Henry Ford once declared, “History is Bunk.” Personal preferences aside, Ford’s blunt dismissal of the past reflects a still-dominant bias toward the future deeply rooted in America’s self-understanding as a nation of progress. A steep decline in the number of history majors among college undergraduates suggests that this bias remains alive and well among most educated Americans.
Ironically, recent years have also seen previously esoteric debates within the historical profession make their way to the center of today’s culture wars. In 2019, left-leaning academic historians partnered with the New York Times to produce the “1619 Project,” a work of revisionist public history that took the year of the first arrival of African slaves in Virginia as the defining moment of American history. Conservative politicians expressed outrage and, with the assistance of conservative historians, crafted an alternative, “patriotic” history, the “1776 Report.”
Is this of any concern to Catholics or the Church in America? To my knowledge, no Catholic pundit has chimed in with a strong position based on Church teaching. On the one hand, this avoids dragging the Church into the messy mud wrestling of contemporary politics. On the other hand, the silence suggests that Catholic tradition has nothing significant to say on the matter.
A distinct view of history
In this essay, I would like to argue that the Church actually does have a position in this debate. The Church has a very distinct view of history rooted in Jesus’s command to the Apostles: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation” (Mk 16:15). History encompasses every human activity, but the Church sees the spread of the Gospel as the highest human activity and judges historical epochs by the success or failure of fidelity to Jesus’s command.
The events signified by “1619” and “1776” have a place in that history, but one subordinate to the primary story of spreading the Gospel. For a Catholic, this is not “religious history” or “Church history,” but simply history. The spread of the Gospel is itself historically contingent, finding different expressions in various places and times. For a historically appropriate intervention into current debates, I believe Catholics should look at American history through a different date: 1531, the year of the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe to the Indigenous peasant, Juan Diego.
The Guadalupe event does not appear in most mainstream American history textbooks. Until recently, devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe did not figure much in the lives of non-Latino U.S. Catholics. I grew up in the 1970s. Despite the general decline in Marian devotion during that decade, my Catholic grammar school still passed on stories of Our Lady of Lourdes and Our Lady of Fatima.
I did not learn about Our Lady of Guadalupe until high school. The priest who taught freshman Latin had been a missionary in Mexico and had a special devotion to Guadalupe; students who had not done their homework would often encourage him to tell the story of Guadalupe to escape discovery (and his pitiless wrath!). With some exceptions, Guadalupe remained a particular ethnic devotion throughout my youth and adult years. Increasing immigration from Latin America increased the visibility of Guadalupan devotion, and over the past few decades, many non-Latino U.S. Catholics have embraced Guadalupe as their own. In a surprising departure from their early efforts to downplay ethnicity in favor of a generic American Catholicism, the Knights of Columbus have in recent years promoted Guadalupe as a distinctly American devotion without minimizing its Mexican origins and traditions.
The Guadalupan event and devotion
The rise of Guadalupan devotion is a fact of American history. The Guadalupe event is a way to understand American history.
The context of this event carried with it historical and cultural dimensions distinct from all other Marian apparitions. Our Lady did not simply appear to a lowly peasant but spoke a message of love and mercy to an Indigenous convert whose people had recently experienced a catastrophic conquest by a superior Catholic power. Further, she left as evidence of her love the miraculous tilma, an image of herself with the dress and features of an Indigenous princess. As Jesus became man to suffer with us, so Mary became indigenous to suffer with a conquered people. After a decade of failed evangelization on the part of Spanish missionaries, Mary began to draw Indigenous people to the faith through an image of herself that they could recognize as one of them. Over time, despite the persistence of Spanish dominance, a distinctly New World civilization arose that blended Indigenous and Spanish elements into a new Catholic civilization.
