I hit on occasion the need for American Catholics to have an understanding of their American Catholic ID. I think it is important for this to be done in a Orthodox and positive way.
There is really quite a Catholic history to the United States. However because of our English roots this gets warped. So much of the teaching of US History is influenced by the political dynamic of English Good and Glorious while everything Spanish and Catholic is Dark and Devious.
I often see Catholic bloggers buying into this lately. The argument is that the country was founded by Protestants and Deist and Catholics were not welcome or a part of it. Therefore just remember where your true loyalties apply etc etc. Where I find this not only silly but wrong in many ways. There does not have to be another big "either/or" all the time as to Catholicism and our American ID.
I have to admit being from Louisiana this whole line of thought gets on my nerves. Louisiana and other parts of the Louisiana purchase were quite Catholic. We were also very much early on the scene. Like 1804!!!!!! Yet this attitude that come from historical forces and is now it seems endorsed by some Catholics causes a great bit of early Catholic American history to be ignored.
Whispers in the Loggia has a great post on the installation of Archbishop Edwin O'Brien's Installation in Baltimore. Check out his other post here O'Brien O'Baltimore: The Maryland Tradition, Vol. XV, Day One . Baltimore is of course the Mother Church of American Catholicism. I am going to force myself to write about people like Bishop Carroll and other Catholics that were involved in our founding. The whole post is great that Whispers provides. Let me excerpt just part of the Homily that O'Brien gave:
I am reminded, as I arrive here in Baltimore, that we are, indeed, surrounded by a “great cloud of witnesses” [Heb. 12.1]. In what is now the State of Maryland, the roster of those witnesses reaches back almost four centuries, to the landing of a small company of Englishmen on St. Clement’s Island on March 25, 1634. It was the feast of the Annunciation, marked by the celebration of the first Mass in Mary’s Land. As the revered patroness of our Archdiocese, may it always remain, Mary’s Land.
In granting the Archdiocese of Baltimore the title of “Premier See,” the Holy See meant to honor this history. It is a history that has been of decisive importance for the Catholic Church in the United States. It is a history that has shaped our beloved Country. And it is a history that played a significant role in the life of the Catholic Church throughout the world. For the Maryland Act of Religious Toleration, adopted in 1649, was an important step – if a limited step – on the hard road that eventually led not only to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution but also, I believe, to the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom.
Maryland was home to the great majority of the tiny Catholic population in the United States at the time of our Declaration of Independence. Here, through the work of men like Archbishop John Carroll and his cousin, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Catholics demonstrated that they, too, could pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the cause of American liberty. And we have done so in every era since, without reservation.In the Archdiocese of Baltimore, the Catholic people of the early Republic demonstrated by deed as well as by argument that there was no inherent contradiction – as many bigots charged – with being completely Catholic and proudly American.Here, began to recede what the distinguished historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., once described as the “deepest prejudice in the history of the American people” – anti-Catholicism.
Here is where Catholics learned to defend the religious liberty of all – a defense that contributed much to the noble tradition of interfaith tolerance and collaboration that has long marked this community.If, as Pope John Paul II often taught, religious freedom is the first of human rights, then the Catholic people of the City of Baltimore and the State of Maryland have, over more than two centuries, played a crucial role in securing one of the foundation stones of the American house of freedom. As new voices are raised in our land today, voices suggesting that moral convictions informed by Catholic faith are unwelcome in the American public square, let all of us recommit ourselves to a robust, informed, and determined defense of religious freedom as the first of the rights of Americans – a right that supports and sustains all of our efforts to shape public policy according to the first principles of justice.
And if the Maryland tradition of Catholicism and its commitment to religious freedom have been important for the United States, that same tradition has also played an valuable role in the life of the universal Church. Our dear friend, the patriarch of Catholic historians, the late Msgr. John Tracy Ellis, recounts that when the ninth archbishop of Baltimore, James Cardinal Gibbons, went to Rome to take possession of his titular church of Santa Maria in Trastevere on March 25, 1887, he preached a sermon in defense of the American relationship of Church and state. This helped accelerate the process of Catholic reflection that eventually led to the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom.That seminal document on religious freedom in turn, reflected the insights of both Maryland’s theological scholarship – the work of Father John Courtney Murray who taught in our Archdiocese at the old Woodstock College—and the interventions of Baltimore’s Archbishop, Lawrence Cardinal Shehan during the third and fourth sessions of Vatican II. And if the Council’s teaching on religious freedom, in its turn, gave Pope John Paul II the weapon with which nonviolently to defeat European communism, well, that too was a fact of history with great resonance here, given the large numbers of Central and Eastern European Catholics who have for so long been a vital part of this Archdiocese.
