In Rome We Trust: The Rise of Catholics in American Political Life
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In Rome We Trust: The Rise of Catholics in American Political Life
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Overview
In Rome We Trust examines the unusually serene relationship between the chief global superpower and the world's most ancient and renowned institution. The "Catholicization" of the United States is a recent phenomenon: some believe it began during the Reagan administration; others feel it emerged under George W. Bush's presidency. What is certain is that the Catholic presence in the American political ruling class was particularly prominent in the Obama administration: over one-third of cabinet members, the Vice President, the White House Chief of Staff, the heads of Homeland Security and the CIA, the director and deputy director of the FBI, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other top military officers were all Roman Catholic. Challenging received wisdom that the American Catholic Church is in crisis and that the political religion in the United States is Evangelicalism, Manlio Graziano provides an engaging account of the tendency of Catholics to play an increasingly significant role in American politics, as well as the rising role of American prelates in the Roman Catholic Church.
“[Graziano’s] convincing conclusions with regard to the current mutually influential relationship between United States and Rome make for fascinating reading.” —Timothy Byrnes, Colgate University
“Graziano demythologizes the U.S.-Vatican relationship in the post-World War II era.” —David T. Buckley, Political Science Quarterly
“A priceless interpretation of the geopolitics that the Roman Church . . . and America . . . have recently practiced and will continue to practice in the post-Cold War era.” —Corriere della Sera
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781503601833 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/25/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
In Rome We Trust
The Rise of Catholics in American Political Life
By Manlio Graziano
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5036-0183-3
CHAPTER 1
Catholics in the United States
"The Greek in the Midst of Troy"
TOWARD THE END OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR, to the demand of including the Vatican in future peace negotiations, US Secretary of State Robert Lansing answered: "We are a republic, and like France, Switzerland and other republics we do not wish to set up relations with the Holy See, whose objectives are openly in contrast to the democratic ideals of America."
This statement indicated a structural — not a temporary — incompatibility between the two sides: the objectives of the Roman Catholic Church and those of the United States government were physiologically divergent.
Today we know that Lansing was wrong. After meeting with Pope Francis in March 2014, Barack Obama declared that "there is a potential convergence" between the pope's intentions and "what policymakers need to be thinking." The gap between an "open contrast" and a "potential convergence" is huge, so we cannot blame Lansing for not having foreseen it. It is true that almost a century has passed since the declarations quoted above. But America's hostility and mistrust toward Catholicism, particularly toward the Catholic Church, were so profound that they survived for many more decades — at least, according to a prevailing opinion, until the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan succeeded in becoming the center of a coalition overturning Lansing's perception of irreconcilable difference, a change for which the arrival of millions of Catholics on American shores was a crucial factor.
Robert Lansing was perfectly in line with the anti-Catholic tradition that for two hundred years had been consubstantial to the very nature of the United States. The history of this tradition can be divided into four phases: (1) the period extending from the arrival of the Mayflower up to the Declaration of Independence, which is characterized by a theological and political ostracism; (2) the first decades of life of the United States of America, characterized by a legal quarantine; (3) the period from the great Irish immigration to World War I, characterized by the expansion of the Catholic community; and (4) the period extending from the 1920s to the 1980s, characterized by its laborious integration into the American national life and by the exhaustion of the Protestants' traditional hostility.
OSTRACISM
The Puritans who sought refuge on the eastern coast of North America as they fled the Church of England's persecutions were animated by a double anti-Catholic feeling: against blatant "popery," both theological and institutional, and against what they considered a kind of "popery of a second degree," represented by their Anglican persecutors. In fact, apart from some doctrinal divergences (e.g., the denial of the Immaculate Conception and Purgatory), the Church of England had inherited most of the characteristics of the Church of Rome, actually changing only its head — the king instead of the pope. With the tendency toward autonomy of national churches in the countries thrust into new colonial conquest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Anglicanism represented a middle way between the total — theological and organizational — rupture of North European Protestant churches and an attempt by Spanish and French monarchies to nationalize local episcopacies without completely separating from Rome.
As a result of the religious conflicts raging in Europe, English territories in America experienced a constant influx of colonists belonging to a wide range of religious affiliations: Anglicans, Presbyterians, Calvinists, Lutherans, Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers, Catholics, and even a few Jews, in addition to Puritans who had opened the way.
Initially, the various New World Christian confessions continued Old World practices. In 1565 the first contact between Christians of different denominations was the massacre, by the Spanish in Florida, of a colony of French Huguenots who had been accused of "scattering the odious Lutheran doctrine in the province."
In that case, however, political considerations were more weighty than religious ones. In actuality, the Spanish intended to chase the French, no matter what their religion, from a region they wanted for themselves. Religious motivation was a useful — but completely instrumental — excuse for stirring up passions. This much is clear not only because they were ignorant of the form of worship practiced by the French colonists (Huguenots were Calvinists, not Lutherans) but also by the fact that the Huguenots' massacre was avenged three years later by a French aristocrat, a Catholic, who murdered all the Spanish in the garrison snatched from the Huguenots.
