Catholicism and Modernism

CATHOLICISM AND MODERNISM

Transition

The 1940s were a decade of momentous change for Catholicism in the United States. Traditional Catholicism was challenged on every front: liturgical, philosophical, and organizational. The Catholic Church in general became more worldly, liberal, and egalitarian. Modernism, a catchall term that signified the multiple and diverse forces arrayed against tradition, confronted and transformed American Catholicism. This confrontation was long delayed. Unlike other churches, the Catholic Church failed to come to adequate terms with concepts and ideas that had transformed other theologies in the nineteenth century. Evolutionary theory, for example, restructured American Protestantism at the turn of the century. When Father John A. Zahm of Notre Dame University attempted a synthesis of Darwinism and Catholicism in 1896, the Vatican had him silenced. After World War II a reckoning with modernism could no longer be avoided. This confrontation made the 1940s one of the most dynamic decades in the history of American Catholicism.

Tradition

By tradition, American Catholicism was a religion of immigrants, connected to the turn-of-the-century migration of Irish, Germans, Italians, Poles, French Canadians, east Europeans, and later immigrations of Latin Americans. For all of these groups Catholicism was tied to the immigration and acculturation experience, usually as a bulwark against a complete abandonment of the immigrant's previous identity. The situation was complicated by a great degree of anticlericalism among many immigrants, especially Italians, and the experience of labor activism, which forced the American Catholic Church into a series of compromises with European tradition long before the 1940s. But for the most part the Catholic Church was for these immigrants what it had been in Europe: the church of the poor, the stern overseer of community life and personal morality, a conservative force, and a fixture of the status quo. Catholic Church organization tended to be rigidly hierarchical, with much of its liturgical practice conducted in Latin. Catholic education was often doctrinaire and authoritarian. According to church rules, Catholic children were forbidden from attending school with non-Catholic children, but bishops almost never enforced this order. Many American Catholic leaders ardently denounced modern life, especially condemning birth control, divorce, and morally suspect entertainment. Cardinal Dennis Dougherty of Philadelphia went so far as to advocate a Catholic boycott of all movies. As the condition of these immigrant groups changed, however, so did American Catholicism. The most significant change in the life of immigrants during the 1940s was the great nationalizing force of the war and then the unprecedented economic prosperity that followed. The American immigrant became upwardly mobile, middle class, more distinctly American. So too did American Catholicism.

Unionism

Upward mobility for American immigrants was connected to the ability of trade unions to force businesses to grant higher wages and benefits to workers. American Catholicism was tied to the labor movement (two-thirds of all unionized workers were Catholics) and became integral in forming the political base of the New Deal. Competing with Socialists and Communists for the heart and soul of the labor movement, Catholicism made labor more conservative, while labor made Catholicism more liberal. Catholic trade-union organizers such as John J. Burke, John A. Ryan, Raymond A. McGowan, Francis J. Haas, Charles O. Rice, and the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU) forced church fathers to abandon their status quo conservatism and actively take up the plight of the poor. More radical was the trade unionism of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, which opened houses of hospitality where the poor and unemployed could find food and shelter. By 1942 thirty-two houses were operating, as well as several rural communes where Catholics practiced simple living. Day and her associates not only advocated more equitable distribution of wealth but challenged the philosophical basis of church hierarchy. The result of these pressures was a Vatican encyclical, Mystici Corporis (1943), which significantly restructured the church's organization as a collective entity. Catholicism became less hierarchical and granted a new recognition to the efforts of the laity within the church.

Commonweal

Also important in the liberalization of American Catholicism were the efforts of both Catholic and non-Catholic intellectuals associated with the journal Commonweal, founded in 1924. Commonweal became the locus for intellectual fusions of traditional Catholicism and the innovations of modernism, including Darwinian evolution, psychoanalysis, pragmatism, and Keynesian economics. The work of the Catholic paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin provided a viable synthesis of Catholicism and evolution, and biblical scholars such as Edwin V. O'Hara of Kansas City and Martin Hellreigel of Saint Louis pioneered more-modern interpretations of the gospels.

Neo-Thomism

Another intellectual trend with profound consequences for American Catholicism was neo-Thomism. Originally a Continental movement led by the great Christian scholar Etienne Gilson and the philosopher Jacques Maritain, neo-Thomism renewed attention to the work of medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, who synthesized the Catholic practice and science of his day. Neo-Thomism attempted something similar for the 1940s: a fusion of faith, humanistic philosophy, and modern science. Its most ardent champions in the United States were Fulton J. Sheen, who propagated the concept on his popular radio program; University of Chicago president Robert M. Hutchins; and his associate, philosopher Mortimer Adler.

Liturgical Transformation

The combination of trade unionism, Commonweal Catholicism, and neo-Thomism set into motion a revolution in Catholicism that would culminate in the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s. In many ways the reforms of the Second Vatican Council began with Pope Pius XII's encyclical Mediator Dei (1947), itself the outcome of modernizing and liberalizing forces, as well as the singular efforts of Virgil Michel, a Benedictine monk from Minnesota whose publishing enterprise, Liturgical Press, was instrumental in prompting liturgical renewal. Mediator Dei transformed Catholic liturgical service, providing for vernacular translations of the missal, wider use of vernacular language in preaching and worship, the encouragement of congregational participation, and a renewed emphasis on Holy Communion. Bilingual Catholic education also declined, especially in Polish-speaking schools, as English became the sole language of instruction. These reforms increased popular participation in the church in the late 1940s and sparked a return to the church in the 1950s. From 1940 to 1960 the ranks of Catholic practitioners doubled, from 21 million to 42 million. The relatively liberal, mainstream attitudes of these new communicants would be instrumental in developing support for the increased cooperation among the different American faiths evident in the ecumenical movement, as well as for the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

AN INTERFAITH SACRIFICE

One of the most frequently told stories of World War II concerned the 1942 sinking of an American troop carrier, the Dorchester, by German submarines in the North Atlantic. As the troops scrambled to escape the sinking ship, it was discovered that the complement was four life jackets short. The four chaplains aboard gave their vests to four enlisted men. As retold by survivors, the four chaplains—two Protestant ministers, a rabbi, and a Catholic priest—were last seen praying together on the deck of the doomed ship. The Dorchester tale was often repeated during and after the war as an example of the interfaith cooperation possible in the United States.

Source:

Arthur Hertzberg, The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter—A History (New York: Simon &. Schuster, 1989).

Sources:

Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1972);

Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985).