The New American Catholic History

1972 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moses Rischin
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Geographic Mobility ◽  
General Interest ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
John Xxiii ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
American Society ◽  
American Catholic

Even historians and historically minded Sociologists with little sense or awareness of the current Roman Catholic scene have been stirred by the precipitous flow of events of the last dozen years to ask questions about the Catholic role in American society. Virtually without warning, the history of American Catholicism has been catapulted from specialized ecclesiastical history of interest to Catholics primarily into an ecumenical history of unprecedented general interest. After hovering backstage for centuries, the Catholic presence has erupted almost simultaneously from the secular and theological wings and burst onto centerstage. A convergence of public events dramatized and personalized for world Catholicism by the papacy of John XXIII and for American Catholicism by the presidency of John F. Kennedy ironically magnified a sense of supreme Catholic crisis and confusion that in its scope and implications dwarfed earlier American Catholic crises, making them appear parochial and intramural by comparison. The elevation to the papacy of the most saintly and humble of priests and the brief presidency of the first Catholic president of the United States turned an aged pope and a young president into symbols of a new public Catholicism, cosmopolitan and courageous in its vision and democratic in its thrust. Vatican II, the ecumenical movement, the race revolution, the general revolt against authority, the new ethnic succession, explosive social and geographic mobility, and the heightened self-consciousness of newer ethnics of European origin and largely Catholic religion, combined with the instant exposure of the mass media, synchronized with an era of American world hegemony and the emergence of an American Catholicism of appropriate dimensions.

Anti-Catholicism in the United States

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark S. Massa
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
North American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Boundary Maintenance ◽  
Different Types ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society ◽  
American Catholic

Historian John Higham once referred to anti-Catholicism as “by far the oldest, and the most powerful of anti-foreign traditions” in North American intellectual and cultural history. But Higham’s famous observation actually elided three different types of anti-Catholic nativism that have enjoyed a long and quite vibrant life in North America: a cultural distrust of Catholics, based on an understanding of North American public culture rooted in a profoundly British and Protestant ordering of human society; an intellectual distrust of Catholics, based on a set of epistemological and philosophical ideas first elucidated in the English (Lockean) and Scottish (“Common Sense Realist”) Enlightenments and the British Whig tradition of political thought; and a nativist distrust of Catholics as deviant members of American society, a perception central to the Protestant mainstream’s duty of “boundary maintenance” (to utilize Emile Durkheim’s reading of how “outsiders” help “insiders” maintain social control). An examination of the long history of anti-Catholicism in the United States can be divided into three parts: first, an overview of the types of anti-Catholic animus utilizing the typology adumbrated above; second, a narrative history of the most important anti-Catholic events in U.S. culture (e.g., Harvard’s Dudleian Lectures, the Suffolk Resolves, the burning of the Charlestown convent, Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures); and finally, a discussion of American Catholic efforts to address the animus.

American Catholics and “The Use and Abuse of Reading,” 1865–1873

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-64
Author(s):  
Erin Bartram
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Social Order ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Individual ◽  
American Catholic

ABSTRACTIn the wake of the Civil War, Father Isaac Hecker launched several publishing ventures to advance his dream of a Catholic America, but he and his partners soon found themselves embroiled in a debate with other American Catholics, notably his friend and fellow convert Orestes Brownson, over the “use and abuse of reading.” Although the debate was certainly part of a contemporary conversation about the compatibility of Catholicism and American culture, this essay argues that it was equally rooted in a moment of American anxiety over a shifting social order, a moment when antebellum faith in the individual was being tested by the rights claims of women and Americans of color. Tacitly accepting and internalizing historical claims of intrinsic and through-going Catholic “difference,” claims offered both by American Protestants and American Catholics like Brownson, scholars often presume that debates within American Catholicism reflect “Catholic” concerns first and foremost, qualifying their utility as sources of “American” cultural history. By examining American Catholic discussions of reading, individual liberty, social order, and gender in the 1860s and 1870s, this essay argues that Brownson's arguments against the compatibility of American and Catholic life were in fact far more representative of ascendant ideas in American culture than Hecker's hopeful visions of a Catholic American future made manifest through the power of reading. In doing so, it demonstrates the ways that American Catholicism can be a valuable and complex site for studying the broader history of religion and culture in the United States.