Great stuff.
There is really quite a Catholic history to the United States. However because of our English roots this gets warped. So much of the teaching of US History is influenced by the political dynamic of English Good and Glorious while everything Spanish and Catholic is Dark and Devious.
I often see Catholic bloggers buying into this lately. The argument is that the country was founded by Protestants and Deist and Catholics were not welcome or a part of it. Therefore just remember where your true loyalties apply etc etc. Where I find this not only silly but wrong in many ways. There does not have to be another big "either/or" all the time as to Catholicism and our American ID.
I have to admit being from Louisiana this whole line of thought gets on my nerves. Louisiana and other parts of the Louisiana purchase were quite Catholic. We were also very much early on the scene. Like 1804!!!!!! Yet this attitude that come from historical forces and is now it seems endorsed by some Catholics causes a great bit of early Catholic American history to be ignored.
Whispers in the Loggia has a great post on the installation of Archbishop Edwin O'Brien's Installation in Baltimore. Check out his other post here O'Brien O'Baltimore: The Maryland Tradition, Vol. XV, Day One . Baltimore is of course the Mother Church of American Catholicism. I am going to force myself to write about people like Bishop Carroll and other Catholics that were involved in our founding. The whole post is great that Whispers provides. Let me excerpt just part of the Homily that O'Brien gave:
I am reminded, as I arrive here in Baltimore, that we are, indeed, surrounded by a “great cloud of witnesses” [Heb. 12.1]. In what is now the State of Maryland, the roster of those witnesses reaches back almost four centuries, to the landing of a small company of Englishmen on St. Clement’s Island on March 25, 1634. It was the feast of the Annunciation, marked by the celebration of the first Mass in Mary’s Land. As the revered patroness of our Archdiocese, may it always remain, Mary’s Land.
In granting the Archdiocese of Baltimore the title of “Premier See,” the Holy See meant to honor this history. It is a history that has been of decisive importance for the Catholic Church in the United States. It is a history that has shaped our beloved Country. And it is a history that played a significant role in the life of the Catholic Church throughout the world. For the Maryland Act of Religious Toleration, adopted in 1649, was an important step – if a limited step – on the hard road that eventually led not only to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution but also, I believe, to the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom.
Maryland was home to the great majority of the tiny Catholic population in the United States at the time of our Declaration of Independence. Here, through the work of men like Archbishop John Carroll and his cousin, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Catholics demonstrated that they, too, could pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the cause of American liberty. And we have done so in every era since, without reservation.In the Archdiocese of Baltimore, the Catholic people of the early Republic demonstrated by deed as well as by argument that there was no inherent contradiction – as many bigots charged – with being completely Catholic and proudly American.Here, began to recede what the distinguished historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., once described as the “deepest prejudice in the history of the American people” – anti-Catholicism.
Here is where Catholics learned to defend the religious liberty of all – a defense that contributed much to the noble tradition of interfaith tolerance and collaboration that has long marked this community.If, as Pope John Paul II often taught, religious freedom is the first of human rights, then the Catholic people of the City of Baltimore and the State of Maryland have, over more than two centuries, played a crucial role in securing one of the foundation stones of the American house of freedom. As new voices are raised in our land today, voices suggesting that moral convictions informed by Catholic faith are unwelcome in the American public square, let all of us recommit ourselves to a robust, informed, and determined defense of religious freedom as the first of the rights of Americans – a right that supports and sustains all of our efforts to shape public policy according to the first principles of justice.
And if the Maryland tradition of Catholicism and its commitment to religious freedom have been important for the United States, that same tradition has also played an valuable role in the life of the universal Church. Our dear friend, the patriarch of Catholic historians, the late Msgr. John Tracy Ellis, recounts that when the ninth archbishop of Baltimore, James Cardinal Gibbons, went to Rome to take possession of his titular church of Santa Maria in Trastevere on March 25, 1887, he preached a sermon in defense of the American relationship of Church and state. This helped accelerate the process of Catholic reflection that eventually led to the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom.That seminal document on religious freedom in turn, reflected the insights of both Maryland’s theological scholarship – the work of Father John Courtney Murray who taught in our Archdiocese at the old Woodstock College—and the interventions of Baltimore’s Archbishop, Lawrence Cardinal Shehan during the third and fourth sessions of Vatican II. And if the Council’s teaching on religious freedom, in its turn, gave Pope John Paul II the weapon with which nonviolently to defeat European communism, well, that too was a fact of history with great resonance here, given the large numbers of Central and Eastern European Catholics who have for so long been a vital part of this Archdiocese.
Great stuff.
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