Roman Catholicism

Roman Catholicism. Spanish and French explorers brought Roman Catholicism to America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. St. Augustine, Florida, founded by Spanish explorers in 1565, became the site of the oldest Christian community in the United States. Missionary priests intent on Christianizing and “civilizing” the Native population established mission towns that stretched northward to Georgia. By the mid‐seventeenth century, seventy missionaries were working in thirty‐eight missions; these Spanish missions declined, however, and by the early eighteenth century St. Augustine was the only one left. The mission era ended when the British gained control of Florida in 1763.

The French, meanwhile, in 1608 established a permanent settlement at Quebec, from which Catholic missionary priests traveled down the St. Lawrence through the Great Lakes region evangelizing the Native population. This mission era ended in 1763 when the British took over all of Canada. Throughout the Middle West, French missionaries and explorers left their mark in places like St. Ignace and Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and St. Louis, Missouri.

The Catholic presence in the Southwest was widespread. Spanish explorers settled Santa Fe in 1610 and branched out to areas in what is now Arizona and Texas. In the eighteenth century, Spanish missionaries led by the friar Junipero Serra traveled the Pacific coast founding twenty‐one mission towns stretching from San Diego to San Francisco. The Mexican government's takeover of the missions in 1833 marked the end of the Spanish mission era. The church survived, however, ministering to the needs of Hispanic Americans and Catholic Indians. This territory became part of the United States in 1848 after the Mexican War, opening a new chapter in the Catholic church's history.

Catholicism in British America.

In 1634 Cecil Calvert, a convert to Catholicism, together with a small group of English colonists founded Maryland. This colony and its capital, St. Mary's City, became the center of the Catholic presence in the English colonies. Maryland farms established by Jesuit missionaries from England and Europe became centers of Catholic worship and home bases for traveling missionaries who ministered to rural Catholics of southern Maryland. Catholics were always a minority in Maryland, but while the Calvert family retained control, they enjoyed prestige and power. This changed in 1689 when William and Mary assumed the English throne and the Calverts lost ownership of the colony. As Maryland became a royal colony, English laws that discriminated against Catholics by proscribing such rights as voting and public worship also became law in Maryland. Nonetheless, thanks to immigration from Ireland, Maryland's Catholic population continued to grow. By 1765, it stood at twenty thousand, with another six thousand in Pennsylvania.

The vast majority of Maryland Catholics supported the Revolution of 1776. One of them, Charles Carroll of Carrollton (1737–1832), became a delegate to the Continental Congress, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and an author of the Maryland constitution.

In 1790 John Carroll (1735–1815), an American‐born and European‐educated priest, was ordained as the first bishop of Baltimore. Although only about 35,000 Catholics then lived in the United States, Carroll, together with other Catholics, articulated a vision of Catholicism that was unique at this time. He foresaw a national, American church that would be independent of foreign jurisdiction and would endorse religious pluralism and toleration, in which religion would be grounded in the Enlightenment principle of intelligibility, where a vernacular liturgy would be normative and in which the spirit of democracy would permeate parish government. By 1800 this republican model of Catholicism gave way to a more traditional European model, owing mainly to the influx of French clergy who brought with them a monarchical vision of the church.

The Immigrant Church.

With large‐scale immigration in the 1820s and 1830s, particularly from Ireland and Germany, the U.S. Catholic population increased dramatically. After the Civil War, Catholic immigrants from southern and eastern Europe arrived in large numbers. By 1920 the Catholic population numbered about seventeen million and included some twenty‐eight ethnic groups. Catholics mainly lived in the urbanized Northeast and Middle West, a region stretching from Boston to Chicago, Baltimore to St. Louis. The neighborhood parish organized by nationality became the hallmark of the urban immigrant church. Most parishes supported an elementary school staffed by nuns recruited from Europe and Ireland. Parish organizations strengthened the bond between church and people. Hospitals and orphanages, also staffed by nuns, extended the ministry of the urban church.

In the Antebellum Era, a Protestant crusade against Catholics swept the nation. Anti‐Catholic riots erupted, and in a few instances convents and churches were destroyed. The crusade peaked in the early 1850s when a new anti‐immigrant, anti‐Catholic political organization, the Know‐Nothing party, gained power in several states. Archbishop John Hughes of New York became a forceful defender of Catholic rights. Encountering discrimination, Catholics developed their own subculture and an outsider mentality.

Some Catholics wanted the church to abandon this outsider mentality and become more American and less foreign. The Catholic convert Isaac Hecker (1819–1888), founder of the Paulist Fathers, forcefully advocated this vision in the antebellum period, while Archbishop John Ireland and James Cardinal Gibbons promoted it in the 1880s and 1890s. These “Americanists” endorsed the separation of church and state, political democracy, religious toleration, and some type of merger of Catholic and public elementary education. In 1889, however, Pope Leo XIII issued an encyclical letter that condemned “Americanism.” This papal intervention ended the campaign of Ireland and Gibbons and solidified the Romanization of American Catholicism.

