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Two Forms of Catholic Nationalism

Catholics today are debating the value of the American experiment, and the appropriateness of being loyal American citizens. Some conservatives have found this shocking, or simply been bewildered by neo-integralists who seem anxious to debate the value of crown-and-altar politics in a nation that never really had either. In fact, this debate is best understood as a continuation of a long-running disagreement within American Catholicism. It will be easier to see this in the context of a broader historical account of earlier generations of European Catholics in America, who came for a variety of reasons but then played a significant role in shaping American Protestant nationalism. Along the way, divisions surfaced among American Catholics over whether they should Americanize or remain dedicated to foreign nations. Feeling embattled once again, American Catholics today are repeating this same pattern.

As a religious minority, American Catholics had to find a way to fit into a Protestant cultural hegemony, and there have been two strategies proposed over the years. The predominant strategy was one of Americanization, and proponents were dubbed “Americanists.” The American hierarchy, working within this framework, articulated a Catholic republicanism complementary to American institutions. Some even insisted that Catholicism was the best source for perfecting American republicanism! Even so, Catholic Americanists stopped short of a full-fledged nationalism. As John D. Wilsey has shown, American nationalists have generally seen the nation itself as having a divine mission, owing to its exceptional character and place in the world. American Catholics could not easily fit into this mission for reasons I explain below. Rather, Americanists appealed to patriotism, urging Catholics to love their country for its many gifts, and to feel a corresponding obligation to contribute as loyal citizens and to support its administration of justice. 

The alternative strategy was one of cultural separation. This separation did not involve a radical removal or loss of contact with the broader world, but there was a separation of ethnic cultural practices and beliefs bound up in their ancestral Catholicism. The separationists regarded America as inferior—and probably heretical; hence, they sought to retain as much of their old beliefs and institutions as they could. Over time, separationists began to lose contact with the old world, but their displeasure with America remained and found expression in the endorsement of foreign nationalisms over American nationalism.

The two schools of thought have battled it out over the course of American history, and this essay features some key moments: the Americanism controversy, the radio competition between Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen and Fr. Charles Coughlin, and the challenge of Triumph magazine. Moreover, this division remains today. The heirs to Triumph are today’s postliberals and integralists who recycle the same critiques from Triumph, which in turn recycled Coughlinite and other Catholic fascists, who recycled the anti-American arguments made here at home and abroad during the late nineteenth century. 

Origins of American Nationalism 

American nationalism is historically a Protestant phenomenon. At various points in American history, Protestants have found it easier to fit their faith into the broader mission of the nation, whether it was to free themselves from a distant overlord, settle the West, or defend democracy across the globe. The reason for this is simply that America, though not quite confessionally Protestant, had a broadly Protestant culture. In fact, open opposition to Catholicism was long a defining component. Revolutionary New Englanders hated the British for the passage of the 1774 Quebec Act that continued the establishment of Catholicism in recently conquered Quebec. American westward expansion, as John C. Pinheiro demonstrates, had deeply Protestant roots and explicitly anti-Catholic motivations. James G. Blaine pioneered his eponymous amendments to block Catholic efforts to seek state money for parochial schooling as part of the Republican “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” party line of the late nineteenth century. Even today, secular liberals continue the tradition by pointing out the Catholic justices whenever the Supreme Court issues a decision they dislike.

Catholics learned from men like Ireland to interpret American republicanism in terms of Catholic social teaching, and to view republican government as equal, or even superior, to that of monarchy given the spirit of the age. 

Catholics responded to this expressly Protestant nationalism with their rival strategies of Americanization or cultural separation. At first, the division over strategies followed ethnic lines. After the Irish immigration during the early nineteenth Century, the majority of American Catholics and Catholic hierarchy were Irish, and most of these were eager patriots ready to adopt their new country for themselves. By the 1830s, laws in America excluding Catholics from such rights and privileges were gone. Irish Catholics found much to love about republican government, freedom of association, political organization, and relative freedom of labor and property. Except for a few prominent recusant families in Maryland and Kentucky (especially the Spaldings), and the French expatriates who had fled the Terror, the Irish constituted the American Catholic hierarchy, hence their desire to appear as patriotic as possible, and to render the Church as comprehensible to non-Catholics as they could. 

There existed, however, a minority of Catholics opposed to Americanization. These were the separationists. They were primarily German in origin and had fled the wars of the French Revolution. The Germans settled in the Midwest in tight-knit communities, continued to speak German, and had considerable ties to their homelands. They possessed skills in trades and arrived with more money than their Irish co-religionists. They wished to retain their German way of life, which included hostility to Americanization and the Irish hierarchy that pushed for it. 