Conversely, in Massachusetts — the British colony that was considered by Alexis de Tocqueville to be a prototype of American democracy — discriminations and persecutions were based on theocratic motivations totally unfamiliar to the Spanish. The conviction that they had founded the evangelical "City upon a Hill" stimulated Puritan colonists to establish a "Bible Commonwealth" from whose rulings the followers of other Christian confessions were obviously excluded. Its norms were draconian: the obligation to participate in religious services; prohibition of music, dancing, theater, tobacco, gambling, and even of celebration of the Nativity and Resurrection; and the proscription of Quakers, Jews, and Catholics. Two laws, those of 1647 and 1700, contemplated capital punishment for Catholic priests who returned to Massachusetts after having been expelled. This climate of exacerbation of religious sentiment provoked the mass hysteria that led to the notorious Salem Witch Trials (1692–93), as a result of which nineteen people were hanged and four more died in jail (at least one under torture and one by stoning); two dogs were also executed for their complicity with witches.
Many of those persecuted in Massachusetts found shelter in neighboring and more hospitable Rhode Island. Catholics were not tolerated there either, however. According to Albert West, "It is said that in 1680 there was not one Catholic in the colony." In 1739, West continues, there were thirty-three churches (twelve Baptist, ten Quaker, six Presbyterian, and five Episcopalian) but not one Catholic. The first one was built a century later, in 1837.
The situation was not very different in the other colonies. In New Hampshire, Catholic colonists from nearby Quebec were expelled when, in 1641, the territory was brought under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. The new 1679 law limited itself to excluding them from public office. In Connecticut "the spirit of antagonism to all things Catholic was everywhere," James O'Donnell writes, and "proscription of Catholics was officially taught as a duty." In other colonies (New Jersey, South Carolina, Georgia) freedom of worship was guaranteed to all "except papists."
Considering its particular and growing importance, the New York colony echoed for a long time the events that took place in the motherland. Dutch governor Pieter Stuyvesant's decision to authorize only Calvinist worship was invalidated by the West Indies Company, and freedom of worship was confirmed by the English as early as 1664. At the time when the British Crown was swaying once again toward Catholicism, New York had no less than two Catholic governors: Anthony Brockholls (1681–82) and Thomas Dongan (1682–88). After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, however, the limits on and persecutions of Catholics of other Crown territories were introduced in New York as well: Catholic priests and teachers were expelled, and in 1741 an elementary schoolteacher and preacher was hanged under the charge (probably false) of being a "Popish priest." When independence was proclaimed, there were about two hundred Catholics (out of a total population of about 340,000) in the province of New York; considering that between three hundred and four hundred Jews were living in the city of New York alone, we can get an idea of the especial hostility toward Catholicism.
Catholics enjoyed relative freedom only in Maryland and Pennsylvania. The Maryland (or Terra Mariæ) colony was founded by a Catholic baron, Lord Baltimore, in 1634 and became a safe haven for the Catholics persecuted in England. But being the first Catholic territory to declare religious liberty, Maryland also became a refuge for Anglicans persecuted by Puritans and for Puritans persecuted by Anglicans, which soon reduced Catholics to a minority. The English Revolution of 1649 caused a Puritan coup in the beginning of the 1650s, which entailed the abolition of religious liberty, with particular hostility against Catholics, whose churches were set on fire. The Toleration Act promulgated by the Catholic governor was definitively abolished in 1692 following the Glorious Revolution. In 1704 the local legislative assembly passed An Act to Prevent the Growth of Popery Within This Province that resulted not only in expulsion of "Popish bishop, Priest, or Jesuite" but also in the progressive expropriation of Catholic landlords, whose lands went from 25 percent of the total in 1688 to 5 percent in 1776.
Many Catholics sought refuge in the North, in the region that in 1681 took the name of Pennsylvania. The Quakers who had founded the new colony intended to make it a safe haven for all religiously persecuted people, provided that they recognized "Jesus Christ [as] the Savior of the World." Although Catholics were de facto, if not de jure, excluded from public office, as they were considered loyal to a foreign sovereign (the pope), Pennsylvania was nevertheless the only colony where they were never, or almost never, persecuted.
The colonists' anti-Catholic zeal fed on a profound aversion to the pope, who was not only regarded as the Antichrist but also as the head of a foreign power, certainly hostile to England and therefore inclined to conspire and ally against it. We should not forget that only fifty years before the voyage of the Mayflower, Pope Pius V pronounced Queen Elisabeth I "to be a heretic and favorer of heretics," absolving her subjects "from any duty arising from lordship, fealty and obedience" (bull Regnans in Excelsis, 1570).
In the land of America, political aversion to "popery" was not only the result of local reflections of the English wars but also of the special geopolitical position of the thirteen colonies, virtually encircled as they were by two Catholic superpowers — France and Spain — with whom the English were far from having definitively settled past accounts. Although the Catholics in the colonies constituted a meager and insignificant minority of a few thousand people in the second half of the eighteenth century, the passions unleashed by the Seven Years' War (1756–63) gave rise to outright pogroms against them, as they were once again regarded as a foreign body and, under the circumstances, as a potential fifth column of the French.
