Pope Pius IX condemned Americanism in the Syllabus of Errors in 1864

When Mrs. Hackett called a few months ago to ask whether I might be able to speak before the Catholic Citizens, she may have caught the hesitation in my voice - at least for the briefest of moments. And truly, if I hesitated it was for no other reason than that I was not sure if I really was ready to talk about that which has been bothering me lately:

I have been wondering - and seriously so and sadly so - are we on the verge of losing the culture War? Are we about to succumb to the Culture of Death on all fronts - life, love, family and even peace?

Having squandered every opportunity in the last 50 years to have fostered and created a Catholic culture of life - even a Catholic party - we seem powerless. The most Catholic states in our country are also the most relentlessly pro-homosexual agenda and pro-abortion. The Republicans are falling all over themselves to give money to Rudy Guiliani.

We cannot sell our farms fast enough and send out kids off to work in the casinos. Our home life is in tatters if it exists at all; and our Catholic Universities proudly celebrate and encourage all manner of perversion and non-reproductive sex.

How many of us know good Catholics who have learned over the past 60 years how to defend invasions, nuclear warfare - shock and awe bombing - how the ends justifies the means - and even torture.

I was recently at a dinner of Catholics where the Catholic speaker mocked the Catholic Archbishop of Baghdad who having watched his country be plunged into anarchy and incredible suffering was pleading for his people. For that he was mocked.

Nor are our homes immune from the baleful influence of this Culture of Death - as we ignore each other, turn on each other, disregard each other and look for comfort in the death-like coma of television where we are mesmerized by drunken celebrities and empty tarts.

Can we call it a victory for the culture of Life when having already killed 40 million babies in 25 years we see no real end in sight. Sure, the Supreme Court upheld the partial birth abortion ban - but that only banned a technique. You can still kill the little one by some other means.

And can we forget that there are hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos out there - tiny imprisoned souls captured in countless jars and locked away forever in stainless steel freezers in sterile laboratories waiting to be experimented on or killed. And the only thing we are allowed to ask is who pays for the privilege of killing these microscopic humans. And how many Catholics have no idea that this is what is going on?

We cannot even say anything about the source of the embryos - in vitro fertilization - for we have learned to keep silent when science says it has discovered something - we must stand aside and let them do it.

As the scientists gave us the horrors of nerve gas, chemical and biological warfare, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they are about to give us the horror of fetal farms where organs and limbs will be grown and distributed - as well as chimera factories - where human-animal hybrids will be developed.

Who does not foresee the universal legalization of homosexual marriage in this country? And who but a Bishop from the east coast would be fooled by the subterfuge of "Civil Unions" as if that is somehow acceptable. Is not every marriage witnessed by a judge already a civil union?

Euthanasia - mercy killing is making its dark way across this continent. Does anyone doubt that it will be the law of this land before too long?

And none of this is to forget our daily descent into barbarism - where less and less children are born into families with a married mother and father. None of this is to ignore the coarseness and crudeness and ugliness that have become our hallmark of our youth - along with the intentional self-mutilation - the violence, brutality, and shameless immodesty of our popular culture.

This is quite a litany - it is our litany. And it is us - living it and hearing it daily, we cannot imagine how just the smallest portion of this list of outrages would have stunned our great-grandparents. We are so used to it we don't even notice anymore.

How did it get to his point? How is it that we as Catholics have lived in this country for more than two hundred years and have not been able to put more than token resistance to this juggernaut? How is it that we have had the benefit of the Church and her teachings - unchanged in 2000 years - and the incalculable grace of the sacraments - have not been able to change or mold or even tweak this culture into something resembling a Culture of Life?

Well there are a hundred answers - each equally valid and if you want you can back to the sin of Adam and Eve. But one answer - among many - is "Americanism." I will define it more thoroughly, but in a nutshell, it means that we American Catholics have often enough been so intent on being good Americans that we neglected to be better Catholics. That we are finally living the accumulated consequences of two hundred years' worth of believing that it was better to go along in order to get along.

We look at this litany and we act as if these evils dome not from us but from aliens - that this must be some other country doing such evil things. That it is someone else' government that has declared abortion, pornography, gay marriage, euthanasia, invasion and torture to be inalienable human rights. Not us.

But it is us.

