History and Nationalism

With the passing of Pope Francis, commentators began the long debate over his legacy and place in history. I will refrain from such speculation, wishing simply to begin this column by thanking Francis for one of his last official public statements: a letter calling for a renewal of the study of Church history. History has always been something of a poor stepchild among the disciplines deemed essential to the Catholic intellectual life. The heavy hand of philosophy and a philosophized theology has privileged “timeless truth” over the “truth in time” model found in the historical narrative that shapes the Bible.

Despite his prominence and influence, the Thomistic philosopher Etienne Gilson suffered greatly at the hands of rival Thomists, who saw his efforts to introduce a historical dimension to the study of philosophy as a first step on the slippery slope toward relativism. These fears seemed confirmed by the turn away from orthodoxy that accompanied the embrace of historical models of thinking in the decades following the Second Vatican Council.

Nationalism and the spirit of America

I would like to consider a different danger in historical thinking, one that sheds a different light on the wrong turns after Vatican II: nationalism. In America, at the very least, much of what orthodox Catholics feel went wrong after Vatican II can be attributed to the desire of American Catholic leaders to show the rest of America that the Catholic Church was in tune with the spirit of America. This was, moreover, not a new development of the 1960s, but a persistent American Catholic concern, one that shaped the writing of American Catholic history from the origins of the discipline in the late nineteenth century.

The writings of these earlier historians seem pious and reverent compared with the oppositional tone taken by some post-Vatican II Catholic historians, yet the deference of these historians to American Church authorities belies their quiet challenge to at least one aspect of Church teaching: the relation between the Church and the State.

Prior to the 1965 Vatican II document Dignitatis Humanae, Church teaching offered no clear endorsement of American-style religious pluralism or religious disestablishment; for almost a hundred years before Dignitatis Humanae, American Catholic historians wrote American history as if it had. John Courtney Murray had been silenced for making such claims within the field of theology; American Catholic historians enjoyed a relatively free hand in making similar claims due largely to the comparatively low standing of history in the Catholic intellectual life during this time.

The nationalism of American Catholic historians was no accident. History as a modern discipline arose in the nineteenth century, largely as an exercise in explaining the rise of modern nation-states. From this, we get our notion of history as “politics past,” which still provides the basic structure of most textbook narratives. Often extolled by conservatives as “real history,” the centering of politics came at the expense of an earlier centering of the Church. The nation state could only emerge once the international character of the Church had been eliminated, either through the formal break achieved by Protestant princes or the de facto nationalization of the Church by Catholic absolute monarchs.

Secular and Protestant European historians celebrated these changes as progress. Catholic historians were somewhat adrift, falling into nostalgia for the Middle Ages or fighting against secularists over the role of religion in the national identity of traditionally Catholic countries (e.g., France).

America presented unique challenges to Catholic historians during this first age of nationalism. Founded by declaring political independence from Great Britain, America could never achieve true cultural independence from its Protestant motherland. Faced with the multiplicity of Protestant sects and inspired by the Enlightenment’s rationalism and principle of religious toleration, the Founders established the first Western nation without an established church. The generation that succeeded the Founders experienced an unexpected revival of Protestantism that for many rendered the fact of formal disestablishment moot: by the 1830s, evangelicals began to speak of America as a Christian nation, understanding that term as referring to Protestant Christianity and very definitely excluding Catholics. By mid-century, Catholic immigrants were pouring into America, committed to retaining the distinctive beliefs and practices that so offended Protestants but just as committed to claiming their right to consider themselves fully American.

The political and pastoral challenges of this era came to shape the writing of the first generation of American Catholic historians (and most subsequent ones as well). So too did the new standard of “objectivity” associated with the work of Leopold von Ranke, the German scholar generally acknowledged as the founder of modern academic history. John Gilmary Shea (1824-1892) stands as the first American Catholic historian who wrote both to serve the needs of the Church in America and earn the respect of secular academics. Shea followed the German model by promoting the study of American Catholic history through the use of a wide range of primary source documents.

In 1884, the same year as the founding of the American Historical Association, Shea founded the U.S. Catholic Historical Society to promote this new approach to history. Shea was, to be sure, respectful and deferential to the Church in all his writings; however, he was just as respectful and deferential to America. America, alas, did not return the deference. Anti-Catholicism remained strong among America’s intellectual elites, and mainstream scholars largely ignored Shea’s work. Undaunted, Catholic historians believed that the commitment to new scholarly standards itself reinforced the argument for Catholic belonging in America.

Peter Guilday (1884-1947) was undoubtedly the leader of these efforts in the years between the two world wars. Like Shea, Guilday fully embraced the modern scientific approach to history and sought to secure for it a firm place in Catholic higher education. In the tradition of the time, he established Catholic equivalents to secular institutions: he founded The Catholic Historical Review (CHR) in 1915 and explicitly modeled it on the secular American Historical Review; four years later, he co-founded the American Catholic Historical Association (ACHA), modeled on the American Historical Association. Most of Guilday’s contemporaries founded distinctly Catholic parallel institutions to insulate Catholics from the corrupting influence of secular institutions; Guilday founded his journal and professional society precisely to engage the secular world. Guilday’s motives were noble, but decidedly mixed. Speaking to the broader community of American historians, he once wrote:

We are all Americans, Catholic or non-Catholic, proud of our citizenship in this country, and we can all meet as brothers of the same household in the laboratory of historical research with the same enthusiastic hopes for the future and with the same strong love for the deeds of the men and the generations who have preceded us in this roseate land of opportunity.

