Catholicism and American Freedom: A History.

AuthorGarnett, Richard W.
PositionBook Review

CATHOLICISM AND AMERICAN FREEDOM: A HISTORY. By John T. McGreevy. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co. 2003. Pp. 431. $26.95.

INTRODUCTION

The jacket photo for John T. McGreevy's Catholicism and American Freedom (1) is striking. In the foreground, a young and vigorous Pope John Paul II, censer in hand, (2) strides across an altar platform on the Mall in Washington, D.C. His attention is fixed off-camera, presumably at the altar he is about to reverence with incense. At the bottom of the picture, gathered around and below the platform, sits a grainy group of mitre-wearing bishops. (3) Looming directly over the scene, in the background yet dominating the photograph, is the towering dome of the U.S. Capitol Building.

This picture is worth many thousand words; it evokes and captures many of the events described, themes developed, and debates presented in this excellent book. The crowd of faceless bishops, lurking beneath the foundations of the Capitol, recalls the famous Thomas Nast cartoon depicting a mass of crawling crocodile-like prelates who, with toothy, gaping mitres, stalk Tammany-abandoned schoolchildren cowering in the ruins of the public schools and armed only with the Holy Bible. (4) That the Church's rituals are proceeding in our most public of public squares, in the shadow of the unmistakably churchlike seat of our national government, reminds us that our "separation of church and state" has long been anything but strict, and perhaps also that even our professedly secular state has at times demanded faithlike loyalty to its own political orthodoxies. (5) That the Capitol dome so resembles that of St. Paul's Cathedral in London highlights the tension between Catholicism and America's Protestant origins, traditions, and premises. In the picture, the Pope occupies an in-between place, as Catholics in America often have: he appears both suspended and intent on mediating between the ancient, hierarchical Church he leads and the modern, democratic nation he is addressing. His posture is neither defensive nor defiant, but confident. It is as if his aim is not to impose a conclusion, but to propose a claim and to initiate a conversation.

Catholicism and American Freedom is about, and part of, that conversation. This book is relevant and important reading for anyone who aspires to understand American culture, history, and politics. It should also be of particular interest to lawyers and legal scholars. And, the book is welcome, given the appallingly widespread ignorance of the themes and topics it explores. (6)

I.

John T. McGreevy is the author of Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter With Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North, a respected history. (7) His latest book, Catholicism and American Freedom, confirms McGreevy's skill and sensitivity. It is timely, engaging, provocative, and entertaining. It is carefully researched and annotated, but never pedantic or tedious. McGreevy's prose is clear and accessible; his tone is warm and charitable, balanced but not bland. He is unobtrusive--though not disingenuously disinterested--and, with only a few exceptions, steers clear of soapboxes and heavy-handed editorializing. (8) His project seems not to steer, let alone drag, his readers to particular conclusions. (9) It is, instead, to call their attention to the dynamics of a close, complicated, and continuing relationship, one whose role in shaping Americans' arguments about America is often overlooked.

Catholicism and American Freedom is not a "Catholic" book. It is not a work of devotion, apologetics, or catechesis; nor is it a study of the Catholic Church's divisions, crises, or future. (10) It is not a tendentious chronicle of Catholic misdeeds and corruption or an overwrought pseudo-historical indictment, (11) nor is it a crusading, triumphalistic romp. (12) McGreevy braves the waters of interminably controversial matters like abortion, parochial-school vouchers, and sexual ethics, but this work is not about these issues. He is not a "culture warrior" (13) and this book is nothing like a polemic or a jeremiad. He calls our attention to the reality and role of anti-Catholicism in the American experience, but his book is not an accusation or a complaint, and its concern is not with the question whether anti-Catholicism is a persistent or spent force in American culture, law, or politics. (14) And, he concludes not with a strident call to ideological arms, or a bullet-point litany of policy recommendations. but with the cautious, modest suggestion that we temper our "romantic view of individual autonomy" with a corrective appreciation for associations, communion, and solidarity (p. 295).