1920–1960: Consolidation, Acculturation, and Growing Confidence.

The 1920–1960 era was one of consolidation. New churches were built, colleges founded, and record numbers of American Catholics entered seminaries and convents. At the neighborhood parish level, Catholicism remained very ethnic and clannish into the 1940s. Educated middle‐class Catholics, however, whose numbers were increasing, sought greater involvement in the public life of the nation. What contemporaries called a “Catholic renaissance” took place in these years as Catholics grew more confident of their place in the United States. Catholics supported the New Deal and many held influential positions in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration and in the growing labor movement. John Ryan (1869–1945), a priest and professor at the Catholic University of America, gained a national reputation as an advocate of social action and workers' rights. Dorothy Day (1897–1980) founded the Catholic Worker movement in 1933; her commitment to the poor inspired many young Catholics to work for social justice. By the 1950s Catholicism was riding a wave of popularity and confidence. New churches and schools opened their doors, the church drew record numbers of converts, and more than 70 percent of Catholics regularly attended Sunday Mass. The Catholic college population increased significantly. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen had his own award‐winning television show that attracted millions of viewers. In 1958 a new pope, John XXIII, charmed the world and filled Catholics with pride. The 1960 election of an Irish American Catholic, John F. Kennedy, to the presidency reinforced the optimism and confidence of Catholics.

1960–2000: Liturgical Reforms and Demographic Changes.

In the 1960s, prodded by the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the Catholic church worldwide underwent a period of reform. Coupled with broader social changes under way in the United States, the reforms initiated by the council ushered in a new age for American Catholicism. The most dramatic change took place in the Catholic Mass; a new liturgy celebrated in English replaced an ancient Latin ritual. An ecumenical spirit inspired Catholics to break down the fences that separated them from people of other religious traditions. Emerging from a cultural ghetto, Catholics adopted a more public presence in society, joining the war against poverty and racism. While some members of the Catholic hierarchy such as Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York supported the Vietnam War, Catholics such as Daniel and Philip Berrigan were in the forefront of the peace movement. In the 1980s, the Catholic hierarchy issued pastoral letters addressing issues of war and peace in the nuclear age and economic justice. At the same time, an educated laity displayed a greater readiness to challenge the church's teaching on birth control, clerical celibacy, an exclusively male clergy, and the teaching authority of the Pope. Other Catholics opposed such dissent, however, and strongly defended the authority of the Pope and the hierarchy. Ideological diversity became a trademark of contemporary Catholicism.

Beginning in the 1960s, the number of priests and nuns declined. As a result, lay men and women assumed more responsibility for the church's many ministries. As new immigration laws admitted more newcomers from Asia and South America, many of them Catholic, the church in the 1990s was more ethnically diverse than ever; in some cities, Sunday Mass was celebrated in as many as forty‐five different languages. Spanish‐speaking Catholics comprised the single largest group of these new immigrants.

As the twentieth century ended, Catholicism in the United States entered still another new period in its history. No longer religious outsiders, Catholics were better integrated into American life, more ethnically diverse than ever, and more heterogeneous intellectually and politically. While the hierarchy had become more theologically conservative, the laity had grown more independent. All these developments, coupled with the declining number of priests and nuns, presented the church, after more than four hundred years in America, with great challenges for the future.
See also Abortion; Anti‐Catholic Movement; Assimilation; Birth Control and Family Planning; Exploration, Conquest and Settlement, Era of European; French Settlements in North America; German Americans; Irish Americans; Italian Americans; New Deal Era, The; Polish Americans; Religion; Secularization; Seton, Elizabeth Ann (“Mother”); Sixties, The; Spanish Settlements in North America.

Bibliography

John Tracy Ellis , The Life of James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore, 1834–1921, 2 vols., 1952.
Andrew M. Greeley , The American Catholic: A Social Portrait, 1977.
James Hennessey, and S.J. , American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States, 1981.
Jay P. Dolan , The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present, 1985.
Robert A. Orsi , The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950, 1985.
Patrick W. Carey , People, Priests, and Prelates: Ecclesiastical Democracy and the Tensions of Trusteeism, 1987.
Philip Gleason , Keeping the Faith: American Catholicism Past and Present, 1987.
James M. O'Toole , Militant and Triumphant: William Henry O'Connell and the Catholic Church in Boston, 1859–1944, 1992.
Jay P. Dolan and Allan Figueroa Deck, S.J., eds., Hispanic Catholic Culture in the U.S., 1994.
John T. McGreevy , Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth Century Urban North, 1996.

Jay P. Dolan