Christianity, Roman Catholic, Issues in Science and Religion

The most distinctive features of Roman Catholicism that influence the religion-science dialogue are its hierarchical and authoritative structure and its emphasis upon the rational foundations for religious belief. Many of the divisions that have occurred within Christianity in the course of history have their origins in one or both of these characteristics of Roman Catholicism. The history of the interaction within Roman Catholicism between science and religion has been dominated by its hierarchical structure. On the other hand the insistence on reason as fundamental to the relationship of human beings to the universe and, therefore, to the creator of the universe has played an important role in the birth of modern science and provides a platform for the dialogue between the belief system of Roman Catholicism and other disciplines, especially science.

Views of nature

The Catholic belief system includes the fundamental affirmation that nature has a rational structure which human intelligence is capable of probing and, in fact, is driven to probe. The basis for this affirmation lies principally in the Johannine tradition of the Logos. John the Evangelist confronted early Christian belief with the world of Greek philosophy. In addition, early Christian reflection upon lived, historical events, especially those recorded in John's Gospel, sees in such events the insertion of God's plan, thought, and word into the universe. Thus John's use of the word Logos, inherited from the Greeks: "The Word (Logos) of God became flesh." This revelation, which the Judeo-Christian tradition believes is spoken by God through his chosen spokespersons, has enormous consequences for one's judgment upon scientific knowledge of the universe. The Judeo-Christian experience affirms emphatically the enfleshment of the divine and, since God is the source of the meaning of all things, that meaning too becomes incarnate.

Some see in this religious belief the foundations of modern science. A rigorous attempt to observe the universe in a systematic way and to analyze those observations by rational processes, principally using mathematics, will be rewarded with understanding because the rational structure is there in the universe to be discovered by human ingenuity. Since God has come among human beings in his Son, humans can discover the meaning of the universe, or at least it is worth the struggle to do so, by living intelligently in the universe. Religious experience thus provides the inspiration for scientific investigation.

To varying degrees this "Logos theology" is at the roots of all Christianity. What in it is peculiar to Roman Catholicism? In addition to the strong affirmation of this "transcendence become incarnate" by the robust system of sacraments in Roman Catholicism (shared, perhaps, also by Anglicanism), there is in Catholicism a long tradition of analogical knowledge. This reached its peak in medieval Scholasticism, and, although it has taken on many forms, is still very prominent in Catholic thought. It seeks to come to a knowledge of God, the creator, through knowledge of creation. In creation, perfections are always mixed with imperfections. If, at least in thought, the two can be separated, the perfect can then be applied to God. This analogical knowledge is also referred to as the via negativa because, even as one applies knowledge of the perfect to God, one must deny that God can be limited to this knowledge. So, the philosopher Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) could rightly say upon the completion of his Summa Theologica that "it was all straw."

Analogy refers to a relationship of similitudes, or of things that are similar. For instance, God is perfect love, and that can be compared with other kinds of love that one witnesses, such as the love of a mother for her child, or the long-standing love of a husband and wife for one another in a stable marriage. But then one sees imperfections in human love, and one must deny that these are present in God's love. That is the use of analogy. The implication is that God wishes to tell humans about himself/herself in creation. It follows, therefore, that a scientist, one who is also a religious believer, must find in science one way to seek to know God. Roman Catholicism in its view of nature is profoundly convinced of this.

It is important to note the logical sequence here. It is not that one comes to believe in God by proving God's existence through anything resembling a scientific process. God is not found as the conclusion of a rational process like that. One believes in God because God gave himself/herself to one. Faith is a personal relationship of love with God and God initiated gratuitously that relationship. No one merited it. No one reasoned to it. Faith is "arational." It does not contradict reason, but it transcends it. Once one has entered into that relationship, one can seek to deepen it through a scientific knowledge of God's creation. This is a very characteristic stance of Catholic intellectuals.

History of the interaction between science and religion

Because of the dominant hierarchical and authoritative structure of the Catholic Church the history of the interaction between science and religion will necessarily focus upon that structure. This is not to deny that influential Catholic thinkers, such as the paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), the astronomer and cosmologist George Lemaître (1894–1966), and others, have not had an impact, but they are not typical of Catholicism in regard to the interaction with science.

Four case histories indicate that the relationship between religion and science in Roman Catholicism has, in the course of three centuries, passed from one of conflict to one of compatible openness and dialogue. The four periods of history are: (l) the rise of modern atheism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; (2) anticlericalism in Europe in the nineteenth century; (3) the awakening within the Church to modern science in the first six decades of the twentieth century; and (4) the Church's view at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The approach of science to religion in each of these periods can be characterized respectively as: (l) temptress, (2) antagonist, (3) enlightened teacher, (4) partner in dialogue.