And in creating this disconnect we ignore the enormity of the crimes being committed in our name by the people we continually place in office. We absolve ourselves of all blame by saying these horrible things cannot be laid at our feet - this isn't our country. This is an anomaly and the real America will come back one day.

We paint a mental picture of our country - all Norman Rockwell and beautiful and every election - every Forth of July - every Memorial day we fool ourselves into thinking that that mental picture is really what we are cooperating with - when it isn't.

We are cooperating with a genuinely godless secular state - a world regime of people who are not like us and who do not like us' and this state grows bigger and more sinister with each passing day. And it is this entity that has given birth to the global Culture of Death under which we groan and which we try to ignore.

And every time we play nice - every time we cooperate and say nothing for fear of being divisive or judgmental, every time we vote for the lesser of two evils, every time we boast about spreading American values, which for us is democracy and fair-play we forget there is some one else who is intent on spreading - abortion, contraception, pornography, sexual license, feminism and homosexualism. How are we complicit in the crimes and depredations of those we have put in power? By ignoring their crimes, making excuses for them, and by saying nothing of any substance.

We play nice because we are trying to be good Americans - good Republicans and good Democrats. But that does not make us necessarily good Catholics.

So here is my question. How did we come to thin it is better to cooperate than to convert? Have we played a part in the creation of this world cultural mess by having quietly surrendered - each in our own way - to a relatively subtle heresy called Americanism?

Well, that is the reason for this talk.

Now Americanism actually has very little to do with America but everything to do with what we believe about the nature of the Church. In other words: is the church simply an organization with a flexible code of beliefs that for whatever reason we might simply ignore or dismiss? Or is it - as we claim - the body of Christ - where He is the Head and we are the Members its unchangeable beliefs coming from God Himself?

Now it would seem to me that the Catholic asks: given that our religion comes from God, how loyal can we be if our government ever comes into conflict with our Faith? The Americanist answers: Our religion comes from God?

Let me give an example of Americanism in action. Only two months ago eighteen Catholic politicians - all liberal - all pro-abortion - and sadly representative of hundreds of punier pro-abortion Catholic politicians were offended that His Holiness Benedict XVI had proclaimed that they - by virtue of their promotion of killing children in the womb - had excommunicated themselves.

In typical high-dudgeon these erstwhile Catholics and loyal secularists criticized the Successor of Christ for daring to think the killing of babies might be a public issue, a human issue. They were appalled that he dared to hold them to the moral demands of the Faith.

They felt they had to correct the Pope for his violation of the American system. Doesn't he know? We are Americans! We don't need revelation or a Church! We vote on what is moral or immoral in this country. This is the will of the people, the consent of the governed. It is if we say it is; and no foreign power can contradict us.

This Americanist willingness to correct the Pope - a kind of hallmark of Americanism - comes not only from liberal democrats but from dedicated Republicans as well.

Only a couple of years ago authors such as George Weigel in First Things and Michael Novak in Crisis, began theorizing about and defending George Bush's War in Iraq as just and moral because of their new discovery - the preventive war.

Despite the fact that Pope John Paul II has spoken some 56 times against the First Iraq war - despite Cardinal Ratzinger's stating unequivocally that Catholic teaching does not recognize the morality of preventive way, Michael Novak traveled to Rome - at the behest of the government - to lecture the pope on Novak's new insights. He never got to see the Pope and had to content himself with a two hour lecture to a group of lover level Vatican officials.

George Weigel - the biographer of John Paul II never tires of reminding us that the Pope's statements on the war are not infallible. And he is right, they are not infallible. But what kind of Catholic turns a deaf ear to Peter when Peter speaks?

Is this the Republican version of the Seamless Garment? Of responsible dissent" So now we don't have to listen to the Pope unless he is speaking infallibly. This should trouble all of us because it is the same argument that dissenters always used in the 60's.

In some circumstances are we perhaps more intent on being reasonable democrats or republicans - loyal more to the secular regime - in either of its parties' manifestations - than our own Catholic faith - a faith that is becoming simply an adjunct to our citizenship. Have conservatives along with liberals finally jointly subscribed to the John F. Kennedy school of patriotism where the demands of the government far outweigh the demands of the Faith?

