Catholics, Protestants, and the Meanings of Freedom

There are many books on the history of anti-Catholicism in America, but the achievement of John T. McGreevy, a historian at Notre Dame, is in making a persuasive argument, supported by detailed and original research, that helps explain the underlying conflict of ideas, experiences, and sensibilities that has made America from the founding to the present day so hospitable and, at the same time, so hostile to Catholicism. I have discussed earlier (“Something Like, Just Maybe, a Catholic Moment,” Public Square, May 2001) McGreevy’s important article on twentieth-century anti-Catholicism in the American academy, published in the Journal of American History. Much more ambitious and comprehensive is his new book, Catholicism and American Freedom (Norton, 431 pages,, $26.95). One may not be persuaded on every point but, all in all, this is the most informative, analytically insightful, and even-handed account we have of the troubled relationship between Catholicism and the American experiment. It is also a pleasure to read.

In the beginning, from the Puritan commonwealth in Massachusetts to the founding of the Republic, Catholicism was viewed—not always for the same reasons—as alien and threatening. Almost everybody viewed Catholicism with suspicion, although not all saw it as an immediate danger. Alexander Hamilton, for instance, urged that New York give Catholics full voting rights in 1787, noting the “little influence possessed by the Pope in Europe” and arguing against the needless “vigilance of those who would bring engines to extinguish fire which had many days subsided.” The monolithic and authoritarian Church that his compatriots feared, he said, was a thing of the past. Many, one may note, make the same argument today, pointing to the “liberalization” of Catholicism following the Second Vatican Council. Then and now, many other Americans are not persuaded.

The nub of the dispute, McGreevy contends, is the tension, if not contradiction, “between Catholic and American ideas of freedom.” That tension was first voiced in the 1840s when European immigration made Catholicism the largest religious group in America and “it moves from nineteenth-century debates over education, slavery, and nationalism to twentieth-and twenty-first century discussions of social welfare policy, democracy, birth control, abortion, and sexual abuse.” The difference was and is between freedom as “ordered liberty” and freedom as the autonomous individual’s right to choose. A nineteenth-century Catholic editor contrasted liberals and Catholics: “They say that true liberty is a freedom from right as well as from wrong; we assert that it is a freedom only from wrong.” Or, as the Catholic Lord Acton would have it, freedom is not the freedom to do what we want but to do as we ought. From the beginning, Catholic thinkers in both Rome and the U.S. made the argument that the American founding—with its emphasis on natural law, natural rights, and higher law—was perfectly consonant with the Catholic understanding of freedom. In his 1888 encyclical promoting Thomism, Leo XIII declared, “The true liberty of human society does not consist in every man doing what he pleases [but] supposes the necessity of obedience to some supreme and eternal law.” More than a hundred years later, Catholics still contend that that proposition is perfectly consonant with what Father John Courtney Murray, in his 1960 book of essays We Hold These Truths, called the “American Proposition.”

An Ignorant and Squalid People

An earlier Puritan and Calvinist tradition also stressed a higher law, the sovereignty of God, and communal fidelity to truth. As Michael Novak has conclusively demonstrated in his recent book, On Two Wings, such convictions were much stronger during the founding era than most accounts allow. But by the mid-nineteenth century, such convictions clashed with developments in liberal Protestant theology. In the North, influential figures such as William Ellery Channing, Horace Bushnell, George Cheever, and Theodore Parker unfurled the banners of an optimistic, this-worldly Christianity, and were most particularly hostile to any idea of authority, sin, or redemptive suffering. The way of the cross was to be replaced by the way of individual self-realization and social reform. From his socially eminent pulpit, Theodore Parker described the waves of Catholic immigration as composed of “ignorant and squalid people, agape for miracles, ridden by their rulers and worse ridden by their priests, met to adore some relic of a saint.”