The Making of American Catholicism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Pfeifer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
The United States ◽  
Regional Culture ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
American Catholic

The Making of American Catholicism: Regional Culture and the Catholic Experience argues that regional and transnational relationships have been central to the making of American Catholicism. The book traces the development of Catholic cultures in the South, the Midwest, the West, and the Northeast and their contribution to larger patterns of Catholicism in the United States. Exploring the history of Catholic cultures in New Orleans, Iowa, Wisconsin, Los Angeles, and New York City, the book carefully explores the history of American Catholic cultures across regions and their relation to factors such as national origin, ethnicity, race, and gender. The chapters include close analysis of the historical experiences of Latinx and African American Catholics as well as European immigrant Catholics. Eschewing a national or nationalistic focus that might elide or neglect global connections or local complexity, the book offers an interpretation of the American Catholic experience that encompasses local, national, and transnational histories by emphasizing the diverse origins of Catholics in the United States, their long-standing ties to transnational communities of Catholic believers, and the role of region in shaping the contours of American Catholic religiosity. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book argues that regional American Catholic cultures and a larger American Catholicism developed as transnational Catholic laity and clergy ecclesiastically linked to and by Rome in a hierarchical, authoritarian, and communalistic “universal Church” creatively adapted their devotional and ideological practices in particular American regional contexts that emphasized notions of republicanism, religious liberty, individualistic capitalism, race, ethnicity, and gender.

From Advent to Easter: Catholic Preaching in New York City, 1808–1809.

1994 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-377
Author(s):  
James M. O'toole
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
White House ◽  
White Males ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Catholic History ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Scholarly Discourse

The recent interest in reconstructing the history of spirituality and religious belief is nowhere more welcome than in the history of Roman Catholicism in the United States. From the very point of its emergence as a recognizable subdiscipline at the turn of the century and lasting into very recent scholarship, American Catholic history has been a relentlessly “topdown”affair. It focused on the leaders of the church—almost all of them white males—and on official church institutions. Episcopal biography was the preferred form and, as often as not, “progress” was the theme: the hierarchy established itself steadily along the advancing frontier; populations of clergy, religious, and laity all increased heroically; immigrants once despised were transformed into the American mainstream. There was even an inspirational final chapter to the tale, as one American Catholic finally grasped the brass ring of acceptance and moved into the White House. The story was a deliberately edifying one, but it was a story primarily for insiders. Perhaps for that reason alone, American Catholic history seemed to remain, as Leslie Tender has recently observed, “on the margins” of serious scholarly discourse.

Writing American Catholic History

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Margaret M. McGuinness ◽  
James T. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
New France ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
Eastern Seaboard

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of the history of U.S. Catholicism, which is traced back to the efforts of Franciscan missionaries in the sixteenth-century Southwest prior to the arrival of Anglo-Protestants along the Eastern Seaboard, and then moved on to Jesuits in New France (Canada) early in the following century. By 1850, Catholicism was the largest religious denomination in the United States, and remains so to this day. American Protestant Christianity has always boasted a substantial aggregate majority of religious adherents, but Protestantism was broken into so many movements by the mid-nineteenth century that no single Protestant group equaled in size the nation's Catholic populace. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Confession

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick W. Carey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society ◽  
Catholic Tradition ◽  
American Catholic

Confession is a history of penance as a virtue and a sacrament in the United States from about 1634, the origin of Catholicism in Maryland, to 2015, fifty years after the major theological and disciplinary changes initiated by the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). The history of the Catholic theology and practice of penance is analyzed within the larger context of American Protestant penitential theology and discipline and in connection with divergent interpretations of biblical penitential language (sin, repentance, forgiveness, reconciliation) that Jews, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, and Catholics shared in the American body politic. The overall argument of the text is that the Catholic theology and practice of penance, so much opposed by the inheritors of the Protestant Reformation, kept alive the biblical penitential language in the United States at least until the mid 1960s when Catholic penitential discipline changed and the practice of sacramental confession declined precipitously. Those changes within the American Catholic tradition contributed to the more general eclipse of penitential language in American society as a whole. From the 1960s onward penitential language was overshadowed increasingly by the language of conflict and controversy. In the current climate of controversy and conflict, such a text may help Americans understand how much their society has departed from the penitential language of the earlier American tradition and consider what the advantages and disadvantages of such a departure are.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Michael J. Pfeifer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
The United States ◽  
Dynamic Interaction ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Upper Midwest ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
American Society ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
Over Time