In no way do I wish to denigrate a healthy patriotism - the love of the land and of our people, a love strong enough to make us willing to die for that land. In my own heart there has always been a warm spot for the Founding fathers. I know that most of them were Deists and Rationalists and Atheists. I know they really didn't like Catholics. I ignored that because they tolerated us as long as we weren't too Roman. We were not to step out of line.

Still I have always searched for whatever sign I can of some hidden influence of Catholicism. I have delighted to read where Jefferson may have taken his ideas from St. Robert Bellarmine. I have heard that George Washington converted to Catholicism on his deathbed. All this is entirely possible - and it would be a wonderful meditation to comfort us in our hope that what we believe as Catholics is not at all necessarily antithetical to what we believe as Americans. And really, it in those moments that I find myself in church before my people offering thanks to God for having blessed our nation.

But there is a difference between being grateful for the blessings which God has granted us and then concluding that America was chosen from among all other nations to lead the world. It is perfectly legitimate to see how we are an example to the world; but can we conclude that we are hope of all peoples, the repository of all civic virtue? Have we made a religion of ourselves?

Well, the Puritans did. These early day people who founded this nation called their discovery the Shining City on a Hill. They believed her to be the New Jerusalem, the New Israel. The American therefore is part of the new Chosen race and Royal Priesthood. As good Calvinists, the Puritans saw the proof of God's favor and predilection for America in her wealth and power. As a god-favored nation America was both invincible and infallible.

This attitude would eventually evolve into what others have called the doctrine of American exceptionalism - that means that laws and moral stricture apply to every country except us. And if we are tempted to believe that America is infallible and invincible and exceptional, then what does that mean that we believe about other countries? That God curses the small and poor ones? That God despises the Indians and Irish and Italians and Mexicans because they are of no account? That we can have our way with them?

If we believe that God has set America up as his Chosen Nation - then who needs independent Revelation? Who needs the guidance of a Church? And while we are at it - who is the Catholic Church to set herself above America and judge it? Way more than eighteen Catholic politicians and two authors have asked that same question.

That is, in fact, political Americanism. The understanding, the feeling, the sentiment that America is not only not like other countries, but that she is above them - and granted that place by God. Political Americanism makes of the nation its own god, its own religion, its own authority.

Now there is not inherent conflict in being a Catholic and a good American. Certainly not if he avoids the Puritan excesses. There ought to be some means of accommodation by which we can participate in the political and cultural life of America and remain Catholic. But it is difficult for Catholics because if we accept the premise that America is specially favored by God - almost a faith - how can Catholics make the necessary accommodations of their citizenship with their own Faith? One faith would seem to cancel out the other.

The solution dawned on some that they could modify or ignore what all other Catholics had to observe. They learned that if they defined themselves as unique and exceptional - as Americans did when confronting the world - then they could do the same when they confronted the church. "We are different than the rest of our co-believers. Nothing applies to us as it does to them."

This is the heart of Catholic Americanism - a mental construct by which we could be good citizens in a nation that didn't particularly want good Catholics. It is our way of relating to our host country as well as to Rome. And our host won't take it amiss if we begin to pay less attention to Rome. Sometimes the dynamic is purely ecclesial - sometimes it involves politics and policy.

But, I first noticed Americanism - and hardly knew what to call it - when I was in the seminary, Mundelein. It was the mid-70's, the era of the Grand Experiment where First Confession was delayed until after First Holy Communion - where the bulk of at least two generations of Catholics never even made their First or any other confession.

Another brilliant moment for the American Catholic Establishment!

But those of us who read the alternative Catholic press had read that the Pope had decreed that we were to return to the previous order of reception. Our professor when confronted with that fact simply told us - that letter referred only to one diocese in Italy - and not to us. And there that issue stood - in limbo - until the 1980's.

How many times have we read - for home many years - that American Bishops had asked for special consideration from Rome for one or another dispensation from universal law or practice - usually it was liturgical - sometimes administrative. But we needed the dispensation because were different - we were the American Catholic church.

You will remember the latest American Episcopal request - as to whether or not American lay ministers could continue to purify the vessels at Mass as they had previously been allowed to do. I think the Pope was tired of the drumbeat of Americanism and he simply said, "NO." Maybe he wanted to say, "No more."