Parker was not the exception but represented the liberal consensus when he declared in 1854: “The Roman Catholic Church claims infallibility for itself, and denies spiritual freedom, liberty of mind or conscience, to its members. It is therefore the foe of all progress; it is deadly hostile to democracy. She is the natural ally of tyrants and the irreconcilable enemy of freedom. Individual Catholics in America, as elsewhere, are inconsistent, and favor the progress of mankind. Alas! Such are the exceptional; the Catholic Church has an iron logic, and consistently hates liberty in all its forms—free thought, free speech.” So also in many quarters today, allowances are made for “inconsistent” Catholics, the rule being that the only good Catholic is a bad Catholic. They are tolerable despite their being Catholic. Indeed, in their defiance of or indifference to the Church, they are praiseworthy. But, in this view, the “iron logic” of Catholicism has not changed.

Catholicism and American Freedom, however, is not just about anti-Catholicism. It is not to be read as another telling of the story well told by Philip Jenkins in his recent The New Anti-Catholicism (which, as McGreevy would have it, is really very old). McGreevy wants to explain how Catholicism understood itself, and was understood, and how that, in turn, helps explain the religious, cultural, and political situation of Catholicism in America today. Anti-Catholicism explains part of it, but then one must explain anti-Catholicism. Of course, there were the centuries of anti-Catholic Protestant theological polemics—returned in good measure by anti-Protestant Catholic theological polemics—but in America’s public square the great issue was freedom. McGreevy’s title is no doubt to be taken as a play on Paul Blanshard’s explosive anti-Catholic best-seller of 1949, American Freedom and Catholic Power. The conflict was not between freedom and power, however. Those who viewed Catholicism as a threat had the power. The real conflict was between very different ideas of freedom.

Slavery and Freedom

The mid-nineteenth century witnessed a “Catholic revival” in Europe, with both ultramontane and liberal wings. Notable among the liberals were, in France, Charles Montalembert and Bishop Felix Dupanloup, along with Ignaz von Döllinger in Germany, and Lord Acton, Richard Simpson, and John Henry Newman in England. In this country, Orestes Brownson pressed the liberal direction, urging the “Americanization” of Catholicism, meaning mainly immigrant Irish Catholicism. McGreevy calls Brownson “the most influential American Catholic intellectual of the nineteenth century.” (See Peter Augustine Lawler, “Orestes Brownson and the Truth About America,” FT, December 2002.) Decisive for the future of Catholicism, however, was the issue of slavery. Alignments formed in the 1850s continue to influence the public position of Catholicism to the present day.

Catholics were ambivalent about slavery. But so, then, were most Americans. The abolitionist agitators in the North were a distinct minority and were viewed as dangerous radicals. This is easily forgotten today. Moreover, the abolitionists, drawn mainly from the brahmin class, were also the most stridently anti-Catholic, a factor that was not lost on Catholics. From saints in the Middle Ages through popes during the time of New World discoveries, the Catholic Church had condemned chattel slavery as intrinsically evil. Catholics, along with a majority of Americans in the North, including leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, thought slavery to be an evil, but they were not persuaded that abolition was the remedy. Nor did it seem to Catholics and many others that slavery was the greatest evil afflicting American society.

Catholic ambivalence about slavery is sometimes explained by the fear of Irish immigrants, who were at the bottom of the economic ladder, that freed slaves would be unwelcome competition in the labor market, and that was no doubt a factor. Today some explain the ambivalence by reference to racism. While that, too, was no doubt a factor, McGreevy writes, “In fact, the Vatican’s insistence on the validity of interracial marriage and its opposition to rigid segregation laws made Roman authorities relatively tolerant of racial mixing and opposed to biological notions of racial inferiority.” When in 1861 a Louisiana bishop wrote a pastoral letter adopting the slaveholders’ view on race, he was sharply censured by Rome. The Roman congregation rejected the claim of “a natural difference between the Negroes whom he calls children of Canaan, and the Whites who he says are the privileged ones of the great human family.” African-American slaves, the Vatican insisted, are an integral part of the human family saved by Jesus Christ, not simply, as the bishop said, “poor children.”