Historians of Latin American culture call this process of mixing mestizaje. It is, in one sense, yet another example of the inculturation of the universal faith into particular cultures that has been going on since the small community of Jewish Christians in first-century Palestine brought the Gospel to the Greco-Roman civilization of the Mediterranean world. More recently, the philosopher Rocco Buttiglione has made a bolder claim: this mestizo civilization stands as a distinctly Catholic, “alternative modernity.” In contrast to cultural historians, who often fall into a romantic primitivism by privileging the pagan elements of this inculturation, Buttiglione insists that this achievement stands as distinctly Catholic and distinctly modern.
The discovery of the New World marked the beginning of modernity, shattering the geographic and cultural assumptions of a parochial and relatively unified European Christian world. Whereas some Spaniards refused to embrace the New World people, even to the point of denying their humanity (the better to exploit them through slavery), figures like Bartolomé de las Casas argued for their full humanity and the moral and spiritual necessity of integrating them into the Gospel life.
This achievement has for too long been either forgotten or taken for granted. The New World was new and troubling, but the Church embraced its newness, drawing people into the universal truth of the Church while retaining those aspects of indigenous culture compatible with the Gospel.
A different constellation of values
U.S. Catholics who find this story inspiring may wonder what it has to do with current debates about American history. I would answer: everything. In Buttiglione’s account, the modernity to which Guadalupe stands as an alternative is North America, or more pointedly, Anglo-Protestant modernity. The United States never developed anything close to a mestizo civilization with respect to its indigenous populations, opting instead for confinement of its conquered people to reservations.
Until very recently, this refusal to allow for cultural mixing also shaped, in a similar fashion, the official modern Protestant response to other pre-modern cultures that threatened its purity: namely, the culture of the immigrants who flooded into America from the 1840s to the 1920s. A significant portion of those immigrants were Catholic, who were told that to become good Americans, they had to abandon their traditional language and culture, and, ultimately, their religion. In the North American context, Catholics were the equivalent of the Indigenous peoples of Latin America: if not technically a conquered people, they were absolutely a subordinate one.
Our Lady did not bless Catholic immigrants with a miraculous apparition. Still, the spirit of Guadalupe lived on as these Catholics refused to submit to Protestant modernity and crafted their own “alternative modernity” that managed to synthesize traditional beliefs and cultural practices with something radically new: the utterly alien civilization of modern, urban industrial capitalism. This synthesis was contentious. Many Irish American clergy who heroically defended the Catholic faith would have been happy to see Italian and Polish cultural traditions pass away. Still, up until the middle of the twentieth century, Catholics maintained enough of their traditions to stand as a people apart within America—or, to use Buttiglione’s term, an “alternative modernity” within America.
This story, the extended narrative of 1531, falls far below the radar of those who debate the significance of 1619 and 1776. It draws its life from a different constellation of values, centered not on “freedom” but on community and solidarity. Sadly, this is a story little known by most American Catholics. As a scholar, I encountered the academic study of American Catholicism only after many years of laboring in “mainstream” American cultural history. It was a revelation that has inspired much of my subsequent work. The tremendous body of academic writing on American Catholic history has largely remained inaccessible to a non-academic audience. In my American Pilgrimage (Ignatius Press, 2022), I tried to synthesize this material and present it in a reader-friendly narrative format.
The Church’s greatest contribution to America
Writing a one-volume narrative history presented challenges beyond accessibility. Forsaking academic analysis for narrative raises the question: which narrative?
In this, I found myself at odds with the entire tradition of American Catholic historical writing. As I reflected in an earlier essay on history and nationalism, most historians in this tradition have narrated the story of the Church in America as the story of Catholics becoming fully American. Always kept in check by the endurance of ethnic subcultures, this Americanism finally triumphed in the 1960s. For all the divisions that have wracked the Church since the 1960s, Americanism (despite its liberal and conservative variations) is perhaps the one thing that all American Catholic can agree. For all the current talk of Catholic “identity,” Catholics have largely lost the cultural distinctiveness that once set them apart from other Americans. Whatever remains of authentic Catholic faith, it exists apart from authentic peoplehood.