One of the salient features of Americanism is its insistence that it doesn't exist - that it never existed - and was simply the figment of imagination of jealous European clerics who persuaded Leo that the American Church was slipping out of his control. This was how it was presented to us in the seminary. I was 25 years old before I had ever heard of such a thing as an Americanist heresy. And we all laughed.

How could there be such a thing as Americanism! Of course, we did not bother even to read the Pope's letter. We did not discuss it. We simply dismissed it as an impossibility. We cannot be criticized by even the Pope since by definition what we do is virtuous, and by definition no one outside of American can understand America - not to mention American Catholics. Remember American exceptionalism? It applies to American Catholics as well. So blithely we went on missing it, ignoring it, tripping over it until it has nearly consumed us.

Americanism - to the detriment of our Faith, and to the detriment of our nation - has made us twist the demands of our Faith to fit the demands of government.

Those eighteen Catholic politicians who wrote to the Pope? - just ask them what comes first - the government or the Church? Just ask Sean Hannity and Rudy Giuliani. Just ask George Weigel and Michael Novak. Just ask Dick Durkin and Teddy Kennedy - ask Rick Santorum when he campaigned for Arlen Specter - for the good of the party. Just ask every Catholic who for the last 40 years has voted for the lesser of two evils - because it was more important as a citizen to vote for some party-hack mediocrity rather than as a Catholic who would make a stand for the Faith. Ask them which comes first, the demands of government or of the Faith.

Let us now examine Pope Leo's Testem Benevolantiae Nostrae. We will leave to the historians the details of the Episcopal battles that led up to its publication. Suffice it to say that there was a monumental struggle going on between those Bishops who said we needed to tailor and customize our Catholic beliefs and practices in order to fit in more amicably and smoothly with the Americans and those Bishops who, understanding the connection between Faith and Culture, warned the Catholic people if they surrendered to specific American expressions of culture, namely pluralism, congregationalism and practical atheism, they would lost their Faith.

Pope Leo begins his letter with the most pleasant of introductions fulsome in its praise of America, but letting his Episcopal readers know that he was deeply aware of their unfounded hope that they could attract the Protestants if they omitted or ignored some of the more particularly Catholic beliefs. Leo told the American bishops that these attitudes were wrong and needed to be corrected. In no uncertain terms he told them that the Church does not shape her teachings in accord with the spirit of the Age. She does not make concessions regarding the Faith.

Leo was no fool and he knew - and he told them he knew - that their dishonest technique was often enough silence - just say nothing - just neglect certain Catholic teaching and principles and practices. Do not be so vigilant in protecting the faith and seen enough it would be forgotten that we actually believe anything. Leo called them on that kind of subterfuge and forbade the American Bishops "to suppress for any reason any doctrine that had been handed down.

He went on to condemn "... the confounding of license with liberty, the passion for discussing and pouring contempt upon any possible subject, the assumed right to hold whatever opinions one pleases upon any subject and to set them forth in print to the world."

This, according to Leo, wraps our minds in a darkness of our own making and leads us to the conviction that what is actually happening is a sort of consecrated free speech where the Holy Spirit is pouring richer and more abundant graces into our American souls than into anyone else's. With this super abundance of grace, our opinions and decisions - and our lives - are truer and more authentic than those of the rest of humanity.

Leo realized that it would not be a difficult leap to conclude that such a super-inspired citizenry does not need the guidance either of history or indeed of a Church, or of a magisterium or of a tradition. This citizenry is eminently capable of discussing its way to truth.

Leo tells us, American Catholics would seen be led to believe that the need for supernatural virtues would be eliminated. We would not need the evangelical counsels of "poverty, chastity and obedience" because those are passive virtues while what we need is the dynamism of active virtues - and, of course, are so abundant in America.

Leo did not simply assume the worst about what was going on in America. Nor did he mystically intuit his concerns. He probably read it from the American Bishops' own words. Listen to Archbishop Ireland of Minnesota in 1884 declaring,

"I could not utter one syllable that would belie, however remotely, either the Church or the Republic, and when I assert, as I now solemnly do, that the principles of the Church are in thorough harmony with the interests of the Republic. I know in the depths of my soul that I speak the truth . . . Republic of America, receive from me the tribute of my love and loyalty.

Thou bearest in they hands the hopes of the human race, thy mission from God is to show nations that men are capable of highest civil and political liberty . . . Believe me, no hearts love thee more ardently than Catholic hearts. . . and no hands will be lifted up stronger and more willing to defend, in war and peace, thy laws and thy institutions than Catholic hands."

