The factors that caused the Roman authorities to insist on a Plenary Council of the American Bishops in 1884 have not been sufficiently explained. Perhaps the role of the American prelates in opposing the opportuneness of the definition of the doctrine of infallibility had some influence. Undoubtedly the reports of the bishops in their ad limina visits to Rome did little to subdue any fears that may have arisen. The frequent appeals of recalcitrant clergymen against their bishops were going directly to Rome because there was no intermediate court. The Instruction of 1878 makes this quite clear. Rome had shown its dissatisfaction with the condition of Catholic education by its interrogatory and its Instruction of 1875. The renewed condemnation of the Fenians had some American effects; and the renewed condemnation of the Masons with applications to certain other American social organizations indicated that all was not well in the social conditions of Catholics in the United States. Had the prelates in Rome understood American democracy and American conditions they would have had to have been much better informed than most Europeans in the nineteenth century. America was to Europe a land of great physical possibility, but a land without any great culture or religious accomplishments. Even European liberals did not understand the manhood suffrage of American democracy. The Catholic leaders of southern Europe, so generally aligned with conservative and monarchist parties, could have little understanding of American democracy in the religious sphere. In Rome where the hierarchical arrangement had not been fully dissociated from monarchical government and where Roman law with its insistence on the union of Church and State was the basis of most political thought, even the most sympathetic seemed to have some misgivings about the manifest loyalty of the American Catholics to the Holy See.
