The New American Catholic History

Even historians and historically minded sociologists with little sense or awareness of the current Roman Catholic scene have been stirred by the precipitous flow of events of the last dozen years to ask questions about the Catholic role in American society. Virtually without warning, the history of American Catholicism has been catapulted from specialized ecclesiastical history of interest to Catholics primarily into an ecumenical history of unprecedented general interest. After hovering backstage for centuries, the Catholic presence has erupted almost simultaneously from the secular and theological wings and burst onto centerstage. A convergence of public events dramatized and personalized for world Catholicism by the papacy of John XXIII and for American Catholicism by the presidency of John F. Kennedy ironically magnified a sense of supreme Catholic crisis and confusion that in its scope and implications dwarfed earlier American Catholic crises, making them appear parochial and intramural by comparison. The elevation to the papacy of the most saintly and humble of priests and the brief presidency of the first Catholic president of the United States turned an aged pope and a young president into symbols of a new public Catholicism, cosmopolitan and courageous in its vision and democratic in its thrust. Vatican II, the ecumenical movement, the race revolution, the general revolt against authority, the new ethnic succession, explosive social and geographic mobility, and the heightened self-consciousness of newer ethnics of European origin and largely Catholic religion, combined with the instant exposure of the mass media, synchronized with an era of American world hegemony and the emergence of an American Catholicism of appropriate dimensions.1 The implications of such changes for American Catholic history, given the eager search for comparative historical perspectives, the maturing of urban and ethnic history, the universal quest for identity and an upsurge of interest in American religious history, are manifold. Almost overnight, psychic barriers and feelings of Catholic inferiority that had lingered for generations seemed nearly to dissolve. The Catholic Church as the ready foil of Protestant and post-Protestant America, the symbol and embodiment of the hierarchical, monarchical old order of pre-Reformation and preFrench Revolution Europe, appeared almost as obsolete as the yeoman farmer. Catholics in their delayed and heightened confrontation with the cumulative forces of modernism now seemed analagous to Jews of an earlier era who had experienced a great awakening as their segregated antique civilization sought a new viability in the modern world, and to the succession of Protestant denominations which in the course of almost two centuries had less precipitously encountered secular cultural shock. As a result, those of all religious faiths and none were drawn to share vicariously and at least retrospectively in the Catholic experience. The discontinuity between past and present that has marked the last decade or so for American Catholics is most vividly illustrated in the two successive editions of American Catholicism by its foremost living historian, John Tracy