We could ask Archbishop Ireland how willing those Catholics would be to invade Catholic countries like Cuba and the Philippines.

Msgr. Denis O'Connell, then rector of the North American College in Rome provides an answer. In a letter he wrote to Archbishop Ireland in 1898, referencing the Spanish American War, he called the Spanish "greasers" whose lives are not worth those of the Americans fighting them in Cuba. Without an ounce of shame, Monsignor O'Connell called for the closing of convents and monasteries in our newly conquered possessions - Cuba and the Philippines - Close them down! He said religious orders have done nothing for the advancement of religion.

This is an interesting position to be taken by a Catholic priest who was then in charge of the American Roman seminary and who would eventually be named Bishop of Richmond. O'Connell's letter continues to proclaim that America is "God's way of developing the world" and would one day displace Rome and Spain as the centers of the Faith. Says O'Connell: "Go to America and say, thus smith the Lord!" Then you will live in history as God's Apostle in modern time to Church and to society." O'Connell's vision: An America commissioned by God Himself to be His Apostle - to teach the world and to teach the Church the new Gospel of freedom and openness.

I am sure Leo was not privy to O'Connell's correspondence with Archbishop Ireland, but the Pope was more than aware of what Americanists believed about the exceptional place of America in history and before the church. He was more than conversant with their contempt for traditional Catholic beliefs and attitudes toward the place of religious life.

In Testem, he even has to remind the American Bishops of all the good that religious orders - including the cloistered contemplative orders - have done in America. I guess he knew where the ever-practical, ever-efficient, ever naturally-virtued Americanists were going. Toward the end of his letter, and with marvelous subtlety, Leo assures his readers, the American bishops, that he knows that they would be the first to repudiate any hint that they thought any of these things - that America was superior or was specially chosen by God to lead the world or that the American Church exists differently from the Church in the rest of the world.

He closes with the salutation of a loving father - the kind who loves all his children, recognizes that each has certain gifts, but that they are all equal in his eyes, and that special treatment has no place in the home called Church.

Commentator after commentator will explain how this Americanist movement, actually a cousin of liberalism and modernism, was ended both by Leo's letter and a few judicious firings and transfers. Failing to distinguish between the natural conservatism of clerics - who simply wish the boat not to be rocked - and vigorous Catholic orthodoxy, the students of the modern period often think that Americanism simply evaporated and was no more heard from. That is not what happened. Americanism hung on and became an essential element of the Catholic Establishment. It even developed a corollary that not only were we different Catholics because we were American, but also that we were different from pervious generations of American Catholics because we were the most educated generation. We can thank Fr. Greeley for that!

Just recall the last 30 years of sexual and familial upheaval and how our own Catholic politicians and Universities in full view of the rest of the church have procured tens of millions of victims for the Culture of Death and nobody but a few says a word.

Americanism as our own little heresy still burrows its way into our hearts. It has stalled the Pro-life movement, made many of our Bishops hesitate to teach and act boldly, sterilized our mothers and fathers and without so much as a whimper. It has encouraged us to accept meekly the worst economic and environmental excesses of globalism and capitalism and secularism - all to the terrible detriment and destruction of the family - and has allowed us to accept way and its evils uncritically even when the Pope has preached peace.

I suppose it is unfair not to offer some sort of hint of a solution. But I am not sure I have one. Back to the catacombs - intentional communities - is one possible solution. I don't know. But at the very least we need to be aware that Americanism exists - that one of our greatest Popes who loved us, and was probably fascinated by Americans, warned us of Americanism and told us what the symptoms and dangers were. We cannot ignore it.

What we must do is to be sharply aware of everything that happens in this country and to us. We must be aware of every piece of information that floods our eyes and brains and hearts every day - the cultural things, the entertainment things, the news things, the political things. We must pierce those things to see what is inside or what is behind. To ask of everything we see or read or hear: Who put that there and why?

And the day we discover that we have become a little cynical - the day we first catch ourselves judging everything they tell us and everything they reveal to us and judging it in the balance of the traditional Catholic teaching that comes down to us from the popes - well, that's the day we will know that we are on the way to being good Americans precisely because we have been good Catholics.

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