The First Battle: Archbishop John Ireland and Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae

The American Civil War put a temporary halt to the rising tensions, but the years following it saw them return and accelerate. Things began to come to a head after the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore of 1884. Americanizers like Archbishop John Ireland, Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore, and Archbishop John J. Keane pushed to integrate American Catholicism into the mainstream, but in 1891 the German Catholics worked with German businessman and politician Peter Paul Cahensly to found the St. Raphaelsverein zum Schutz deutscher katholischer Auswanderer (the St. Raphael Association for the Protection of German Catholic Emigrants). In addition, Cahensly worked with German Catholic bishops to see their clergy appointed in American dioceses where German predominated. Ostensibly, the reason was that German Catholics were attending Lutheran services because the Irish bishops were indifferent to German folkways. Cardinal Gibbons was able to halt the plan before it ever got started. Americanizers did not want American Catholics to appear loyal to foreigners like Cahensly, or to the German hierarchy. This would only confirm the Protestant accusation that American Catholics gave their allegiance to foreign powers, and not the United States.

The ensuing conflict over Americanism is a subject left for a future essay. It is sufficient for present purposes to mention that the Americanists were a powerful influence in America but made miscalculations in Europe. Ireland toured France after a favorable meeting with Pope Leo XIII. During his tour, he called for the French to heed the pope’s call to ralliement for the Third Republic as loyal citizens, and held up Servant of God Isaac Hecker, founder of the Paulists in America, as a model for them to follow. Ireland also saw The Life of Hecker published in France with his introduction that echoed these same themes.

The French reactionary press and the Jesuits were furious with what they saw as Americanist triumphalism, and with the Americans’ perceived liberalism, indifferentism, Pelagianism, and minimalism. French reactionaries clung to the political theology of “ultramontanism,” or the reliance on papal authority to intervene in political matters. With the support of separationist ally Archbishop Michael Corrigan of New York, the reactionary French clergy insisted the pope condemn the so-called heresy of Americanism. This gave rise to a strange epistle from Leo XIII, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, in which he condemned heretical views that anti-Americanists attributed to men like Ireland.

Leo XIII’s position on the Americanists themselves was deliberately unclear. He condemned the positions as heretical, but stipulated that he was unaware of anyone who actually held them. He refused even to identify anyone who might, and added no titles to the Index of Prohibited Books. The primary purpose of the letter seemed to be lowering tensions within the French Catholic Church over ralliement, and also within the American Church over similar political questions. After all, things in the French Church were already boiling over: reactionary French priests were becoming anti-Dreyfusards and members of the proto-fascist Action Francaise party, which Pope Pius XI condemned in 1921.

Despite the pope’s subtlety, the Americanists were chastened and kept to their side of the Atlantic. Corrigan accepted this limited victory, though he paid a price: neither he nor Ireland was ever considered trustworthy enough to be offered a cardinalate. Ultimately, the Americanist legacy was considerable. Catholics learned from men like Ireland to interpret American republicanism in terms of Catholic social teaching, and to view republican government as equal, or even superior, to that of monarchy given the spirit of the age. 

The Second Battle: Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen against Father Charles Coughlin

The next battle featured the rival radio preachers of Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen and Fr. Charles Coughlin. Sheen was nothing short of a prodigy, studying in several American institutions, such as the Catholic University of America. There, one of his chief instructors was Monsignor John A. Ryan, later known as the “Right Reverend New Deal” because of his economic liberalism and support for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plan to end the Great Depression. Sheen finished his graduate work at the University of Louvain, a bastion of neo-Thomism. Despite the distinctly reactionary bent of neo-Thomism, Sheen remained thoroughly Americanist in his views. Briefly, during the 1930s, Sheen was cautiously optimistic that Benito Mussolini, on account of his concordat with Pius XI, might be at least not a bad leader, and the violent anti-clericalism of the Spanish Republicans gave him hope that Francisco Franco might at least put a stop to the bloodshed. Sheen’s endorsement was quite measured, however, and within only a few years he became a leading anti-fascist voice in America. 

Once America entered the Second World War, he called on Americans to be patriotic citizens and make the necessary sacrifices for war. Here too, he was measured, never fully embracing the nationalism of the moment. Sheen saw the war as a punishment from God for the sins of the involved nations, especially their irreligion and greed. He was also deeply disturbed by the American alliance with the Soviet Union, which he regarded as a devil’s bargain.

To this end, Sheen endorsed a form of Americanism, which was by this time in favor with the authorities in Rome. Despite Sheen’s use of Americanist rhetoric (or, arguably, because of it), Pope Pius XI elevated Sheen to Auxiliary Bishop of New York under Cardinal Francis Spellman, while also making Sheen the Director of the American branch of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. In 1940, he said:

Americanism, as understood by our Founding Fathers, is the political expression of the Catholic doctrine concerning man. Firstly, his rights come from God, and therefore cannot be taken away; secondly, the State exists to preserve them. … The recognition of the inalienable rights of the human person is Americanism, or, to put it another way, an affirmation of the inherent dignity and worth of man. … As a political document, [the Declaration of Independence] affirms what the Gospel affirms as religion: the worth of man. Christ died on a cross for him, and governments are founded on account of him. He is the object of love theologically and politically—the source of rights, inalienable and sacred because when duly protected and safeguarded, he helps in the creation of a kingdom of Caesar which is the steppingstone to the Kingdom of God.

At this time, Sheen condemned nationalism as the elevation of the nation over God, and named Mussolini its chief advocate. He accused Adolph Hitler of valuing race over God, while Stalin made an idol of the proletariat. Sheen made these statements in homilies and public engagements, but most of all over the radio on The Catholic Hour, which broadcast out of New York starting in 1930, sponsored by the National Council of Catholic Men.