In his detailed study of the origins of modern atheism, Michael Buckley concludes that it was, paradoxically, precisely the attempt in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to establish a rational basis for religious belief through arguments derived from philosophy and the natural sciences that led to the corruption of religious belief. Religion yielded to the temptation to root its own existence in the rational certitudes characteristic of the natural sciences. This rationalist tendency found its apex in the enlistment of the new science, characterized by such figures as Isaac Newton (1642–1727) and René Descartes (1596–1650), to provide the foundation for religion. Isaac Newton marks the real beginning of modern science. Although the Galileo case, as it is called, provides the classic example of confrontation between science and religion, it is really in the misappropriation of modern science by Isaac Newton and others to mistakenly establish the foundations for religious belief that the roots of a much more deep-seated confrontation can be found. From these roots, in fact, sprung the divorce between science and religion in the form of modern atheism. Thus, science served as a temptress to religion. The certainties born of the scientific method gave birth to the desire for identical certainties as a foundation for religious belief. That desire was radically misplaced and led to a lengthy period of misunderstanding between religion and science.

Certain episodes during the nineteenth century reveal aspects of the second movement—anticlericalism. Its influence on the development of the relationship between science and religion in Catholicism are described by Sabino Maffeo in the second edition of his history of the Vatican Observatory. In fact, the founding of the Observatory in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII is set clearly in that climate of anti-clericalism, and one of the principle motives that Leo XIII cites for the foundation of the Observatory is to combat such anticlericalism. However, after having shown clearly the prevailing mistrust of many scientists for the Church, he terminates the document in which he established the Observatory by stating:

. . . in taking up this work we have put before ourselves the plan … that everyone might see that the Church and its Pastors are not opposed to true and solid science, whether human or divine, but that they embrace it, encourage it, and promote it with the fullest possible dedication (quoted in Maffeo, p. 315 ff.)

Although the historical circumstances did not provide a healthy climate for a dialogue between religion and science, the founding of the Vatican Observatory, even if couched in triumphalistic terms, proved to be a positive contribution to the dialogue, both at the time of its foundation and in its subsequent history.

When one speaks of the awakening of the Church to science during the first six decades of the twentieth century, one is really speaking of the personage of Pope Pius XII. The Pope had an excellent college-level knowledge of astronomy and he frequently discussed astronomy with researchers. However, he was not immune to the rationalist tendency and his understanding of the then most recent scientific results concerning the origins of the universe led him to a somewhat concordant approach to seeing in these scientific results a rational support for the scriptural, and derived doctrinal, interpretation of creation. It was only, in fact, through the most delicate but firm interventions of Georges Lemaître, the father of the theory of the primeval atom that foreshadowed the theory of the Big Bang, that the Pope was dissuaded from following a course that would have surely ended in disaster for the relationship between the Church and scientists.

The specific problem arose from the tendency of Pope Pius XII to identify the beginning state of the Big Bang cosmologies, a state of very high density, pressure, and temperature, which was, at that time, thought to have occurred about one to ten billion years ago, with God's act of creation. Lemaître, in particular, had considerable difficulty with this view. Although he was a respected cosmologist, he was also a Catholic priest, and, since solid scientific evidence for his theory was lacking at that time, he was subject to the accusation that his theory was really born of a spirit of concordism with the religious concept of creation. In fact, it was only with the discovery in 1965 of cosmic background radiation that persuasive scientific evidence for the Big Bang became available. Lemaître insisted that the primeval atom and Big Bang hypotheses should be judged solely as physical theories and that theological considerations should be kept completely separate.

Galileo and Darwin

There are two episodes in the history of the interaction between Catholicism and science that merit special attention. The cases of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) and Charles Darwin (1809–1882) have, at least in the popular mind, become myths that are thought to exemplify the interaction.

In view of Galileo's increasing promotion of Copernicanism the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Catholic Church in 1616 issued a decree that declared that the Copernican theory that the sun moved was absurd in philosophy and heretical, and the theory that the Earth was not immovable was absurd in philosophy and suspect of heresy. These carefully honed distinctions between philosophy and religious belief reveal the exaggerated rationalism of Catholicism at that time. Philosophy, of course, referred to the philosophy of nature, what people today call physics. Heretical meant that the philosophy contradicted Scripture. The physics was that of Aristotle; Scripture was limited to the literal meaning and to the understanding of the Church Fathers. On both accounts the decree was, by hindsight, grossly in error. This is touted as a conflict between science and religion, but of all things it was clearly not that. Science was never a partner in the discussions. Galileo's telescopic observations, which convincingly supported Copernicanism even though they were not proofs, were never subjected to discussion. Furthermore, religion in the name of Scripture was not a principal protagonist. A philosophical conviction that Aristotle was correct led to an insistence on a literal interpretation of Scripture. Uncritical and untested convictions about the nature of the universe dominated the scene on the part of the Church. In 1633 Galileo was condemned to house arrest for life because he had disobeyed, by his publication of the Dialogue, a private edict given to him in 1616, as a consequence of the above decree, not to support Copernicanism. A final judgment upon this case must be that the Church erred gravely at that time in not allowing an internationally renowned scientist to pursue his research. It did so because its authoritarian structure embraced a renunciation of reason. Aristotelian natural philosophy was the standard, not because it was reasonable but because it was imbedded in all Catholic theological thinking of that epoch. A fracture had occurred between reason and authority, two basics of the Catholic way.