Events relating to the Revolution determined two opposing attitudes. On the one hand, the Quebec Act — enacted in 1774 by His Majesty's Government to prevent a potential conjunction of the restless francophone Catholics in Quebec and the insurgents in nearby Massachusetts — provoked a new outburst of antipapist feeling in the thirteen colonies. On the other hand, the support of France and Spain for the American insurrection, in 1778, provoked considerably more restrained feeling, closer to the revolutionary leaders' positions, widely favorable to religious freedom for all. But the hopes nurtured by independence and the Constitution were mostly dashed.
LEGAL QUARANTINE
The delegates of the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 represented almost all the thirteen colonies, with the exception of Rhode Island, and almost the entire range of religious denominations. Thanks to Frank Lambert's research, we know that twenty-eight of the delegates were Anglicans (or Episcopalians, as they had been called since independence), eight were Presbyterians, seven Congregationalists, two Dutch Calvinists, two Lutherans, two Methodists, and two nonaffiliates. And there were two Catholics as well: Thomas Fitzsimons, a merchant and banker from Philadelphia, and Daniel Carroll, a major plantation owner in Maryland, who was the cousin of Charles Carroll, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and brother of the Jesuit John Carroll, the founder of Georgetown University (1789) and the first American Catholic bishop (1790).
Neither Fitzsimons nor the Carrolls ever suffered persecution or discrimination of any kind — not even before independence. It must be said, though, that the former was at the head of one of the biggest companies engaged in commercial traffic with the East Indies, whereas the latter, with his sixty thousand acres of land (in spite of ongoing Catholics' expropriation in Maryland that had started in 1704), was one of the wealthiest men on the continent. Furthermore, these two delegates represented the two most tolerant colonies when it came to religious matters. Nevertheless, their presence at the convention gave the country's Catholics, at that crucial moment, a political representation considerably higher in proportion to their weight in the rest of society: 3.6 percent (two delegates out of fifty-five), against about 1 percent of the total population of the new country in 1776.
The living conditions of almost all of that 1 percent continued for a long time to be very different from those of the two rich Catholics sitting in Philadelphia. Popular sentiment against them, their religion, and above all their pope did not, in fact, change substantially with the revolution or independence. And their legal situation actually remained the same, despite the voting in favor of the Federal Constitution and, later, the First Amendment.
This amendment prohibited Congress's officially acknowledging a religion and, at the same time, impeding its free exercise; nevertheless, almost all new states preserved the laws or regulations that favored this or that religion. Even after the approval of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), concerning equal protection of citizens, North Carolina and New Hampshire had to wait until 1875 and 1877 respectively for all religious references to be removed from their constitutions.
The First Amendment broke with a long tradition of established churches enjoying an exclusive relationship with political power. That had been the rule for quite a while in nine colonies out of thirteen: in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut this privilege was granted to the Congregational Church; in the province of New York and in Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia to the Anglican Church. Only in Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware was there no official church.
All the states had written the principle of religious freedom into their new constitutions; but, as John K. Wilson writes, "The vagueness of these provisions, and the lack of a mechanism to enforce them, suggests that they rarely affected the actual treatment of religious groups in any of the states." And, in any case, "many states required tests to keep non-Christians or in some cases Catholics out of public office." Practicing the Protestant faith was required, according to Wilson, in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, both Carolinas, and Georgia, while in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and Vermont, public officials had to acknowledge the Trinity dogma (which excluded Jews but not Catholics).
In some states the rule — that obliged public officials to "abjure and renounce all allegiance and subjection to all and every foreign king, prince, potentate and state in all matters ecclesiastical as well as civil" (as per the 1777 Constitution of the State of New York) — remained in force, where "foreign king, prince, potentate and state" clearly indicated the pope and his state.
Although in New York the law restricting Catholics' rights of citizenship had been abolished in 1806 (twenty-nine years after the Constitution was voted in), in other states adjustment periods were different: from Rhode Island, where the limitations were removed as early as 1783, to North Carolina, where the "Protestant Test" remained in force until 1868.
The permanence of anti-Catholic dispositions resulted from the inertia of a popular sentiment that, as I have already mentioned, was consubstantial with the very existence of the colonies. Frank Whelan points out that "to an average 18th-century [American] Protestant, Roman Catholics were regarded with the same horror as Germans during World War I or radicals in the Joe McCarthy era." A direct testimony of that feeling was transmitted by the historian Thomas Jones (1731–92), who posited New York's "Golden Age" as the 1750s, when "Presbyterians, Moravians, Seceders, Lutherans, German Calvinists, those of the French Reformed Church, the people called Quakers, and even the very Jews lived in perfect peace and harmony."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from In Rome We Trust by Manlio Graziano. Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
1. Catholics in the United States: The Greek in the Midst of Troy2. The Catholic Church and the United States: The Discovery of America
3. The Catholic Church and the United States: Parallel Empires
4. Catholics and American Politics: The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Coalition
5. Politics and Religion in the United States: The Evangelical Meteorite
6. Catholicization of the United States: Shift of Power and Catholicization
7. The Americanization of the Catholic Church: In America We Trust