A Book Review… The Cost Of Assimilation

By JUDE DOUGHERTY

Shaw, Russell. Catholics in America: Religious Identity and Cultural Assimilation From John Carroll to Flannery O’Connor. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2016; 141 pp.

This is a delightful book, to say the least, in part because Russell Shaw has a way of uncovering facts you wish you had known all along. The book follows upon and reinforces Shaw’s previous work, American Church.

In the preface to the volume, Shaw suggests that the Church may need to reassess its former policy of unconditional assimilation into American secular culture. The cost of assimilation, he believes, has grown unacceptably high as secular culture has become increasingly hostile to Catholic life. He was not the first to pass such a judgment.
Orestes Brownson, subsequent to his conversion in 1844, expressed a similar thought: “There is scarcely a trait in the American character that is not more or less hostile to Catholicity.” Shaw muses: “My country right or wrong” — words associated with the naval hero, Stephen Decatur — may be a thing of the past.
In his effort to determine Catholic identity, Shaw investigates the lives of 15 remarkable men and women. In chronological order, he begins with John Carroll.
John Carroll was carefully chosen to become the first bishop in the United States, and subsequently the first archbishop of Baltimore. Carroll was a member of a wealthy and respected Catholic family of southern Maryland. Ordained a Jesuit priest in 1773, after studying at St. Omer College in what is now Belgium, he was chosen to lead the fledging church in America because officials in the Vatican were desirous of “selecting a man who was neither headstrong nor weak.”
The young Carroll was called “a gentleman of learning and abilities” by no less a person than John Adams, who was to become the second president of the United States. Franklin concurred and took the French-speaking Carroll on a mission to Canada intended to persuade French Catholics to join the thirteen colonies in their struggle against Great Britain.
The Quebec Act, voted by the British Parliament in 1774, was specifically cited by the Continental Congress in the Declaration of Independence as one of the colonists’ grievances against King George III. The Act had granted the free exercise of religion to French-speaking Catholics, against opposition by the thirteen colonies. Later, when Franklin was serving as U.S. ambassador to the French Court, he was asked by authorities at the Vatican’s Propaganda Fide for his opinion, and he recommended Carroll. Appointments to bishoprics in those days were usually vetted by secular authorities.
Among his many accomplishments, Carroll founded the school that was to become Georgetown University. He selected the architect and laid the cornerstone of the first cathedral in the United States. Later he appointed bishops for the four new dioceses created under his tenure.
A subsequent chapter examines the career of Archbishop John Hughes (1797-1864) of New York, who is described as a politician as well as a priest. Clearly as a member of the “Church militant,” he was responsible, in the face of opposition, for the planning and construction of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
In researching his subject, Shaw has a penchant for the obscure but often relevant fact as he weaves together these brief biographies. At age 19, Hughes decided to study for the priesthood. He applied for admission to the seminary at Mount St. Mary’s in Emmitsburg, Md. He was turned down because he was judged to be academically unprepared; he was hired as a gardener instead. Fortunately, he had become acquainted with Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton, who recognized his ability and used her influence to get him accepted as a student.
Elizabeth Ann Seton, a pious Episcopalian from New York, came into the Church as a result of an experience in Italy. She was attending Mass with Catholic friends when a boorish English tourist sotto voce expressed his contempt for the congregation who obviously by their piety believed in the Real Presence.
That got her thinking and led her to examine why Catholics so believed. She was eventually received into the Church in 1805. Archbishop John Carroll confirmed her. Elizabeth married William McGee Seton in 1794 and upon his death, four years later, was obliged as a result of a family tragedy to care for her husband’s younger siblings, whom she later referred to as her children.
Encouraged by Louis Dubourg, a priest of the Order of St. Sulpice, she not only created a school for her children and others but also a Women’s Institute, modeled after the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. First housed in the lower chapel of St. Mary’s Seminary on Paca Street in Baltimore, she later moved to Emmitsburg, where she opened St. Joseph’s Free School and St. Joseph’s Academy. The order flourished and established hundreds of schools across the country. Shaw provides some amazing statistics. Today Mother Seton is commemorated as the foundress of the Catholic parochial school system.
Orestes Brownson, like Mother Seton, a convert to Catholicism, became the foremost Catholic intellectual of his period. An ardent advocate of the Union during the American Civil War, he hoped for a postwar reconciliation with the South and was disgusted by the vindictive policy pursued by Congress after the death of Lincoln.
When John Henry Newman was preparing to establish a Catholic university in Dublin, Brownson was the first person he invited to join the faculty. The appointment was vetoed by the Irish bishops because Brownson was considered too controversial.
It should be noted that during the First Vatican Council Brownson was identified with the “Ultramontanists” for strongly supporting the doctrine of papal infallibility. He never wavered. Another fact: Brownson was instrumental in the conversion of his friend Isaac Hecker, who became the founder of the Paulist Fathers.
Subsequent chapters examine the careers, or should I say, contributions to the American character by Fr. Michael McGivney, James Cardinal Gibbons, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, Al Smith, Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop Fulton Sheen, John F. Kennedy, Dorothy Day, Fr. John Courtney Murray, and Flannery O’Connor.
The volume ends with a tribute to the saintly Flannery O’Connor. She was not an evangelist in the sense that many presented in this volume were, but an artist. Writing from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy, she said of her work, “All my stories are about the action of grace on the character who is not very willing to support it.” She will say, “The meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and that what I see in the world I see in relation to that.”
As a child, she attended a parochial school in Savannah, Ga., until her father’s failing health forced a move to her mother’s home in Milledgeville, Ga. There she attended Peabody High School and later Georgia State College for Women.
A career opportunity occurred in 1946, when she was accepted as a participant by the prestigious Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. There she became acquainted with Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom of Southern Agrarian fame. It was at the workshop that she began writing fiction and acquired the habit of attending daily Mass. Diagnosed with lupus in 1950, the disease that killed her father, she accepted her illness with admirable courage. She continued to write and publish. Before her death, she had published two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and 32 short stories. A collection of her stories was published posthumously.
It must be said that Russell Shaw’s dry humor pervades the volume — for those who are attentive.