The case of Darwin is different; in confronting Darwinian evolution, it was Catholic doctrine that was at stake. There are two fundamental doctrinal assertions that appeared to be under attack: The human being is a special creature, in whose origins God directly intervenes; and the supernatural cannot be reduced to the natural.

Since the time of Darwin, as biological, chemical and physical evolution became ever more acceptable scientifically, the Catholic Church has struggled to understand its doctrinal heritage in light of the new science. On October 22, 1996, a message of John Paul II on evolution was received by the members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on the occasion of a meeting sponsored by the Academy on The Origin and Evolution of Life. This message is in continuity with the posture of openness characteristic of modern Catholicism. Whereas the encyclical of Pope Pius XII in 1950, Humani Generis, considered the doctrine of evolution a serious hypothesis, worthy of investigation and in-depth study equal to that of the opposing hypothesis, John Paul II states in his message:

Today almost half a century after the publication of the encyclical [Humani Generis ], new knowledge has led to the recognition that the theory of evolution is no longer a mere hypothesis.

The Pope wished to recognize the great strides being made in the scientific knowledge of life and the implications that may result for a religious view of the human person. For him, however, some theories of evolution are incompatible with revealed, religious truth. These include materialism, reductionism, and spiritualism. But at this point the message embraces a true spirit of dialogue when it struggles with the opposing theories of evolutionism and creationism as to the origins of the human person. And this is obviously the crux of the message.

The dialogue progresses in the following way: (1) The Church holds certain revealed truths concerning the human person; (2) Science has discovered certain facts about the origins of the human person; (3) Any theory based upon those facts that contradicts revealed truths cannot be correct. Note the antecedent and primary role given to revealed truths in this dialogue; yet note the struggle to remain open to a correct theory based upon the scientific facts. The dialogue proceeds between these two poles. In the traditional manner of papal statements, the main content of the teaching of previous popes on the matter at hand is reevaluated. And so the teaching of Pius XII in Humani Generis that, if the human body takes its origins from preexistent living matter, the spiritual soul is immediately created by God. Is the dialogue therefore resolved by embracing evolutionism as to the body and creationism as to the soul? It must be noted that the word soul does not reappear in the remainder of the dialogue. Rather the message moves to speak of "spirit" and "the spiritual."

If the revealed, religious truth about the human being is considered, then there is an ontological leap or an ontological discontinuity in the evolutionary chain at the emergence of the human being. Is this not irreconcilable, wonders the Pope, with the continuity in the evolutionary chain seen by science? An attempt to resolve this critical issue is given by John Paul II's statement in his 1996 message that:

The moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of [scientific] observation, which nevertheless can discover at the experimental level a series of very valuable signs indicating what is specific to the human being.

The suggestion is being made, it appears, that the ontological discontinuity may be explained by an epistemological discontinuity. Is this adequate or must the dialogue continue? Is a creationist theory required to explain the origins of the spiritual dimension of the human being? Are we forced by revealed, religious truth to accept a dualistic view of the origins of the human person, evolutionist with respect to the material dimension, creationist with respect to the spiritual dimension? In the last paragraphs concerning the God of life, the message gives strong indications that the dialogue is still open with respect to these critical questions.

The dialogue at the beginning of the twenty-first century

Although there are many others, the sources for deriving the most recent view from Roman Catholicism concerning the relationship of science and faith are essentially three messages of John Paul II, two of them given in 1979 and 1986 to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and the third in 1988 to the Vatican Observatory. The public has emphasized the statements made by the Pope concerning the Copernican-Ptolemaic controversy of the seventeenth century. In his statements concerning Galileo the Pope essentially does two things: He admits that there was wrong on the part of the Church and apologizes for it, and he calls for a serene, studious, new investigation of the history of that time. However, there are matters that are much more forward-looking and of much more significance than a reinvestigation of the Galileo case.

Especially in the 1988 message, given on the occasion of the tricentennial of Newton's Principia Mathematica, John Paul II clearly states that science cannot be used in a simplistic way as a rational basis for religious belief, nor can it be judged to be by its nature atheistic or opposed to belief in God.