What does it mean to be a people? We cannot turn back the clock, but the past provides models that can inspire future cultural renewal. There are, of course, many “pasts” from which to choose. In my study of American Catholic history, I have drawn my greatest inspiration from stories rooted in an urban, ethnic Catholic parish as it developed from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. The social and cultural achievements of these communities stand as the greatest achievement of the Church in America.
In a very distinct way, it is the Church’s greatest contribution to America—not because it contributes to some larger, greater thing that is America, but because it provides America a witness to Catholic truth expressed through the endurance of traditional faith and communal culture in a modern secular world.
For much of its history, this world apart was indeed the target of anti-Catholic prejudice. Still, as that actual urban Catholic world was passing away, it gained increasing attention from the non-Catholic world. In the 1970s, Americans who had no interest in the doctrinal debates of the post-Vatican II era nonetheless flocked to movie theaters to get a glimpse of a separate urban Catholic world, usually of the Italian-gangster variation. Even as that world recedes ever further, popular artists continue to mine the cultural gold of that world. It is hard to imagine a compelling film made about post-ethnic Catholic life in America.
The interminable battles over doctrine will do nothing to address the problem of culture. In a sad variation on Berthold Brecht’s dictum, “first bread, then morality,” some contemporary Catholic activists seem to insist, “first doctrine, then culture.” Looking historically, I tend to think these people have it backward. Proper catechesis is necessary, of course, but hardly sufficient. In “Requiem for a Parish,” her classic essay on the changes in Catholic life since Vatican II, Emily Stimpson observed: “Culture, not catechesis, was the framework that held the immigrant American Catholic Church together.”
For all the current talk of Catholic culture and identity in America, I find very little engagement with actual examples of those Catholic cultures most proximate to contemporary American Catholic life. Such cultural engagement requires an engagement with history, one that flows not from 1619 or from 1776, but from 1531.
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The first image I remember of the Blessed Mother growing up was a large painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe that hung in the living room. OLOG is what we chose to have inscribed on my mother’s headstone.
I often visit this site just to read your comments, I am rarely disappointed. Some of my ancestors had already come from Spain to Mexico prior to the Virgen appearing to Juan Diego.So we share something, who needs the Mayflower or Plymouth Rock?
Our granddaughter was just Confirmed at Corpus Christi Church in Hasbrouck Heights NJ. She attended their Catholic School for 8 years (10 if you include pre-school). The cost for this Catholic education was no doubt between $50-$75,000. She is now in high school at Holy Angels Catholic school in Bergen County reported to be the most expensive in the area at some $20,000 per annum. (Her high school education will cost 1.5x the cost of our first house.)
As her Confirmation gift, my wife and I purchased a copy of the book, “Diary of a Young Jesuit: All This Beauty Blooming.” When she finished unwrapping it, she turned to her father and asked, “What’s a Jesuit?”
You can be assured that by the time I left 6th grade in my Catholic education, I knew all about Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brebeuf, and the American Martyrs. That’s because Catholic history was deemed important in a Catholic school before the Age of Revisionism in the Catholic Church began in the late 1960’s.
Parenthetically, it probably was a good thing that I never got a chance to shake hands with the confirming bishop after Mass because he was too busy with the now-customary “photo-op with the bishop.” I was intending to remark to him that it was sad to realize that ten years from that day there was a good chance that none of these Confirmands would be practicing Catholics, let alone evangelizers on fire with the Holy Spirit.
Thank you for sharing her reaction. This is really pathetic.
For heaven’s sake, I hope nothing like this is every formalized. How many times does the Church have to imitate the World, only to have it be an embarrassment, before we learn our lesson? We don’t need to imitate; we need to be authentic.
55 years ago: “Wow, this ‘Rock and Roll’ is really catching on with the young people, but some of its messages are not good. What if we made Christian Rock and Roll? I’m sure the kids would just lap that up! Maybe we could even have it played during the Mass!”