Catholics would not have become Democrats prior to the Civil War if anti-Catholics had not rallied to the new Republican Party. By the mid-1850s, the Republicans had replaced the Whig Party and the explicitly anti-Catholic American Party as the chief rival to the Democrats. This ensured “that a broad array of [Republican] politicians, ministers, and editors would begin complaining, in the words of the Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot, about ‘the alliance between an ancient and powerful Church and slave interests of America.’” Significant too was the fact that some southern writers, not necessarily enthusiastic about slavery, were sympathetic to a Catholic understanding of freedom that was not pitted against community and tradition. Influential Catholics joined southerners in scorning the radical individualism and laissez faire “dog eat dog” capitalism of the North.

Some Catholics did not see that much difference between slavery in the South and “wage slavery” in the North. Bishop John (“Dagger John”) Hughes of New York compared the master to the father, writing that the “difference in the relations and obligations of those who own slaves, and those who are masters of hired servants, or the parents of children, is rather one of degree than of kind.” Boston’s diocesan paper editorialized, “The principle of slavery is involved in apprenticeship, in imprisonment, in peonage, and in other forms of servitude.” Moreover, in Rome the Republican cause seemed disturbingly similar to the French Revolution and the nationalist radicals led by Garibaldi who were besieging the papacy and seizing convents and monasteries. L’Osservatore Romano depicted the Republicans in America as radicali who were “inflamed by puritan and abolitionist fanaticism and motivated by a poisonous hatred.” Pius IX had friendly contacts with Jefferson Davis, and when Davis was imprisoned after the war sent him a crown of thorns he had plaited with his own hands.

The Origins of Catholic Liberalism

It is among the many ironies of American history that what would later become the Catholic “liberal” alliance with the Democratic Party was forged in the conflict over slavery. It is not so much that Catholics were sympathetic to the South, and very few actually defended the institution of slavery, but they recognized their declared enemy in the Republican Party. For decades after the Civil War, Republicans pressed policies inimical to Catholics, including a “national education” policy that would have dismantled the huge parochial school system. Meanwhile, Leo XIII’s 1891 social encyclical Rerum Novarum roundly condemned both unbridled capitalism and socialism, proposing a distinctly communitarian or “corporatist” approach to social and economic relations. This approach was reiterated and strengthened in the 1931 encyclical of Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, and McGreevy does a masterful job of demonstrating how this doctrine contributed to the powerful alignment of Catholics, the Democratic Party, and organized labor. Catholic social doctrine was seen as an alternative to, and bulwark against, socialism. In the early twentieth century, some Catholics thought their distinctive doctrine warranted the formation of a Catholic Party, but by then too many had risen to positions of leadership in the Democratic Party to make that an attractive option.

There were multiple tensions in the Catholic-Democrat alliance. Al Smith’s presidential candidacy in 1928 was supported by most liberal intellectuals, who also opposed the anti-Catholicism of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, and FDR’s early policies as President were welcomed by Catholics as consonant with the directions of Catholic social doctrine. Also in the 1930s, however, Catholic sympathy for the “corporatist” regimes of Italy, Spain, and Portugal placed severe strains on the Catholic-liberal partnership. Catholic support for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, most particularly, was fatal to many cooperative relationships. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, liberal Jewish leaders made their own bid for acceptance by joining the American elite in letting Catholics know that they were on probation. The Catholic vote, especially in the urban north, was essential to Democrats, as were Catholic labor leaders in opposing socialism, but Catholics were still suspected of divided loyalty between Church and country, and of subscribing to a view of society inimical to American democracy.

