The Americanism Heresy and United States Catholic History

Can one be a loyal American , love your country , have patriotism and still be a devout Catholic? Are people like myself that are Republicans, dare to align ourselves on some issues with the "religious right", involve ourselves with party politics and think Bush is not that bad guilty or least playing with the heresy of Americanism? What in the heck does this "American exceptionalism" term mean?

Those are question I am seeing on the Catholic blogsphere and in print more and more. These questions are not new. They have been asked numerous times in our history. It seems now they are starting to be asked again. Exploring some of these important topics is something I hope to do in the immediate future. A brief introduction.

Americanism-
Americanism is a real heresy. The first thing is to figure out what Americanism is and to find out what it is not. The United States of America is NOT a heresy. Americanism is a heresy. It seems that by ignorance, design, or neglect that point is not being made clear by a few.

Americanism and how this heresy became labeled and what it is about is very interesting. It involves tensions between German American Catholic and Irish American Catholics. It involves Church politics between American Bishops. It involves no small amount of envy by some Europeans that this United States thing and the American Catholic Church was becoming a great power and place of new ideas that showed signs of displacing traditional European powers. It involves the politics and Catholic Church of France a great deal. It also engages real concerns. I shall be getting into Americanism in a post coming up.

For those that like to read ahead here are two pieces that I shall be interacting with as to Americanism
First the actual Papal Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on Americanism. That is Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae.

Second a very interesting Encyclical that Pope Leo the XIII had issued just a few years earlier. That is -LONGINQUA ENCYCLICAL OF POPE LEO XIII ON CATHOLICISM IN THE UNITED STATES

I shall be dealing with more sources and articles but I think it is helpful to look at these two texts.

United States Catholic History-
There seems to be a trend that United States History and especially its early orgins cannot be claimed by Catholics nor should we want too. That is a extreme view but I see variations of it differing degrees of it on the net. As a Citizen of Louisiana, I guess I take a different view. We did not come on the scene that late by the way. Thomas Jefferson pretty much bought us up in that grand real estate deal early on. Louisiana Catholics and those that were absorbed by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase and their descendants have been for the most part loyal Americans. They feel their Catholic patrimony and their American Patrimony and claim both. However Catholics were on the scene since the beginning. There was prejudice against Catholics but that is not the whole story. I shall start interacting with this topic using as one source Life and Times of the Most Rev. John Carroll, Bishop and First Archbishop of Baltimore. Available for Free at the link at Google books. I shall also be getting into such people as Charles Carroll of Carrollton the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. YES we were there!!!! Catholics and their contribution to the United States did not start when the Irish came here because of the potato famine.

American Exceptionalism-
This term is being bantered around alot lately. Not without some cause by the way. American Exceptionalism is according to Wilki:

has been historically referred to as the opinion that the United States differs qualitatively from other developed nations, because of its unique origins, national credo, historical evolution, or distinctive political and religious institutions. The difference is typically expressed as some categorical superiority, to which is usually attached some rationalization or explanation that may vary greatly depending on the historical period and the political context. As Ross (1991) has argued, there are three generic varieties of American exceptionalism:

supernaturalist explanations which emphasize the causal potency of God in selecting America as a "city on a hill" to serve as an example for the rest of the world,
genetic interpretations which emphasize racial traits, ethnicity, or gender, and

environmental explanations such as geography, climate, availability of natural resources, social structure, and type of political economy.

This is of course is being talked about with a Catholic twist often in political debates. The problem is that what is being used as examples of Ameican Exceptionism often are not or at least are not ideas that could be said to be against Church teaching. For instance lately the statements of George Bush as to the United States and it having a mission for Freedom are being called American Exceptionism . The problem is that often these same statements or those similar have been uttered by Popes. There is American exceptionaism and it should be guarded against. But I think we need to try to discover what it is in the first place.


So I shall be going into these topics in the comming week. I will probally start with posts on the issue of Americanism.