more inhospitable to Catholic beliefs and values, a process now observable on issues from abortion and same-sex marriage to the creeping economic strangulation of parochial schools. Currently the question has particular urgency in light of the presence in the United States of yet another large body of mainly Catholic newcomers: the Hispanics.

A while back I wrote a book called American Church , in which I discussed the problem of assimilation (the problems nature is suggested by the books subtitle: The Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall, and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America ). In laying out my thesis, I said this:

American Church was surprisingly well received, and the problem of assimilation received some badly needed attention as a result. Ive even heard that some people who read the book have taken steps to carry out its practical prescription for the rebuilding of a viable U.S. Catholic subculture. Catholics in America a collection of fifteen short profiles of people whose careers illustrate aspects of the phenomenon examined in American Church is meant to encourage continued discussion. (Many of the profiles first appeared in slightly different form in the pages of Our Sunday Visitor newsweekly, to which I here extend thanks.)

This book can be read simply as a set of introductions to a group of individuals who in various ways made significant contributions to American Catholicism and American society. Readers are welcome to approach it that way if they wish. But they should be aware that a more complex rationale is at work herethe hope to stimulate an overdue dialogue on a question of great urgency in which they are invited to take part.

Its this: Can we still be fully Catholic while also being fully American in American secular terms? The response of many Catholics today is simply more assimilation into the values and behavior patterns of the society that surrounds them. But for a remnant of believing, practicing Catholics, its a different story. These people find themselves increasingly alienated from the secular society and deeply concerned to know what to do about it. Perhaps they will find some help in what follows.

Several themes are at work here, exemplified by the following fifteen influential American Catholics: Archbishop Carroll and Cardinal Gibbonsthe assimilation option as it has been accepted and promoted by leaders of the Church in the United States; Saint Elizabeth Seton, Father McGivney, and Al Smithanti-Catholicism and the Catholic response; Archbishop Hughes and Saint Frances Xavier Cabrinithe immigrant experience; Cardinal Spellmanhyperpatriotism as an assimilation mode; Dorothy Day, Archbishop Sheen, Flannery OConnorthe ambiguities of American culture; Orestes Brownson and Isaac Heckerthe feasibility of evangelization; John Kennedy and John Courtney Murrayresolving the tension between church and state.

Let me reply at the start to a possible objection: this is not an unpatriotic book. My country, right or wrongwords associated with the early nineteenth-century American naval hero Stephen Decatur and later repeated, with disastrous results, by Cardinal Spellmanexpresses an unassailably correct sentiment, provided the sentiment is understood to be, No matter how foolishly or unjustly my country may act, its still my country. But this fundamental acknowledgment of national filiation does not excuse patriotic citizens from criticizing their country when it acts foolishly or unjustly, and trying their best to get the country to stop doing that. These things, too, are expressions of patriotism, indeed arguably more useful than blind acquiescence.