A person i was talking to the other day asserted that the degree to which Catholics have successfully woven themselves into the fabric of US society and prospered over time is, in a substantive way, due to American intolerance against Catholics in the 1800’s and early 1900’s. He said that the Catholic religion of that time was much more hierarchical and intolerant of dissension, and that fealty to the church and the Pope towered above any duty to the state.
His opinion was that the discrimination they faced made the American Catholic Church become (relatively) less hierarchically rigid and more convergent with American separation of church and state ethos where the state is the ultimate authority.
I have nooo idea, but I never thought of it. I would’ve pointed to immigration and strength in numbers, but I like that notion. Sometimes the intolerance of a community will just strengthen the community.
One thing I’d question is if this move away from a rigid hierarchy was purely an American phenomenon, or part of a larger sea change in the Church as a whole. If European Catholics were also becoming less rigidly hierarchical in the same time frame, it would seem to indicate that this change was not a direct result of American anti-Catholic prejudice.
My experience with Catholicism in several countries is that there are at least two big factors defining the “rigidity” of any given congregation/parish:
whether the location has been traditionally heavily Catholic or not. More heavily-Catholic, less need to defend your Catholicism, more flexibility and diversity within the group labeling itself Catholic.
the congregation the priest(s) belong to. Augustins the world over have unbending spines, Franciscans the world over are willing to sing and dance at the drop of a hat, Jesuits will argue law with the Devil or play his advocate with equal gusto in Nicaragua or in Japan.
There was an article in a US women’s magazine in 1997 celebrating some anniversary or other, and it listed achievements of women in the period celebrated. One of them, which had taken place during the 1970s in the diocese of Chicago, involved one parish priest wanting to let girls serve the altar; after much yelling and gnashing of teeth, the Diocese asked Rome for permission. Rome’s answer can be translated as “why are you asking for specific permission for something which has been done since before parishes had records?”
First altar girl in the US: the 1970s. First altar girl in Spain, Italy, France… upwards of five centuries (Teresa de Jesús mentions novices serving as altar girls in the kind of offhand way that means it was completely accepted custom, the Princess of Eboli used to serve the altar in her family’s chapel when she was little).
My general impression is that being faced with the kind of opposition that Catholics in the US faced and face (i.e., not downright prosecution, but there are a zillion similar Churches around) means that people tend to get entrenched; in Spain if you disagree with the local parish priest you can ignore him, go to a different parish or stop practicing - in the US, for many people the solution is to switch not just parishes but Churches. And those Catholics who went to the US fleeing prosecution had felt the need to entrench even more so, therefore they were much more rigid and afraid of meandering away from the flock than people in countries where Catholicism was the norm (I’d say “or where Religion was a non-issue”, but at the time there weren’t many of those, uh?)
I think the opposite. America is what changed the catholic church.
We’ve got no king, no pope, no real hierarchy by having a legislative, judicial and executive branch of government. So we, the catholic church, who are experiencing scores of people leaving kingdoms and theocracies, what are we going to do? Looks like we’ll have to lighten up the grip on the leash.
Since these catholics are leaving us for a country of opportunity, yet one that specifically states that they WILL NOT have an official religion, we open up a little.
Today we see what the catholic church does about molestation, disease and burning alleged witches in other countries. If the catholic religion stayed exactly the same by bringing war and inquisitions with them to America like they did in countless other countries, you wouldn’t see a catholic priests on our streets.
I think it was a result of Protestantism but not a result of Protestant oppression. In a country like the United States, where you had Catholics and Protestants, there was a ready alternative to the Catholic Church. If you were a Catholic and your bishop or priest tried to enforce something you didn’t like, you could just convert to Episcopalism. This meant that the Catholic Church in America had to learn to be more accommodating to the opinions of its members.
As for changes in status of Catholics, I think it was just a change in priorities in the people who used to oppress Catholics. They moved on to oppressing other groups and that left an opening for Catholics to switch sides - they could stop being a downtrodden minority and join the oppressive majority.
I think the Catholic Church in America was more influenced by other American values. As early as the 1890s, Pope Leo XIII was condemning the “Americanist Heresy” (which, in sort of an interesting aside, was actually strongest in France, not America) in his encyclical "Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae. A copy of the letter is here:
He is not blowing smoke; he is just wrong. He has it backward. The effort to maintain a “Catholic” identity up through the period prior to the Second Vatican Council made U.S. Catholicism one of the most rigid sub-cultures within the church. There was far more resistance to the changes that emanated from Vatican II in the U.S. than there was in most other countries. (France had the outlier of Bishop Lefebvre and his little schism, but it really was a little schism involving a fairly small number of people.) In comparison, the numerous Pius X organizations in the U.S., the Blue Army, and folks like Donovan of The Catholic League, (or from a more rational perspective, Jeffrey Mirus of catholicculture.org), as well as the folks who control programming on EWTN all demonstrate a hankering for the days when “the church” had all the answers and the faithful were supposed to simply listen and accept. (There is a certain irony in the actions of some of those groups who have gone out of their way to challenge church authority for the specific point of demanding that the authority exercise more rigid control.)
This is not to say that all of the above named groups are mossy backed reactionaries who go to bed, each night, praying for the return of the “good old days” of burning heretics. Most of them accept the changes that came out of Vatican II and simply tend to have more or less conservative viewpoints than their more liberal co-religionists. However, the very fact that so many different American groups tend to promote the concepts of tradition and obedience signals, to me, that the “American” experience did nothing to create a more open attitude toward hierarchy in the U.S.
U.S. Catholic colleges, (as is true of colleges throughout the world), tend to be a bit more “adventurous” in their beliefs, but it is worth noting that few college deans or administrators actually get promoted into the hierarchy, itself.