In this period, the separationist position was supplied by Coughlin, whose 1931 radio show The Hour of Power, broadcast from Detroit, Michigan. Originally, Coughlin’s mission was to teach listeners the basics of the Catholic faith in a dual effort to catechize Catholics and evangelize non-Catholics. After the Great Depression began, his radio shows began to take on a more political and conspiratorial tone. He became an enthusiastic supporter of Roosevelt, but regularly indulged in antisemitic paranoia that earned him a large audience but little gratitude from the new president. Coughlin took that rejection personally and turned his program against the president and the New Deal. He began to rely on fascist and Nazi propaganda that was introduced into his radio program by agents in Coughlin’s Social Justice Party, and later his Christian Front. 

Coughlin argued on the air that Jews wanted Americans to enter the Second World War, hoping the United States would bolster the flagging Jewish conspiracy to create the Soviet Union and spread communism over the world. He therefore urged his listeners to be both anti-war and anti-America. Their own president, he argued, had proven entirely too sympathetic to the Jewish fronts that endangered America with a war against her own interests. 

The division within Catholicism will never abate. America remains a fundamentally Protestant country, even today.

Coughlin lionized fascist regimes for fighting both communism and the Jews. For example, in the winter of 1938, Coughlin plagiarized a speech by Nazi Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels, originally delivered in 1935 at the Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg. His broadcasts continued until 1941 when he violated the Espionage Act by publishing fascist propaganda in his magazine Social Justice. One of Coughlin’s chief lieutenants, Francis P. Moran, was an unregistered foreign agent for the Nazi government. Coughlin was shielded from any clerical punishment because his bishop, Michael Gallager, substantially agreed with him.

Sheen remained on the air and became the nation’s most popular Catholic cleric, serving as an unofficial liaison between the American hierarchy and prominent state and national figures, as well as hosting his Emmy-award-winning Life Is Worth Living and testifying before Congress on the moral and religious ills of communism. This time, the Americanists had won.

The Third Battle: The Defeat of Triumph Magazine to the Present

In the second half of the twentieth century, this debate was revitalized yet again when Americanist Catholic William F. Buckley Jr. disappointed his convert brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell Jr., with his unapologetic patriotism and his moderate attitude towards modernity. Bozell published Triumph as a magazine that was critical of America, fawning over Franco and fascist Spain. For example, one major contributor, William H. Marshner, looked not to the American Catholic republican tradition but to the French anti-Semite Charles Maurras as the source for reforming politics, saying:

When Maurras, then, raised the slogan “politique d’abord,” he was not advocating that we make like the great Irish mayors of Boston! He was saying that the political order is the key of all other social questions. Create a proper government, he said, and all the labor problems, economic problems, and pornography problems, will fall into place.

Like the German Catholics preferring German Catholicism and Coughlin preferring European fascism, Bozell preferred the clerico-fascism of the declining Franco regime and Marshner the derangement of Action Française. Triumph contributors and editors featured arguments similar to those of the separationists beforehand (and of the postliberals today), condemning America as fundamentally hostile to the True Faith. Triumph, however, suffered from serious mismanagement and lost readership and ad revenue until its ultimate closure in 1976. This time, the separationists did not so much lose the battle as give up and start Christendom College instead.

It should surprise no one that contemporary postliberals like Guillaume de Thieulloy and Chad Pecknold invoke Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae as evidence that Rome condemned Americanism and hence patriotism, despite popes after Leo XIII treating Sheen as a hero when he invoked it. Others among them look to China or Hungary as models for Catholic Americans to consider as an alternative to the American republic.

The division within Catholicism will never abate. America remains a fundamentally Protestant country, even today. Catholics must face the choice of Americanism, which requires adapting themselves to a country that does not quite welcome them, or separationism, that is, rejecting this country as fundamentally wicked. The first choice is preferred by Catholic leaders who hope that, over time, Catholics might influence American political culture sufficiently to carve out a home here. The second choice appeals to people who want Catholicism to offer a meaningful alternative to a culture that to them seems degraded and deeply anti-traditional. Unfortunately, they often end up idolizing foreign tyrants, and dreaming of a future postliberal order.

This separationist choice is bad for many reasons, but I will conclude with what I consider the most important: it leads away from the virtue of pietas, or the love of country. To the extent a nation lacks virtue, Catholics are called to participate in government, to improve it, and, more importantly, to honor individuals who have sacrificed themselves for their country. As Br. Anthony VanBerkum, O.P., has said in his reading of St. Thomas Aquinas on pious patriotism, “While it is very good to have concern for the general legal justice of one’s country, one’s obligation to patriotism extends rather to individual relationships. We can thus properly honor our country by honoring especially our fellow citizens who represent the service of governance and stability that the nation provides.”

American Catholics have a rich treasury of citizens who have represented these virtues: Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Archbishop John Hughes of New York, Servant of God Isaac Hecker, Fr. John Courtney Murray, and Servant of God Thea Bowman. It is best for us to learn patriotism from them.

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