Americanism Redux

2020 ◽  
pp. 184-208
Author(s):  
D. G. Hart
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Constitutional Republic ◽  
Political Realities ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Teaching

This chapter investigates the use of Americanism to appropriate Roman Catholicism for the good of a nation. It recounts older Roman Catholic heresy claimed that the American political system was not at odds with church teaching, even though the United States seemed to stand for most of the social and political realities that nineteenth-century popes had condemned. It also talks about the Americanists in the nineteenth-century who argued that Vatican officials misread the United States, stating that the nation was far friendlier to Roman Catholicism than Europeans imagined. The chapter details how Americanists urged the church to update its polity to the nation's political sensibilities, a strategy that would make Roman Catholicism look less odd in the United States. It also highlights ways Americanists adapt Roman Catholicism to life in a secular, constitutional republic.

American Catholic

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. G. Hart
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
Roman Catholics ◽  
The Church

This book places the rise of the United States' political conservatism in the context of ferment within the Roman Catholic Church. How did Roman Catholics shift from being perceived as un-American to emerging as the most vocal defenders of the United States as the standard bearer in world history for political liberty and economic prosperity? This book charts the development of the complex relationship between Roman Catholicism and American conservatism, and it shows how these two seemingly antagonistic ideological groups became intertwined in advancing a certain brand of domestic and international politics. Contrary to the standard narrative, Roman Catholics were some of the most assertive political conservatives directly after World War II, and their brand of politics became one of the most influential means by which Roman Catholicism came to terms with American secular society. It did so precisely as bishops determined the church needed to update its teaching about its place in the modern world. Catholics grappled with political conservatism long before the supposed rightward turn at the time of the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. The book follows the course of political conservatism from John F. Kennedy, the first and only Roman Catholic president of the United States, to George W. Bush, and describes the evolution of the church and its influence on American politics. By tracing the roots of Roman Catholic politicism in American culture, the book argues that Roman Catholicism's adaptation to the modern world, whether in the United States or worldwide, was as remarkable as its achievement remains uncertain.

Context and Meaning: Roman Catholic Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America

1985 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 482-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Taves
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Holy Water ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Church ◽  
As If

A French visitor to a nineteenth-century Irish Catholic parish in the United States described the scene as follows: Behold them, when the sanctuary bell announces the moment of consecration; they raise their hands, they extend their arms in the form of a cross, they pray and sigh aloud; at times some leave their pew and prostrate themselves in the aisle, in order to assume a more suppliant and adoring attitude. … If you wait until the end of mass, you will be further edified. You will see them approach as near as possible to the high altar, before which they bow profoundly, making several genuflections, and frequently remain for a moment almost prostrate to the ground. From here they go to kneel at the altar of the Blessed Virgin, then before that of St. Joseph. Then follows a last and touching station before the body of the dead Christ which the Italians call the pietá; they pray here for a few moments, and respectfully press their lips to the five wounds of the Saviour. At the door of the church they take holy water, sign themselves with it repeatedly, and sprinkle their faces with it; then turning to the tabernacle they make a last genuflection, as if to bid farewell to our Lord, and finally withdraw.

The Crisis in Church-State Relationships in the U.S.A.

1999 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 687-704
Author(s):  
John Courtney Murray
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Present State ◽  
The United States ◽  
Intense Fear ◽  
Political Realities ◽  
The Church ◽  
Grave Danger

In this memorandum four points will be briefly made.First, a grave danger confronts the Church in the United States, because the Church is the object of a newly intense fear, distrust, and hostility. At the same time a new apostolic opportunity is being offered to the Church, because the Church is now the object of a new interest, curiosity, and sympathy.Second, one great obstacle hinders the Church in coping effectively with the danger confronting her. And the same obstacle also blocks her from making full use of the opportunity offered to her. This obstacle consists in the present state of development of the Church's doctrine on Church-State relationships. This doctrine has not yet been vitally adapted to modern political realities and to the legitimate democratic aspirations, especially as they have developed in the United States.

Warring for America

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Physical Parameters ◽  
School Students ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Nation ◽  
The Many

The aftershocks of the American Revolution reverberated through the early nineteenth century, leaving the new country unsettled and at odds with itself. The essays in Warring for America offer a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the internal divisions amongst the inhabitants of the early Republic that hindered the emergence of a coherent American nation as much as did the lingering impact of British imperial influence. Traditional understanding of the War of 1812 era as a moment that reaffirmed the political independence of the United States, thereby ushering in a neat period of stability, have failed to explain the enduring struggle to define the social and physical parameters of the new nation that dominated much of the nineteenth century. By turning from high politics to cultural productions and material problems, the authors in this volume explore the many social and economic conflicts within the United States that were fought on cultural terrain. Wartime calls for unity only cast into sharper relief the arduous efforts of varied Americans to control the terms of inclusion or exclusion within their country. From presidents to African Free School students, from hack magazine writers to Choctaw mothers, Americans fought for country on the battleground of belonging.

