When Cardinal Dominique Mamberti first announced that the new pope had taken the name “Leo XIV” in May of last year, commentators sprung into action to speculate on why Cardinal Robert Prevost had chosen that moniker. The most obvious theory was that the new pope wanted to recall Pope Leo XIII’s legacy of engagement with the modern world and launching the tradition of Catholic social teaching with his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. Indeed, Pope Leo XIV confirmed this in a meeting with the cardinals the day after his election.
But was that the only reason? At the time, I noted—as did many others—the irony that the first pope from the United States took the name of the pontiff who had condemned “Americanism.” Did Pope Leo’s decision to identify himself with Pope Leo XIII signify something about how he would handle relations with his home country on the world stage, or how he would respond to certain developments within the US Catholic Church? I personally think it was unlikely that Pope Leo had the nineteenth-century Americanist controversy in mind when he selected his name, but even so, the Americanist controversy remains relevant and provides an interesting lens for examining US Catholicism and Pope Leo’s papacy.
Author and activist Michael Fox has recently argued that so-called “MAGA Catholics”—that is, Catholic supporters of President Donald Trump—demonstrate several of the characteristics of “Americanism” identified by Pope Leo XIII in his condemnation of the heresy in his 1899 encyclical Testem Benevolentiae. Fox claims that at its root, Leo’s condemnation was a warning about the potentially baneful influence of American individualism on US Catholicism, an influence we see manifest today. He sees the election of Leo XIV as a call from the cardinals for the pope to confront “Americanism” and President Donald Trump’s America First ideology. Similarly, journalist David Gibson has written that Pope Leo XIV is challenging the influence of rising American nationalism on the US Catholic Church and the growing distance between US Catholicism and the global Church.
There is a kernel of truth in these attempts to map the Americanist controversy onto contemporary political and ecclesial realities, but the relevance of the Americanist controversy for the present is quite a bit more complicated. I’ll explore that relevance here and in a follow-up article later this week.
To understand the Americanist controversy, we have to begin several decades earlier. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Irish Catholics immigrated to the US in large numbers and became the dominant group within US Catholicism. Irish immigrant priests and bishops, and eventually native-born Irish-Americans, increasingly took on leadership positions in the US Church. For example, in 1850, Archbishop John Hughes of New York, Bishop Francis Patrick Kenrick of Philadelphia (later Archbishop of Baltimore), and Archbishop John Baptist Purcell of Cincinnati, all Irish-born, were among the most prominent Catholic leaders in the US.
By the 1870s, many Irish Catholics had assimilated into middle-class American society, although by no means forgetting their immigrant heritage or becoming blind to their differences from their Anglo-American neighbors. At the same time, a wave of German immigrants, including German Catholics, had begun arriving in the US in the 1840s and had achieved a significant institutional presence in the US Church by the post-Civil War period. And in the 1880s, a new wave of Catholic immigrants from Italy, Poland, Bohemia, and elsewhere began to further change the ecclesial landscape.
Catholic opinion on how to respond to this increasing diversity, and to the American way of life in general, began to polarize into two camps in the 1880s. On the one hand, the “Americanists,” many of whom came from the assimilated Irish Catholic middle class, sought to accommodate Catholicism to what they believed was best about American culture and the “new age” it represented. This group was led by Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul, Minnesota, and also included Bishop John Keane of Richmond, Virginia (and later the first rector of the Catholic University of American and then the Archbishop of Dubuque, Iowa), Cardinal James Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore, and the theologian Isaac Hecker, the founder of the Paulist Fathers, among others. On the other hand, the “conservatives”—led by Archbishop Michael Corrigan of New York, Bishop Bernard McQuaid of Rochester (a diocese with a large German immigrant population at the time), and Archbishop Frederick Katzer of Milwaukee—saw American secularism and the country’s more dominant Protestantism as a threat to Catholic practice.
This history complicates Fox and Gibson’s narratives because the Americanists were advocates for what we would today identify as key “progressive” aspects of modern Catholicism. For example, the Americanists argued—bucking what was at the time official papal teaching—that religious freedom as it was experienced in the United States was not only beneficial to the Catholic Church as a religious minority in the US, but should be the Catholic ideal. This principle, of course, became official Church teaching through the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 document Dignitas Humanae. The conservatives, however, argued that while religious freedom was of pragmatic benefit to US Catholics, the ideal remained the eventual state recognition of Catholicism.
Second, the Americanists pushed for the participation of Catholics in secular trade unions, the only unions with any influence in the United States, whereas the conservatives argued that Catholic workers should only participate in Catholic labor associations where the workers’ faith wouldn’t be threatened, but rather nurtured. They were also concerned that many labor unions were secret societies which, at the time, Catholics were prohibited from joining. It’s worth pointing out that this prohibition was rooted in the Church’s concerns with Freemasonry and secretive revolutionary groups in the aftermath of the French Revolution, whereas American labor unions kept their membership secret to protect their members from retaliation by employers.
