church leaders and theologians began to speak of the heresy of Americanism, and in 1885 Pope Leo issued a long-awaited encyclical to the church in America. Longinque Oceani made it plain that even if many of his friends and children in America had forgotten the Syllabus of Errors, he had not. He expressed satisfaction with the growth of the church in the U.S.—there were now more than twelve million Catholics—but warned that “it would be erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable state of the Church,” or that it would be expedient for church and state to be “dissevered and divorced in other countries as in America.” Almost all of the priests or bishops who urged reform on the European Continent—whatever the reform—were calling themselves or were being called “Americanists.”
European Catholics were on warning not to become like the Americans. But in the U.S. most Catholics accepted the idea of a strong separation between church and state, especially after the election of John F. Kennedy. “I am wholly opposed,” he had told the ministers in Houston in the 1960 campaign, “to the state being used by any religious group, Catholic or Protestant, to compel, prohibit or persecute the free exercise of any other religion. And that goes for any persecution at any time, by anyone, in any country.”57 In the U.S. the Americanist Catholics had clearly triumphed.
So strongly had the idea of individual freedom become identified with American life that at the Second Vatican Council in 1965 the declaration on religious liberty was commonly referred to as the “American Schema.” Its chief author was John Courtney Murray, and its most powerful support came from American bishops against key figures in the Roman curia, Spanish bishops, and southern Italian prelates. In previous papal encyclicals and other expressions of Catholic theology, religious liberty was something to be tolerated in the interests of civic peace. There were no rights of conscience to be recognized in conflict with the one, true church, which, whenever possible, was to be favored over other religions. Millions of American Catholics had, in effect, repudiated that position. For two decades before the Second Vatican Council, Father Murray argued that it was impossible to separate religious freedom from civil freedom and that persons in error have rights which must be respected by church as well as state.58
By the 1980s, Father Murray’s position had been embraced by the vast majority of American Irish Catholics. It was an outcome that Jefferson, with his fear of hierarchical religions, could not have predicted, and one that Tocqueville, who had prophesied either the demise of the Catholic church in the U.S. or, more likely, the absorption of Protestants into it, explicitly rejected. But neither Protestants nor Catholics disappeared. Some crossed over; others dropped out. They intermarried. More typically, Protestants and Catholics maintained their ancestral religious affiliations while finding it possible to share with and borrow from each other in an ever-moving American ethnic kaleidoscope. James Michael Curley once boasted that Brahmin politician Leverett Saltonstall, a popular Republican politician in Massachusetts and a Unitarian, who learned early in his career that the vote of an Irish Catholic was just as good as that of a Yankee Protestant, joined the charitable Irish society of Boston before Curley did.59
Because the Irish were the largest Catholic group and spoke English, they dominated the Roman Catholic church in America throughout the century and helped to integrate other European Catholics into American culture. Since the Germans, Poles, Italians, and other groups spoke different languages and interpreted Catholicism in national terms, many chafed at what they thought was Irish inhospitableness. The Italians, with their emphasis on the occult, mystery, and passion, could hardly be expected to warm to the ascetic Irish approach to religion. The Germans, with their stress on language and culture, often scorned the Irish as an inferior people. And the Poles saw their own faith as inextricably linked with the destiny of their fatherland.60 Each group developed national fraternal associations and, in some cases, national religious organizations as well, and always local parishes of the national church.
German Catholics had opened a parish of their own in Philadelphia as early as 1790. The German Catholic population increased fourteenfold between 1840 and 1870, by which year one of four Catholics was of German stock. But by 1916, during the First World War, only one of ten Catholics worshiped in a church that used the German language.61 German and other national church movements failed to win support in Rome because they did not have the backing of the dominant Irish-American leaders. German Catholics established their own parochial schools, benefit societies, and other organizations to help them adjust to the American environment, but those who tried to form a national church were frustrated by the U.S. and Roman hierarchies.
Resenting the domination of the Irish, a group of American German Catholics in 1890 asked Rome for a national clergy, for national schools, and proportional representation in the hierarchy for each U.S. nationality. The plan was denounced in the U.S. Senate and by President Benjamin Harrison, but, more important for the ears of Rome, it was opposed vigorously by the Irish Catholic bishops, who constituted half of the U.S. total. (Only 14 percent of American bishops were German.)62 Where the Germans did gain control over the church, as in Wisconsin, they began to behave like the Irish in their relationship to recently arrived groups, in this case, Polish Catholics. What the Germans thought of as justifiable pluralism in the 1880s, they disparaged as Polish parochialism in the 1900s. In 1904, some Poles formed an independent Polish National Church, which eventually claimed twenty-four churches and 28,200 communicants.
Many of the Irish Catholic bishops became apostles of Americanism, not only preventing the development of separatist movements linked to foreign languages and cultures, but, imbued with the ideals of the civic culture and the civil religion, becoming super-American patriots in the process. Nevertheless, just as Protestant ministers had done before them, they often displayed the narrower, parochial side of the civil religion. Archbishop O’Connell of Boston, writing to Archbishop Ireland, defended the sweeping of Catholic Spain from Cuba by American forces. It was good to replace “the meanness and narrowness of old Europe,” he wrote, with “the freedom of America.” O’Connell believed that “America is God’s apostle in Modern times,” and that its imperial advance reflected “God’s way of developing the world.”63 Some Catholics, lay and clerical, became nativist bigots, too. They, particularly the Irish, flocked disproportionately to the banner of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin in his hysterical anti-Communist crusade in the early 1950s. Ironically, the Ku Klux Klan, which had originally seen Catholics as unfit to become Americans, elected a Catholic as its Grand Wizard in 1986.64 More significantly, by the 1980s, Catholics played a major role in defending the ideals and principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—three Roman Catholics, two of them Irish, sat as guardians of the civic culture on the U.S. Supreme Court. In all of U.S. history, no president, no speaker of the House of Representatives, and no justice of the Supreme Court have been more ardent defenders of civil liberties, religious freedom, and voluntary pluralism than President Kennedy, Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill and Justice William J. Brennan, all descendants of nineteenth-century Irish immigrants and members of the Catholic church.
Probably less than one percent of the population at the time the Constitution was written, Roman Catholics were more than 20 percent by 1920. The United States had not become Roman Catholic, as many had feared; Roman Catholics had become American. By supporting the principle of separation of church and state, the Irish also contributed to the ideal of a civic culture as the basis of American identity by successfully challenging the assumption that Americanism was synonymous with Protestantism.
Thomas D’Arcy McGee, the Irish-born editor of The Celt, in the 1850s challenged the view that American character was fixed at the time of the Revolution: he said “American nationality” was “like a chemical solution” that “might contain independent elements, and yet form a whole, which would be different from, and better than any of them.”65
Yet the Irish-dominated church was still seen by many Americans as a menace right up until the election of Kennedy in 1960. But by the 1980s, when perhaps almost half of the continuing flow of immigration to the U.S. was Catholic, there was virtually no discussion of a Catholic menace. The Americans had discovered something which, while difficult to export, clearly worked in their own environment. The permission to maintain traditional religious and cultural loyalties helped to bind immigrants and their