The early 1930s, McGreevy writes, was a high point of the Catholic-liberal alliance. Then FDR turned from economic planning and distributive justice, the directions favored by Catholic leaders, to economic growth. Then came the Spanish Civil War. Then came the radio priest Fr. Charles Coughlin, an early enthusiast for FDR who later turned against him and toward the advocacy of strange doctrines, including anti-Semitism. The Spanish war passed, Fr. Coughlin was silenced by church authorities, and Catholic adherence to the Democrats held firm, but things would never be the same. Liberalism—or progressivism, as it was then called—had many parts. “As long as American reformers focused on economic reforms, Catholics proved loyal allies,” McGreevy writes. “But important components of progressive activism lay in the cultural sphere, as suggested by liberal campaigns for more explicit sex education in the schools, less rigorous censorship of books and films, and greater access to birth control.” On contraception and censorship, Catholics, interestingly enough, were fighting to uphold policies earlier put in place by Protestants. Many Protestants were happy enough that Catholic-led efforts such as the Legion of Decency were bearing the odium for the censorship that, in fact, most Protestants favored.

An Alliance Shattered

The definitive change came with abortion. Against the advocacy for liberalized abortion law in the 1960s, Catholics stood alone. Evangelical Protestants, today so prominent in the pro-life movement, were then on the other side. When the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision came down from the Supreme Court, the Southern Baptist Convention hailed it as a victory for “religious freedom” against Catholic efforts to “impose” their doctrine on others. But the Catholic-Democratic alliance, along with much else, was shaken to the foundations. In 1960 the election of John F. Kennedy was supposed to have signaled the end of politically potent anti-Catholicism, even if his triumph was purchased by the promise that he would not let his Catholicism influence his politics. The bishops, touchingly eager for Catholic “acceptance,” did not publicly challenge that fatal pact. The carefully orchestrated campaign by Catholic theologians against Humanae Vitae, Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical on human sexuality, including contraception, further and massively weakened adherence to Catholic distinctiveness in the public square. But the breaking point was abortion.

It may be hard to remember now, but McGreevy is surely right in saying that “well into the 1960s the Democratic Party arguably stood to the right of the Republicans on issues of sexual morality.” The party of big business, what came to be called country club Republicanism, stood sniffingly aloof from moral and social questions. But in 1972, the Democrat George McGovern could choose the staunchly pro-life Thomas Eagleton as his running mate, and when Eagleton was forced to drop out, he replaced him with Sargent Shriver, also pro-life. In the early 1970s, the number of prominent anti-abortion Democrats was striking. For example, Maine Senator Edmund Muskie, Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, and Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, who wrote of his “personal feeling that the legalization of abortion on demand is not in accordance with the value which our civilization places on human life.” Kennedy hoped his generation would be remembered as “one which cared about human beings enough to halt the practice of war, to provide a decent living for every family, and to fulfill its responsibility to its children from the moment of conception.”

All that would soon change, and nobody played a larger part in the change than Jesuit law professor and, later, Massachusetts Congressman Robert Drinan. In the 1960s, Drinan proposed “that Catholics simply abstain from the abortion debate, since to condone any abortion, even for the health of the mother, meant Catholics would be guilty of regulating, and implicitly approving, an abhorrent practice.” It was a disingenuous proposal, and Drinan would later become a reliable supporter of the abortion license, supplying Catholic politicians with a moral cover for their switch to a pro-choice stance.

In the early 1980s Mario Cuomo, Governor of New York, was probably the most popular Democratic politician in the country, and, with the aid of Fr. Richard McBrien of Notre Dame, he offered an apparently sophisticated argument for the “personally opposed, but . . .” position of Catholic politicians. He even harked back to the 1850s when Catholics were “despised by much of the population” and the bishops declined to issue an outright condemnation of slavery. The bishops “were not hypocrites,” Cuomo observed; “they were realists.” And so now, although Catholics encounter far less hostility, they still need to “weigh Catholic moral teaching against the fact of a pluralistic country where our view is in the minority.” That logic, critics observed, did not prevent Cuomo from pressing hard for the abolition of capital punishment, a position decidedly more in the minority. By the late 1980s the pro-abortion litmus test was securely in place and no Democrat with national ambitions could afford to dissent. With very few exceptions, Catholic politicians in the party had taken JFK’s 1960 pledge to the Baptist ministers of Houston not to let their religion influence their political decisions.