McGreevy's subject, in a nutshell, is the story of how "America"--or, more particularly, American liberalism (15)--has reacted and responded to Catholic claims about the nature and purpose of "freedom," and how these claims were, in turn, shaped by Catholicism's interactions with, internal conversations about, and adjustments to American liberalism. This "interplay between Catholic and American ideals of freedom"--a dynamic that "'remains poorly understood"--is the book's unifying storyline (p. 14). Thus, the challenge for McGreevy is "to capture two traditions in motion, not one: to explore American ideas about Catholicism along with the predispositions (at times blinders) framing the mental landscape of American Catholics" (p. 15). This book--like John Courtney Murray's, more than forty years earlier--considers Americans" efforts to work through the questions "whether Catholicism is compatible with American democracy" and "whether American democracy is compatible with Catholicism." (16)

Throughout the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth, it was regularly charged and widely believed by American intellectuals and leaders that there was something un-American about Catholicism's clergy, claims, teachings, practices, structures, traditions, and adherents. (17) For many people and for many years, the Roman Catholic Church served as a foil for "American" values and ideals--and vice versa. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that American liberalism often defined and constructed itself precisely in opposition to its image of Catholicism. (18) At the same time, Catholic institutions, practices, and beliefs developed in response to American and liberal challenges, and American Catholics have oscillated uneasily between sectarianism, segregation, and counter-culture, on the one hand, and engagement, accommodation, and assimilation, on the other. (19)

Thus, American liberals often wondered with John Adams whether "a free government [can] possibly exist with a Roman Catholic Religion." (20) In turn, many Catholics in America responded to liberal anti-clericalism and nationalism by "defin[ing] themselves against dominant ideas of freedom [and[ individual autonomy" (p. 13), while others followed Tocqueville in regarding "Catholicism [as] a powerful contributor to the 'maintenance of a Democratic Republic in the United States.'" (21) And while many intellectuals charged that Catholicism was un-American to the extent it rejected, or was incompatible with, Americans' individualistic understandings of "freedom," underappreciated but enormously significant American figures such as Orestes Brownson, John Ryan, and John Courtney Murray contended not only that Catholicism was consonant with the best of American traditions, it might best embody and transmit America's founding values. (22) Echoing Archbishop John Purcell's 1863 case for the "moral necessity of emancipation" (p. 82), they insisted that "It]he Catholic Church has ever been the friend of human freedom[,] [because] [i]t was Christ's mission to set men free." (23)

One particularly effective feature of McGreevy's guided tour through the Catholic-American dialogue is the way he frames his story around particular, noteworthy participants. Take, for example, the muscular anti-liberalism of the nineteenth century's simultaneously self-confident and reactionary Catholic revival: McGreevy explores it through the exploits and arguments of the charismatic and confrontational Jesuit, Fr. Bernadine Wiget, who worked in Boston's North End and was a refugee from the anticlericalism then sweeping across Europe. Similarly, the arc of Orestes Brownson's dauntingly prolific career tracks the efforts of mid-century Catholics in America who opposed slavery and secession, but also perceived liberal revolution, nationalism, and individualism as threats to authentic human freedom. Brownson was determined to resist the common assumption of liberals and Catholic revivalists that Catholics opposed the American experiment. (24) His work helps McGreevy to explore the "tricornered dynamic" of "liberal intellectuals and politicians convinced of Catholicism's hostility to freedom and progress, ultramontane Catholics determined to resist liberalism's insistence on individual autonomy in all spheres, and a loose assemblage of liberal Catholics tacking between the two groups" (p. 67). (25)

Fr. John Ryan, a Catholic University professor, brought Catholic thinking on solidarity and human dignity to bear on twentieth-century labor and economic questions, but also scorned the "selfishness" of contraception. He embodies in McGreevy's study both the rapprochement between Catholic and liberal social reformers who embraced economic planning, trade unionism, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the divisions to come on matters of sexual morality and abortion (p. 158). John Courtney Murray's work illustrates the efforts of Catholic intellectuals in the middle-twentieth century "to move Catholic theology and philosophy toward a more nuanced understanding of the challenges posed by modernity" (p. 191), to retrieve a Catholic account of democracy and human rights, and to articulate a robust, Catholic understanding of religious freedom that avoided the errors of both nineteenth-century popes and...

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