Not that long ago, American Protestants believed their country faced a "Catholic problem." That was the phrase that Paul Blanshard used in his popular and vituperative book, American Freedom and Catholic Power (1949). His catalogue of Roman Catholic errors extended from the church's teaching on marriage and labor to its hierarchy and intolerance. Catholics could even be un-American in their acts of piety. "The genuflections of the faithful before the so-called princes of the Church, and even before simple bishops," Blanshard wrote, "annoy and disturb non-Catholic Americans who are likely to ask: 'Is not such servility utterly contrary to the American tradition?' 'What good American ever kneels to any man?' 'How did this medieval posturing ever get to the United States?'"1 Although he spoke for many in mainline Protestantism, evangelicals could match their religious cousins prejudice for prejudice. Witness Loraine Boettner's identification of Roman Catholicism as one of the two "totalitarian systems" threatening the nation. For Boettner, Catholicism was even more dangerous than Communism because "it covers its real nature with the cloak of religion."2

What appears today as anti-Catholic hysteria does so in part because Roman Catholicism has changed remarkably since Boettner and Blanshard's broadsides. The Kennedy presidency—and the elegance it exuded—calmed fears about Roman Catholicism's un-American impulses. Almost coincidentally, the Second Vatican Council's statements on religious freedom and ecumenical relations changed the church's image into one less parochial and more tolerant. Meanwhile, the papacy of John Paul II has yielded a leader as popular with teens as any rock star and as conversant with questions about religion and public life as any senior fellow employed by an inside-the-Beltway think tank. In sum, since 1960 Roman Catholicism in the United States has undergone a makeover as dramatic as Blanshard's prose was bloated.

But there is more to the story, according to Jay Dolan's new book, In Search of an American Catholicism. Yes, the church today differs markedly from the pre-Vatican II model, but Roman Catholics in the United States, the accomplished historian at the University of Notre Dame argues, always possessed a constellation of figures, institutions, and ideas more in synch with American ideals than Blanshard's or Boettner's caricature allowed.

Dolan's narrative divides into four periods. The first runs from 1780 to 1820 and shows that Catholicism started life in the new nation from a much different footing than its European counterpart. Old World Catholicism rebounded from the French Revolution to oppose liberalism in practically all forms. But Catholics in the United States developed a faith in "harmony with the culture of the new nation." Emblematic of this American Catholicism was John Carroll of Baltimore (1735-1815), the first bishop in the United States, who said in one of his sermons that faith should be "free and voluntary," and the layman Mathew Carey (1760-1839), an ardent patriot and successful publisher responsible for publication of the first Catholic Bible in the United States and the first family edition of the King James Bible. This was a Catholicism that was largely Irish, well educated, and often well off, and one for which the American experiment was clearly agreeable.

In the second era, from 1820 to 1880, characterized by what Dolan calls "The Romanization of Catholicism," the American church witnessed the influx of immigrants who knew not American ways. Many were Irish, many others came from German lands, but the net effect was to give the church a sectarian identity, one characteristic of Rome's conservative posture. Even so, this was the same Catholic Church that attracted such American-born Protestant converts as Orestes Brownson and Isaac Hecker, both of whom sought an "American version of Roman Catholicism" despite resistance from American bishops moving toward closer alignment with Rome.

During the period running from 1880 to 1960, the third era, Dolan shifts to a thematic approach. Here he uses the subjects of democracy, piety, national identity, doctrine, and gender to organize his account of those who wanted to embrace American ideals and those who resisted assimilation. Throughout these decades American Catholicism managed competing ethnic identities that tended toward Old World devotion. But Rome itself proved an even greater obstacle to an American Catholicism. Pope Leo XIII's condemnation of Americanism in 1899 in Testem Benevolentiae revealed the level of opposition church leaders in the United States faced from Rome. When the pope condemned the notion that "the Church ought to adapt herself somewhat to our advanced civilization, and relaxing her ancient rigor, show some indulgence to modern popular theories and methods," partisans for an American Catholicism reeled.