20 years ago: I was the faculty representative for the Newman Club at a small university. Then we were assigned a new priest, who (among other things) suggested changing the name of the club to “Catholic Pride” — despite (or because of?) the obvious implied similarity to a “Gay Pride” club, and despite the fact that pride is the first of the deadly sins.
Perhaps you misunderstand me. The term “1531 Project” was simply to place my views in a contemporary debate. I do not propose Guadalupe as yet another ideology through which to read history. She is my way of expressing a Christ-centered history in a manner most appropriate to the history of North America.
Far from imitating the World, I am trying to reorient Catholic thinking about history to a very old conception of Christ-centered history, a concept largely abandoned by modern Catholics or confined to theology narrowly understood. My sense is that American Catholics who care about history tend to view it through one of the political ideologies represented by the dates 1619 and 1776. These are the Catholics who have followed the World, in your sense of that term. I am trying to offer a Christ-centered corrective. Do you find this objectionable? If so, may I ask, what would you offer in its place?
Your message is quite clear.
In much the same way, the “Catholic Pride club” would, ostensibly, continue on in the same way the Newman Club had. Only the name was supposed to change. But names have meanings. Ask Abraham, ask Israel, ask Peter.
My objection is to the name you chose.
Shannon offers 1531 as an alternative version (to 1619 or 1776) for modernity. But, then, “Alps on Alps arise.” His thesis still operates within the Western “periodization” of history—an unquestioned template extending from Ancient, to Classical, to Medieval, to…Modernity—what C.S. Lewis termed ‘chronological snobbery.”
Two comments:
FIRST, in the modern world, what is one to say to the totally alternative world of Islam, with its self-understanding that the “germ” of Islam comes from outside/before time or history, altogether? That is, the original and ahistorical orientation toward God (like natural law?), with the wraparound Qur’an as the “uncreated” and dictated essence of God–this replacing the eternal Triune Second Person. And replacing the Logos/Jesus Christ—the Incarnation into time as the center of universal human history (more than an episode on the periodized timeline)–now a revered prophet foretelling the coming of Muhammad?
Instead of alternative narratives of history, for example Puritan or the Guadalupan in America, we have two existentially bipolar worldviews which accept either the Self-disclosure of the One who is Triune, with the Holy Spirit then (!) indwelling the sacramental and transnational “Mystical Body of Christ;” or, under the natural religion of a distant and totally inscrutable Allah, the ahistorical and cosmopolitan brotherhood of the Islamic “umma”. Islam as the original religion from before any and all time-bound/fragmentary/fallen-away historical religions, e.g., Judaism as a blasphemy with the Gold Calf, and Triune Christianity as a polytheistic “triad” like other non-monotheistic paganisms.
SECOND, which brings us to the Second Vatican Council and its more or less convergent interreligious discussion. What might the Council of have added to Nostra Aetate if the inquiry of a paused Muslim thinker had been published prior to the Council, rather than after:
“It all comes down to knowing whether one should hold strictly to the fundamental religious values which were those of Abraham and Moses, on pain of falling into blasphemy—as the Muslims believe; or whether God has called men to approach him more closely, revealing to them little by little their fundamental condition as sinful men, and the forgiveness that transforms them and prepares them for the beatific vision—as Christian dogma teaches.” (al Akkad in 1956, as cited by Jean Guitton, “The Great Heresies and Church Councils,” 1965).
QUESTION: How to dialogue with Islam across the vast spaces of the Alps-on-Alps, or between the post-Christian 21st-century West and a resurgent 7th-century Arabia?
Bishop Sheen proposed that Mary, the Mother of God (!)—not an expansion of today’s town hall “synodality,” or even cosmopolitan “fraternity” alone—would be the bridge…
That is a very interesting comment of Bishop Sheen’s that I have never seen before. After seven years living in the Muslim world I also have a strong feeling that Mary is the bridge.
