As a result, after the war, American Catholics became ever more eager to prove themselves good liberals rather than good Catholics. They became Deweyan and Rawlsian liberals, advocates for pluralism and democracy, advocates of private judgment in matters of conscience, and advocates of the very religious indifferentism that Pope Leo XIII had condemned as “Americanism.” It’s precisely this dynamic that gave us such an infamous generation of Catholic statesmen in this country.
From John F. Kennedy to Joseph Biden, the American Catholic Statesman always had to demonstrate that they were American first and that they were only Catholics secondarily, personally, but never publicly, unless, of course, it helped to prove that they were Americans first. They demonstrated the principle which they believed had to be demonstrated for the mission to succeed: namely, the spiritual power must be revealed as already ordered to the demands of the temporal power.
Within sixty years of Testem Benovolentiae Nostrae, Pope Leo XIII’s warnings ring prescient: Americanism was no phantom heresy. It was real.
[If you have some time, read it all. It’s a fascinating look at a conundrum for Christians in general as well as Catholics in particular. I’ll be guest hosting on Relevant Radio a couple of days in the last week of the month, and I hope to get Chad on to discuss this at length. — Ed]
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