Despite Rome's conservatism, the American church continued to produce leaders who championed Catholicism's adaptation to American ideals. One was John Ireland (1838-1918), archbishop of St. Paul, Minnesota, who believed the United States possessed a "divine mission" that involved preparing "the world, by example and moral influence, for the universal reign of human liberty and human rights." Another figure who represents the pro-American side of Catholicism was John Ryan (1869-1945), a priest who taught at the Catholic University of America and harnessed Catholic social teachings to the political engine driving progressive reform in the "Bishop's Program of Social Reconstruction" (1919). Yet another example of America-friendly Catholicism before 1960 was John Courtney Murray (1904-1967), a Jesuit theologian. During the 1940s and 1950s he emerged as Catholicism's greatest proponent of religious freedom and the separation of church and state. Although his views drew fire from officials in Rome, Murray's ideas eventually triumphed in the Second Vatican Council's declaration on religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae).

These examples all added up to a Catholicism on the eve of JFK's election that, in Dolan's view, "was ripe for change." Yet, in the last period of his narrative, the time when Rome "abandoned its defensive posture toward modern society," Dolan sees no victory but only mixed results. His treatment of John Paul II is revealing. Contrary to George Weigel's rendering of John Paul II as the heir of the Second Vatican Council's engagement with modern society,3 Dolan contends that the pontiff has "increasingly endorsed a more monarchical model of church in which the pope is the boss." He adds, "the boss, of course, is always right." Consequently, instead of a "people's church" prevailing in the United States, American Catholicism continues to meet resistance from hierarchical models that impose order, discipline, and loyalty.

Undoubtedly, Dolan's perspective on the current pope speaks for American Catholics disaffected by John Paul II's unwillingness to bend on sexual ethics and women's ordination, and his imposition of tighter control on the church's theologians. Yet, for Protestants who remember pre-Vatican II Catholicism, the current pope looks downright enviable. Not only has John Paul II's social teaching been thoughtful, humane, and Christian, but his trips around the world, his accessibility to the Catholic faithful, and his charisma have breathed warmth and vigor into an office that older Americans saw as inflexible, remote, and threatening.

One of the curious features of Dolan's book is that he overlooks politically conservative Roman Catholics, such as William F. Buckley and Michael Novak, who appear to have little difficulty advocating free markets and democracy while also swearing fidelity to the pope.4 Dolan may exclude these Americanist Catholics because his own search for an American church is total. Either one is a democrat politically and ecclesiastically, or one is not an American Catholic. "To live in a culture fiercely proud of its democratic heritage and to belong to a church in which democracy has no place presented a dilemma for Catholics," he writes. To be sure, that was a riddle when the pope was condemning Americanism. But once the Second Vatican Council embraced religious liberty, it was largely resolved. Today, Roman Catholics in America face the same dilemmas that confront Christians generally in the United States. Nor is it clear that churches and other religious groups that have sought to make American norms their own have shown how best to resolve this tension.

David A. Hollinger has made the astute point that one of the most important ways to overcome the cultural balkanization encouraged by the politics of personal identity is to recognize everyone's hyphenated status. "Most individuals live in many circles simultaneously," he wrote, and "the actual living of any individual life entails a shifting division of labor between the several 'we's' of which the individual is a part."5 In other words, the life one lives as a Roman Catholic does not necessarily duplicate the life one leads as a resident of suburban Milwaukee. One way to read the Second Vatican Council is that Rome acknowledged the legitimacy of such multiple identities for Catholics living in the United States and elsewhere. Had Dolan recognized that a hyphenated identity is as much a part of being an American Catholic as is democratic reformation of the church, he might have allowed more room for conservative Catholics in his otherwise illuminating and highly readable narrative. He might even have taken a page from R. Laurence Moore's book, seeing the unassimilable figures who fiercely resisted Americanization as every bit as crucial to constructing an American identity for Roman Catholics as those who trimmed religious teachings and practices to fit American guidelines.6 That's a lesson for American Christians of every stripe to ponder.

D. G. Hart is professor of church history at Westminster Theological Seminary in California and the author most recently of The Lost Soul of American Protestantism (Rowman & Littlefield) and That Old-Time Religion in Modern America (Ivan R. Dee).

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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1. Paul Blanshard, American Freedom and Catholic Power (Beacon Press, 1949), p. 15.

2. Loraine Boettner, Roman Catholicism (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1962), p. 3.

3. George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (Cliff Street Books, 1999).

4. On Roman Catholic neoconservatives, Patrick Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals & Conservative Politics in America, 1950-1985 (Cornell Univ. Press, 1993), remains a reliable and judicious account.

5. David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (Basic Books, 1995), p. 106.

6. R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (Oxford Univ. Press, 1986).