I keep repeating this story so please excuse but some years ago a UK art exhibition featured a blasphemous work depicting the Blessed Mother.
Christians complained but to no avail. Muslims complained and the piece of “art” was immediately removed from the exhibit. The Muslims explained that they also honor Mary and found the exhibit deeply offensive.
During the colonial period and early days of the Republic, we were a Protestant nation, with the exception of Maryland, a haven for Catholics. The great Irish immigration of the mid 19th century and Italian immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th century changed that, especially in the Northeast. Over the past 50 years we have had a large influx of Catholic Hispanics. These waves of Catholic immigrants have changed the nature of the US, but there is still that strong Protestant heritage.
The culture differed though in Florida, the Gulf Coast, and the South West. And still does.
Yes, I forgot to mention Louisiana with its French and Spanish influence. Very different than the rest of the South. You are correct, there is French and Spanish influence along the Gulf Coast in Alabama,Mississippi and Florida.
I love the New Orleans funerals where the band plays dirges on the way to the cemetery and joyful Jazz on leaving the cemetery. And the Gumbo, Jambalaya and Bourbon drinks.
These people are not grim Puritans.
Definitely not grim Puritans. Especially not with drive-thru daiquiri bars on every corner.
🙂
“Culture, not catechesis, was the framework that held the immigrant American Catholic Church together.”
Yeah and look where that has got us. Some insist ‘first doctrine, then culture’ because love requires obedience. Jesus said, if you love me you will obey my commandments.
Yes, and when that culture eroded, the descendants of immigrants lost their faith.
The story of the Church in 19th C America was filled with battles between Irish clergy and German ones. (cf the campaigns of Bishop John Ireland against the beer-drinking habits of Germans. O the horror!) The Irish, having the advantage of speaking English, out-played Germans because the latter didn’t want to assimilate. WWI made the struggle moot.
The article don’t mention the French influence in North America, predating the American Revolution. That heritage lives on in New Orleans, where even the Germans were Mediterraneanized.
For the record, I learned about Guadalupe back in the 40s because my (Benedictine) grade school showed us a commercial Mexican-made film about the event.
That’s what the French tend to do: enculturate everyone under their governance. So many Spanish, Jewish, German, etc. names have been “Frenchified” over the years and some Louisiana families with those surnames insist they are 100% French. And in a cultural sense that’s true.
There’s a big section of what’s now the USA that really differed from the Puritan /Protestant historical narratives.
Yes,and even within the Protestant historical narrative,there was variance. New England Protestant religious services were more austere. In the South, services were less restrained, with more emotion. All Protestant, but regionally very different.
Very true. Thank you William.
And don’t forget the first Mass in what would become the United States on September 8, 1565 in St. Augustine, Florida. The protestants destroyed that community as soon as they got wind of it.
I really liked this post. Guadalupan devotion is the best way to provide US Catholicism with the consistency and definition its needs to take its proper place.
We observe a radical distinction of culture and ethnicity N of the Rio Grande and S of the Rio Grande. Except for former Mexican territories N of the Rio Grande River that today separates Mexico and the US.
It’s the people. Spain, a markedly Catholic nation especially after the Reconquista and conquest in the Americas did not annihilate the Native Americans, as did Protestant England [and to an extent Catholic France] and their American progeny virtually accomplished – rather they mixed in with them physically creating new bloodlines called Mestizo. Conquistador of the Inca empire Francisco Pizarro married Inca princess Inés Huaylas Yupanqui and brought her with him on return to Spain.
Our Lady of Guadalupe in her miraculous image on an Aztec’s toga is featured as a Mestizo, darker than European, lighter than Native American. Spain and the Aztecs, Mayans, Incas et Al formed a new culture, much as described by philosopher Rocco Buttiglione cited here by Dr Shannon while retaining language and religion from Spain, blessed by Our lady in her appearance and response to devotion to her.