In 1887, when he traveled to Rome to receive his red hat from Pope Leo XIII, James Gibbons advocated for the Knights of Labor, the largest labor union in the US at the time. The majority of its members, including its leader, Terence Powderly, were Catholics. The Knights had already been condemned by the bishops in Canada because it was a secret society, but Gibbons argued that the Church should be aligned with the working class and that a condemnation of the union from the pope would irrevocably turn the working class in the United States away from the Church. Pope Leo agreed, and historians now argue that Gibbons’s appeal influenced Pope Leo’s thinking in Rerum Novarum.
Seen from this angle, then, one might say that the Americanists were not forerunners of today’s “MAGA Catholics,” but rather of their Catholic opponents seeking to defend the US’s democratic institutions and to promote economic justice. Bill Murphy has made precisely this argument. But history is not so simple!
In the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, US conservative Catholics argued that it was vital to erect so-called national parishes where immigrants’ customs and particular devotions would be respected and where the pastor could speak their language. It was also important to establish Catholic schools where children were taught in their native languages, whether it was German, Italian, or Polish. The conservatives insisted that the Catholic faith is not easily separated from the piety and customs of a particular culture and that rapid assimilation to American culture would inevitably mean the abandonment of the faith. The Americanists, however, advocated for the rapid “Americanization” of these new immigrants, arguing that the conservative approach would isolate immigrants from participation in American public life. They also countered that it was in fact the conservatives’ identification of faith with culture that would lead immigrants to abandon the faith as they inevitably assimilated.
It is easy to make the case that the US Catholic Church of today, with its multiethnic parishes, Masses celebrated in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Tagalog, etc., diverse devotions and celebrations, and not least a USCCB Committee on Cultural Diversity in the Church, is much closer to the vision of the conservatives, at least in this one respect. With hindsight, we can see the Americanists’ call for an assimilated, “Americanized” Catholicism as biased and not sufficiently reflective of the Church’s catholicity.
Many Americanists also viewed the devotions and other religious practices of the newer immigrants as superstitious, too focused on outward ritual, or overly sentimental. They instead promoted a simpler spirituality, focused on prayer, personal conversion, and active engagement in the world. In some cases, this was expressed through the contrast of an active, “masculine” spirituality and a more passive, sentimental, “feminine” spirituality. This disdain for the culturally unfamiliar and gendered account of religious practice is certainly not foreign in our own day.
Finally, at least some of the Americanists were supporters of the US cause in the Spanish-American War, fought in 1898. In 1895, José Martí launched a revolt against Spanish rule in Cuba, and many Americans wanted the US to intervene against Spain in support of the revolution. US President William McKinley sent the ship the USS Maine to Havana’s harbor as a sign of US willingness to intervene if US citizens in the city or American interests were harmed, and the sinking of the ship, which was blamed on Spain (later investigations into whether the explosion was internal or due to a mine have reached mixed conclusions) drew the US into the war.
At the time, the war—which led to the US’s possession of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, and the establishment of a US protectorate over Cuba—was seen by many Americans as emblematic of the dawning of a new American age and the end of the decadent European age, whereas European Catholics viewed it as a struggle between Catholic Spain and Protestant America. Many Americanist Catholics viewed the war through a nationalistic lens. For example, Denis O’Connell, the former rector of the Pontifical North American College in Rome and later rector of the Catholic University of America and then bishop of Richmond, wrote to Archbishop Ireland that the war was a struggle between “two civilizations,” one representing “all that is old and vile and mean and rotten and cruel and false,” and the other representing what is “free and noble and open and true and humane.” We see a similar American exceptionalism and imperialistic mindset in today’s America First foreign policy, for example in the recent intervention in Venezuela and earlier threats to invade Greenland.
To end on an ambiguous and perhaps frustrating note, however, the “Americanism” eventually condemned by Pope Leo XIII should not be identified with the “Americanism” I’ve been describing here, even if they are not unrelated. The heresy of Americanism had more to do with how these disputes among US Catholics were received and interpreted by European, and especially French, Catholics. I’ll dig into that part of the story and say more about is relevance for Catholics today later this week.
Of Interest…
The Society of St. Pius X went through with the illicit consecration of four bishops on July 1, and the Vatican responded with the excommunication of the bishops and their consecrators soon after. What’s particularly interesting is that the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith likewise declared that both the ordained priests who are members of the Society and lay people who affiliate with the Society are also schismatic and excommunicated. The DDF also laid out the steps individual members need to take to restore communion with the Church. I wrote about SSPX’s “profession of faith,” published just days before the consecrations to explain the “errors” committed by the Church’s Magisterium, here.
Coming Soon…
Apologies that this article is running a bit late. I started it late last week but couldn’t finish (and discovered it needed to be split into two articles!), and then I’ve been traveling the past three days. As I mentioned above, I’ll have the second half ready later this week.
Once again, your post provides a historical background that I don’t have time to ensure I can reliably find, read and understand. Thank you for the time you take and your evident expertise. I look forward to the second part
Hi Matt,
Yes, history is a great teacher. Although I don't want to sign up for any isms, I think the participative, constitutional reformist project of men like Ireland and aligns well with CSD. I look forward to your second installment.