Idle Power: the Riot, the Commune, and Capitalist Time in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day

2019 ◽  
pp. 157-204
Author(s):  
Christian P. Haines
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
The United States ◽  
Idle Power ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
The Social ◽  
Antonio Negri

This chapter argues that Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day (2006) not only represents the temporality of capitalism but also contests it through an aesthetic strategy of idleness or sloth. It analyzes how Pynchon recuperates nineteenth-century traditions of anarchism, work refusal, rioting, and the commune as a way of responding to contemporary conditions of labor under capitalism. Putting Pynchon into conversation with the Italian Autonomist Marxists—most notably, Antonio Negri and Mario Tronti—it shows how Against the Day frames class struggle as a conflict between capitalism and workers regarding the social organization of time. It explains that Pynchon links the utopian reinvention of the United States to a political version of idleness, or a willful refusal of capitalist efficiency. It also situates Pynchon’s utopian imagination in respect to the social forms of the riot and the commune.

The Comic Grotesque

2020 ◽  
pp. 29-66
Author(s):  
Jean Lee Cole
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Logical Basis ◽  
Ethnic Populations ◽  
The Social

A particularly grotesque form of the comic sensibility emerged in the closing years of the nineteenth century in the works of George Luks. Luks was called on to take over Richard Outcault’s phenomenally popular Yellow Kid comic strip at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in 1896; he soon made the Yellow Kid his own. As Outcault’s duplicate or twin, Luks capitalized on the grotesque potential of twinning, doubling, and replication to question the social order from below, laying bare—and then savagely mocking—fears of the rapidly growing immigrant and ethnic populations in the United States. In subsequent strips, including The Little Nippers and Mose’s Incubator, his representations of polyglot America become positively fantastical, even monstrous, reflecting the interchangeability and reproducibility of ethnic identity that formed the logical basis of the “melting pot.”

Terrible Revolution

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher James Blythe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
American People ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Norms ◽  
Violent Images ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

The relationship between Mormons and the United States was marked by anxiety and hostility. Nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints looked forward to apocalyptic events that would unseat corrupt governments across the globe but would particularly decimate the tyrannical government of the United States. Mormons turned to prophecies of divine deliverance by way of plagues, natural disasters, foreign invasions, American Indian raids, slave uprisings, or civil war unleashed on American cities and American people. For the Saints, these violent images promised an end to their oppression. It also promised a national rebirth as part of the millennial Kingdom of God that would vouchsafe the protections of the U.S. Constitution. Blythe examines apocalypticism across the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, particularly as it would take shape in localized and personalized forms in the writings and visions of ordinary Latter-day Saints outside of the church’s leadership. By following the official response of church leaders to lay prophecy, Blythe shows how the hierarchy, committed to a form of separatist nationalism of their own, encouraged apocalypticism during the nineteenth century. Yet, after Utah obtained statehood, as the church sought to accommodate to national norms for religious denominations, leaders sought to lessen the tensions between themselves and American political and cultural powers. As a result, visions of a violent end to the nation became a liability, and leaders began to disavow and regulate these apocalyptic narratives especially as they showed up among the laity.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
D. G. Hart
Keyword(s):  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Moral Theology ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
The Press ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Roman Catholics ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Teaching ◽  
John Courtney Murray

This chapter focuses on how Roman Catholics became prominent players in conservative circles and provides an understanding on the affinity and tension between national and Roman Catholic traditions and ideals. It describes John F. Kennedy's kind of Roman Catholicism, which Americans and the press found acceptable. It also mentions John Courtney Murray, who was considered a potential breakthrough for Roman Catholicism that harmonizes church teaching with national ideals, unlike Kennedy whose electoral victory was an example of religious indifference. The chapter talks about Pope Leo XIII's 1899 condemnation of Americanism or adjustment of the church to freedom, democracy, and popular sovereignty as Roman Catholics were still laboring under papal opposition to modernity in the 1950s. It refers to John T. Noonan, Jr., who authored important books about the church's evolving moral theology.

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