Guilday here speaks in two registers: the professional and the patriotic. He holds out hope that the common standards of the new “scientific” history will function much like the common standards of the natural sciences, uniting scholars of any and no faith in the common pursuit of truth. Yet he also points to the potential for the study of American history to unite Catholics and non-Catholics in their common identity as Americans. Guilday never doubted that Catholics could be fully Catholic and fully American; many non-Catholic scholars did. As long as Catholic scholars worked primarily in separate Catholic institutions, they could continue to believe in the compatibility of the two sides of their dual identity.

A fault line and changes

This situation began to change in the era of World War II, some two decades before Vatican II. The war against Nazi Germany had de-legitimated racial and religious prejudice. In America, this opened the door to Jews in higher education and gave urgency to the fight for civil rights for African Americans. Doors opened as well for Catholics, yet anti-Catholicism of some sort proved strikingly resilient.

The writing of American Catholic history once again revealed a telling fault line. The key figure here is Msgr. John Tracy Ellis (1905-1992). A successor to Guilday as the leader of the field of American Catholic history, Ellis published American Catholicism (1956) in the prestigious Chicago History of American Civilization series. A brief narrative synthesis charged with covering the entirety of Catholic history in America, the book seemed to indicate secular acceptance of Catholic scholarship, even as it revealed persistent anxieties about the place of Catholics in America.

Despite the vocal patriotism of American Catholics from the Founding onward, public Catholics such as Ellis still felt the need to assert, once again: “the fundamental principle of separation of Church and State has always been accepted by the American hierarchy from the time of Archbishop Carroll to our own day. . . . There is not a bishop in the American Church today who would not wholeheartedly subscribe [to that principle].” Careful to avoid an explicit accusation of anti-Catholicism, Ellis simply states that Americans who continue to doubt Catholic devotion to democracy have simply allowed “their emotions and prejudices to override their reason.”

Elsewhere, Ellis seems to lay the blame for any persistent anti-Catholicism squarely at the feet of Catholics themselves. In 1955, Ellis published an article, “American Catholics and the Intellectual Life.” A scathing attack on Catholic anti-intellectualism, it set the tone for the trajectory of much of Catholic higher education to this day. With a vitriol worthy of a nineteenth-century Nativist, Ellis attacks the mediocrity of Catholic intellectual life. Catholics simply have made no significant achievement in any area of intellectual life. Even in the field most distinctively Catholic, Thomistic philosophy, Catholic institutions fall woefully short of secular standards: the best work in that field came out of Princeton and the University of Chicago.

A historian by training, Ellis surely felt the shame more powerfully than Catholic theologians and philosophers who had built up powerful fiefdoms within Catholic institutions. As we have seen, Catholic historians were far more outward-looking, trying for decades to collaborate with and earn the respect of secular historians. Decades of fighting for respect had come to nothing. Something had to change.

The soul-searching inspired by Ellis’s critique happened to occur at a time when the Second Vatican Council called for a new openness to the world. These two forces converged at the infamous 1967 Land O’Lakes Conference. A gathering of Catholic educators under the leadership of Father Theodore Hesburgh of the University of Notre Dame, the conference published a vision statement, “The Idea of the Catholic University”, which the historian Philip Gleason long ago described as a “declaration of independence from the hierarchy.”

Though many in attendance were themselves clerics, those present judged the traditional notion that Catholic scholarship should somehow serve the Church as an insurmountable obstacle to academic excellence. A Catholic university must be a university first and Catholic second. Theology and philosophy would retain a certain pride of place, but even these disciplines were to conform to secular standards of scholarship.

In such a climate, the willingness to challenge orthodox Catholic teachings in theology and philosophy became a badge of “excellence.”

Liberal triumphalism 

The situation in history was a bit different. The stakes seemed lower, as history rarely dealt directly with sensitive doctrinal truths. Nonetheless, history, more than the carefully monitored fields of theology and philosophy, had an established track record of anticipating changes in Church teaching. Long before Dignitatis Humanae (1965), Catholic historians had been asserting the truth of American-style religious pluralism and democracy. Is it any wonder that post-Vatican II American Catholics continued to follow the spirit of the American age in their own time?

The historian Jay Dolan captured this zeitgeist in his 1985 work, The American Catholic Experience. A sweeping narrative synthesis, the book far outpaces Ellis’s American Catholicism in scholarly heft, yet carries on the tradition of writing the kind of history that shows how Catholics belong in America. Dolan presents the story of the Church in America as a struggle between two competing visions: “One desired to fashion an indigenous church, an American Catholicism; the other wanted to transplant to the new nation a continental European version of Roman Catholicism.”

The European model dominated the century prior to Vatican II, but now a “new model of church authority is replacing the old, monarchical and clerical conception of church and authority.” So too, a “new model of Catholic morality is replacing the traditional moral code with its exaggerated emphasis on sin and guilt.” Concerned by the “conservative swing” of the pontificate of John Paul II, Dolan assures his reader: “the ways of the past will no longer work. A new spirit is alive in American Catholicism, and the twenty-first century belongs to it.”

Faulty prognostications aside, it is tempting to see Dolan’s liberal triumphalism as reflecting “the spirit of Vatican II” at a high-water mark of dominance within American Catholic historical writing. Yet it also reflects an older spirit of American nationalism that has shaped American Catholic historical writing from the beginning. Guilday and Ellis bet on religious pluralism and won; Dolan and his generation bet on birth control, an issue which waits in vain for its Dignitatis Humanae moment of vindication.

Sadly, for all their real differences, pre- and post-Vatican II American Catholic historians both sought to align the Church with America rather than America with the Church.