... Christianity possesses the source of its justification within itself and does not expect science to constitute its primary apologetic. Science must bear witness to its own worth. While each can and should support the other as distinct dimensions of a common human culture, neither ought to assume that it forms a necessary premise for the other. (quoted in Russell et al., p. M9).

The newest element in this view from Rome is the expressed uncertainty as to where the dialogue between science and faith will lead. Whereas the awakening of the Church to modern science during the papacy of Pius XII resulted in a too facile an appropriation of scientific results to bolster religious beliefs, Pope John II expresses the extreme caution of the Church in defining its partnership in the dialogue: " … Exactly what form that (the dialogue) will take must be left to the future" (quoted in Russell et al., p. M7).

See also Darwin, Charles; Galileo Galilei; Science and Religion, Models and Relations; Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre

Bibliography

buckley, michael j. at the origins of modern atheism, new haven, conn.: yale university press, 1987.

hesse, mary b. models and analogies in science. notre dame, ind.: university of notre dame press, 1966.

john paul ii. "message to the pontifical academy of the sciences," october 23, 1996. published in the original french in l'osservatore romano, 23 october 1996. english translation available in origins (washington, d.c.: catholic news service) 26, no. 22 (14 november 1996).

lemaître, george. "the primeval atom hypothesis and the problem of clusters of galaxies." in la structure et l'evolution de l'universe. bruxelles, belgium: xi conseil de physique solay, 1958.

maffeo, sabino. the vatican observatory: in the service of nine popes, trans. george v. coyne. vatican city: vatican observatory publications, 2001.

pedersen, olaf. the book of nature. vatican city: vatican observatory publications, 1992.

pius xii. humani generis: encyclical letter concerning some false opinions which threaten to undermine the foundations of catholic doctrine, august 12, 1950. in acta apostolicae sedis, vol. 44. vatican city: tipografia poliglotta vaticana, 1950.

pontifical academy. discourses of the popes from pius xi to john paul ii to the pontifical academy of sciences. vatican city: pontificia accademia scientiarum, scripta varia 66, 1986.

russell, robert john; stoeger, william r.; and coyne, george v., eds. physics, philosophy, and theology: a common quest for understanding. notre dame, ind.: university of notre dame press, 1988.

teilhard de chardin, pierre. the phenomenon of man, trans. bernard wall. new york: harper, 1959.

turek, j. georges lemaître and the pontifical academy of sciences. vatican city: vatican observatory publications, 1989.

wallace, william a. the modeling of nature: philosophy of science and philosophy of nature in synthesis. washington, d.c.: catholic university of america press, 1996.

george coyne

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

Roman Catholicism. The term, which denotes the faith and practice of Christians who are in communion with the Pope, is used especially of Catholicism as it has existed since the Reformation, in contradistinction to Protestant bodies. Whereas in the early centuries the Church had to clarify the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation and in the Middle Ages concentrated on the relation of God and man through grace and the sacraments, post Tridentine theologians have been especially concerned with the structure and prerogatives of the Church, the position of the BVM in the economy of salvation, and the function of Pope as Vicar of Christ on earth, culminating in the dogma of infallibility promulgated at the First Vatican Council in 1870. In the 20th cent. an attempt was made to bring the Church into closer communication with the modern world. This was especially associated with the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), the use of the vernacular in worship, and a more liberal attitude towards Christians of other denominations.

From an external point of view RCism presents itself as an organized hierarchy of bishops and priests, with the Pope at its head. Supernatural life is normally mediated to individual Christians by members of the hierarchy in the seven sacraments, which cover the whole life of RCs. The centre of this liturgical life is the Mass (or Eucharist), attendance at which is obligatory on all Sundays and Feasts of Obligation, or on the previous evening.

In post-Reformation Catholicism the religious life increased in scope and size. New orders, of whom the Jesuits were the most influential, were founded to engage in teaching, nursing, and social work. The period since the Second World War has seen the growth of ‘lay congregations’, such as the ‘Little Brothers’ inspired by the ideals of Charles de Foucauld; they seek to combine an element of contemplation with the discipline of earning their living, often in industrial society. The traditional religious orders have also undergone considerable reorganization. Despite some changes in emphasis, the primary aim of the RC Church remains the sanctification of its members and the conversion of souls. See also previous entry.

modernism, Roman Catholic A movement of a group of European intellectuals to open Roman Catholic thinking to modern philosophical ideas and historical criticism of the Bible. Although condemned by Pope Pius X in 1907 the full rigour of the official censorship was later mitigated.

Roman Catholicism

See Christianity, Roman Catholic, Issues in Science and Religion

Roman Catholic Relief Acts. See CATHOLIC RELIEF ACTS.

Roman catholicism. See catholicism.

Roman catholicism See catholicism.