By JAMES BARESEL
It would be easy for a reader of Leslie Woodcock Tentler’s American Catholics: A History (Yale University Press: 2020) to see it as mixture of nostalgic regard for a lost past with dissident liberal theology that might be useful for those able to discriminate between its factual information and the theological viewpoint of its author.
More perceptive readers will see in it a mixture of nostalgic regard for a lost past with dissident liberal theology packed full of subtle clues as to just how in the world people can arrive at such a combination of beliefs and attitudes.
The more straightforward reason for this apparently bizarre phenomenon, one perhaps predictable to some and shocking to others, provides the book with much of its substance — the fact that there were theological dissent and leftist politics already constituted significant elements of the life of the Church in the United States over half a century before St. John XXIII was elected Pope.
Almost from its earliest days, modernism attracted not inconsiderable sympathy here, usually among those tending toward the “Americanism” condemned by Pope Leo XIII, through the underdevelopment of American Catholic intellectual life and the still limited international importance of the United States, rending this very much a following of European modernists’ lead.
The decades between the world wars saw the growth of a leftist “Catholic social movement,” with Dorothy Day a prominent voice by the mid-1930s. When Pope Pius XI reiterated the Church’s condemnation of artificial birth control in Casti Connubii, the practice had already become something of a problem among lay Catholics.
Unfortunately Woodcock’s exposition gives the impression that while the foregoing orientations may have attained limited popularity, they faced little in the way of active opposition (aside from that provided by certain clerical circles), and so smoothly and logically expanded until they became ubiquitous in the aftermath of Vatican II.
No mention is made of Russell Kirk, Christopher Dawson (who spent four years in our country as a professor at Harvard), Dietrich von Hildebrand, William F. Buckley and Brent Bozell — all of whom had well-established public reputations by the mid-1950s. American interest in Evelyn Waugh is touched on in a purely literary context. Fulton Sheen, being impossible to ignore, is mentioned twice in passing.
Mother Angelica and EWTN receive not a word when Woodcock moves on to the second half of the twentieth century. Neither does Pat Buchanan or the movement to preserve the Tridentine Mass. In fact the sole anti-leftist to receive sustained attention is Fr. Charles Coughlin — whose support for a command economy and hostility to the class hierarchy placed him closer to the European fascists with whom he in some ways sympathized than to traditional conservatives.
The book’s thorough (if slanted) analysis of older Catholics leftists is not, however, matched by any indication its author is even aware of the second reason why dissident Catholics can be nostalgic for elements of an earlier era’s Catholic life — the dissidents’ tendency to treat their membership in the Church as membership of a cultural tribe rather than of an institution that demands intellectual assent to its doctrines by those who belong to it.
While those with such a mindset will profess loyalty to whatever aspects of Catholicism they have personally and arbitrarily decided constitute its “essential core,” in practice they treat much of what the Church teaches to be essential as mere “external or time-bound structure or opinions” — as unnecessary for the Catholic tribe as the fallen monarchy is for the French tribe.
The differences between tribal Catholicism and orthodox Catholicism can result in very different attitudes toward the American Catholic subcultures of the past. Faithful Catholics will judge those subcultures by doctrinal standards, and even if the judgment is largely positive might find little that is personally appealing in such accidental and incidental aspects of them as the Catholic Youth Organization.
But it is precisely these accidental and incidental aspects of the subculture that the tribal Catholic will view with nostalgic regard as part of the “lived communal experience” of the tribe. This is why theologically lukewarm and dissident periodicals have tended to be the ones publishing articles on such “cute” topics as “how an Irish priest and an Italian priest learned to share a rectory in Brooklyn.”
For tribal Catholics, that is what being Catholic is all about. Faithful Catholics will be more interested in writings about doctrine or prayer or Church history or how to form their children.
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