“You Catholics . . . ”

In 1984, I hosted a dinner for some twenty-five media leaders to meet the newly arrived John O’Connor as Archbishop of New York. There had been a media ruckus a few weeks earlier when O’Connor challenged Geraldine Ferraro, then the pro-choice Democratic vice presidential candidate, on her claim that there was more than one “Catholic position” on abortion. O’Connor thought that, as Archbishop, he had a responsibility to clarify the Catholic position. In the course of the dinner, Max Frankel, then executive editor of the New York Times, raised the issue and said, “When John F. Kennedy was elected, some of us thought that the question of whether you Catholics belonged here, whether you understand how we do things here, had been settled once and for all. But I have to tell you frankly, Archbishop, that in the few weeks you’ve been here some of us are asking those questions again.” Whether Catholics belong here. Whether they understand how we do things here. Suddenly it seemed like a hundred years ago.

Reflecting on the different Catholic understanding of freedom, McGreevy writes: “This intensely social tradition struggled to absorb insights from its liberal counterpart. But just as the work of John Courtney Murray, Jacques Maritain, and others on democracy and religious liberty reached fruition at the Second Vatican Council, the abortion debate shattered this Catholic-liberal rapprochement.” McGreevy takes passing notice of another rapprochement, that between Catholics and evangelical Protestants, notably on cultural and moral questions. With the Reagan presidency, Republicans skillfully nurtured this realignment. More than McGreevy allows, the 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus signaled a new appreciation of market economics in Catholic social doctrine, a development also favorable to Republicans. He observes, “President George W. Bush and his advisers routinely invoke Catholic ideals. Practicing Catholics are increasingly likely to vote for Republicans in presidential elections.” He then adds, “But Republican leaders remain indifferent to income inequality in the United States and to the immorality of tax cuts disproportionately benefiting the wealthiest Americans.” One might point out that an equal rate of tax decrease or increase will always affect most those who pay the most taxes. But I digress.

I expect that McGreevy’s final chapter, on the sex abuse scandals that broke out in 2002, was added at the insistence of the publisher. It is disappointingly thin and one hopes it will be omitted or entirely rewritten for future editions. While McGreevy does acknowledge the large part played by doctrinal dissent and clerical homosexuality in the scandals, he allowed the furor of the moment in which he was writing to obscure his historical perspective. On page 289, referring to the scandals, McGreevy dismisses the previous 288 pages of history with an abrupt, “And then none of this mattered.” He surely knows that is not the case. For better or worse, the firestorm over the scandals has subsided and is not likely to be reignited. The ongoing tensions and conflicts inherent in two very different ideas of freedom, however, will continue to matter, and to matter greatly, in the unfolding story of Catholicism and the American experiment.

Choosing Religions

The Supreme Court’s Everson decision of 1947, which established the “wall of separation” in the service of the naked public square, put the matter bluntly. There Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote that the assumption behind the public school system “is that after the individual has been instructed in worldly wisdom he will be better suited to choose his religion. . . . Our public school, if not a product of Protestantism, at least is more consistent with it than with the Catholic culture and scheme of values.” Religion is a private choice made by the autonomous individual. Against this is a “culture and scheme of values” in which one is born and sacramentally reborn into a community of authoritatively defined tradition. On the one side: individuality, autonomy, choice; on the other: community, tradition, authority. The first triad is said to represent “American freedom,” and by it national unity is constituted. Commitment to autonomy, oddly enough, is supposed to establish national unity. It is a jealous unity that will abide no compromise with the competing triad of community, tradition, authority. This idea of freedom serves, in the language of H. Richard Niebuhr, the “Christ of culture.” Of American culture; and of American Protestant culture to the degree that it is necessary to ward off the threatening alternative of Catholic culture.