This book analyzes the interaction of religiosity, national and cultural origin, race, gender, class, and region in the varied and uneasy synthesis of Catholicism and American identity over time. American Catholic studies continues to evince comparatively little attention to region, with the weight of scholarship still focused on the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, with little attention to the varied regions of the United States west of Buffalo. Yet the American Catholic experience diverged significantly among regions, with, for instance, the northeastern pattern of Irish Catholic predominance having less salience in areas of significant Catholic population such as Louisiana, the Upper Midwest, and Southern California. Immigrant Catholic cultures also have hardly been ignored in the literature, yet the lengthy significance of transnational ties for Catholic cultures in the United States has not been extensively pursued, with Americanist scholars evincing a water’s-edge approach after migration that was never actually experienced by Catholics in the United States. Clerical sexual abuse emerges at times in these pages. Like all of the American Catholic history in this book, clerical sexual abuse partakes of a dynamic interaction of particular Catholic cultures and American society and culture.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 165-172
Author(s):  
Michael J. Pfeifer
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
American Society ◽  
Catholic Tradition ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
The U.S

Themes of creative adaptation and uneven synthesis have undergirded the history of Catholicism in the Pacific Northwest but are also evident throughout the histories of transnational, regional Catholic cultures analyzed in this book. Such a tension between the Catholic tradition rooted in Rome as well as in various Catholic immigrant homelands versus the desire or need to adapt to the American environment not only drove the Americanism controversies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but also informs ongoing aspects of the American Catholic experience. On the U.S. Supreme Court, where Catholics have composed a majority of justices since 2006, a similar uneasy tension exists between cultural Catholicism and American judicial and political ideologies that do not align easily with Catholic teaching. Catholic participation in U.S. electoral politics also continues to reflect the regionally inflected uneven synthesis evident in the making of Catholic cultures and American society analyzed in this book. Region has made and continues to make a significant difference in American Catholic history and American Catholic cultures.

Italian Immigrant Catholic Clergy and an Exception to the Rule: The Reverend Antonio Demo, Our Lady of Pompei, Greenwich Village, 1899–1933

1993 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Elizabeth Brown
Keyword(s):  
Parochial Schools ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Catholic Clergy ◽  
Italian American ◽  
Greenwich Village ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
The Church

Italians have long been the exception to generalizations about ethnic American Catholicism. As early as the 1880s, American bishops considered them a “problem.” In 1946, Henry J. Browne summarized the “problem”: Italians did not regularly attend mass, did not receive the sacraments, did not contribute to the support of the church, did not educate their children in their faith, did not respect the clergy, and did not appreciate that they should be doing better in all these areas. Although Browne's work has become the subject of revisionist criticism among students of Italian American Catholicism, specialists in other aspects of American Catholicism have incorporated into their work generalizations generated by the Italian-American experts.James Sanders's study of Chicago parochial schools referred to Italians as least likely to support such schools. David J. O'Brien's history of the diocese of Syracuse emphasizes the difficulties Italians faced and the troubles they created for the clergy and hierarchy. Dolan's survey of American Catholic history has a large bibliography on which to base its conclusion that “thereligion of the [southern Italian] people was not the same as the official religion of the church.

“God's Representative in Our Midst”: Toward a History of the Catholic Diocesan Clergy in the United States

1998 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 326-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Woodcock Tentler
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
Parish Clergy ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
Diocesan Priests

From a historian's point of view, the Catholic diocesan clergy in the United States look rather like forgotten men. As a group, they have never figured prominently in the scholarly literature. American Catholic history may have had an emphatically clerical bias as late as the 1950s, but the focus then was mainly on the chancery. The parish clergy were almost as neglected as the famously docile laity. The laity have moved in recent years to the forefront of Catholic historical consciousness, and won for themselves a less docile image in the process. But priests have not enjoyed equivalent attention—indeed, in the eyes of at least some practitioners, priests are today mildly suspect as subjects of research. We do not, after all, want a return to the bad old days of “clerical” history. The predictable consequence is a major hole in our church-historical knowledge. Despite the new vitality in American Catholic historical scholarship, we know very little about the history of diocesan priests in the United States—who they were, how they lived and worked, what they thought about their ministry or the people they served.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document