The conflict over abortion brought things to a head also by revealing the divided soul of American liberalism. The liberalism of, for instance, Martin Luther King and the early civil rights movement was embracing, reaching out to include the previously excluded within the community for which we accept common responsibility. Modern liberalism took a decisive turn with the movement for “liberalized abortion law” in the 1960s. American liberalism had always been schizophrenic, divided between individual self-expression and communal solidarity. By planting the liberal flag on the pro-choice side of the abortion conflict, its individualistic propensities gained ascendancy, even to the point of driving a lethal wedge between mother and child, the most fundamental of communal bonds. Autonomy is a jealous god.

Such are among the many reflections provoked by Catholicism and American Freedom. One is struck by how few Catholic intellectuals of stature have addressed the conflict between the two ideas of freedom. Jacques Maritain and John Courtney Murray, of course, but the overwhelming majority of the Catholic intellectual establishment since Vatican II has been preoccupied with intra-Catholic disputes related to a one-sided accommodation of Catholicism to the idea of freedom as autonomy. The spirit of Emersonian gnosticism described in Harold Bloom’s The American Religion has made deep inroads also among Catholics in America. One is almost inclined to think that Leo XIII’s 1899 condemnation of “Americanism” in Testem Benevolentiae was issued about sixty-five years too early, but then one has to wonder what would be the Americanization of Catholicism had it not been issued when it was.

Probing Possibilities

Never was it, and never could it be, a stark choice between one idea of freedom or another. Maritain and Murray were among the few who understood the need for mutual influence, for a constant probing of possibilities that would preserve and enhance the truth in each idea. Today there are many intellectuals—one thinks, for instance, of Michael Sandel, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Mary Ann Glendon, and Charles Taylor—writing about the limits of liberalism, or at least of the liberalisms that have defined “American freedom.” A “communitarian” movement has had a not insignificant influence in the last two decades, and hyper-liberals of a postmodernist bent accent “the social construction of reality.” Out of these sometimes confused and contradictory intellectual churnings, one may be allowed to think, could come a culturally potent understanding of self and community that will modify the stark antinomy between freedom as the freedom to do what one ought and freedom as the freedom to do what one wants.

At the same time I was thinking about McGreevy’s book, I was reading Paul Elie’s engaging new work, The Life You Save May Be Your Own (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 560 pages,, $27). The book is a critical appreciation that tells the stories of four Catholic thinkers and writers: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor. The first three were converts, and the last a Catholic in a South practically without Catholics. European Catholicism, Elie notes, was accustomed to being the majority religion and way of life, indeed to constitute a Catholic culture. It could not have been more different in America. Elie does not put it quite this way, but in America, and for his four subjects, Catholicism was what today is fashionably called the Other. In the American context, there was something even exotic about the idea of community, tradition, and authority. For the three converts, becoming Catholic was quite self-consciously the way to becoming individuals, particular persons, situated selves. As for O’Connor, she knew that intuitively, and became ever more what she always was.

The juxtaposition of the McGreevy and Elie books is powerfully suggestive. Perhaps, one may be permitted to speculate, there is underway, or at least a hint of a groping toward, something like a cultural transformation in what is meant by American freedom. Perhaps, just perhaps, it poses the prospect of individuality realized by an act of decision in obedience to a communal gift of grace. It may be that the tradition—and it is a tradition—of anti-traditionalism has exhausted itself. The authority of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Robert H. Jackson in their hatred of authority no longer appeals. A new generation may weary of running with what Harold Rosenberg memorably called “a herd of independent minds.”

These are but possibilities, but they are possibilities enhanced by many developments, not least being an evangelical Protestantism that is, more and more, the only Protestantism of public influence, and that is increasingly less dependent upon anti-Catholicism as a necessary component of its self-understanding. The elite liberal class, those who control what are called the commanding heights of culture, will continue to view both Catholicism and evangelicalism as the Other. The first is seen as exotic and seductive, but finally oppressive and deserving of hatred; the second is viewed as ignorant, stifling, and deserving of fear and loathing. But all that could change over time. It depends in very large part upon thinkers, writers, and public exemplars who persuasively propose a more compelling idea of freedom. Such, at least, are some of the thoughts provoked by the gift that is John T. McGreevy’s Catholicism and American Freedom.