Italian Immigrant Catholic Clergy and an Exception to the Rule: The Reverend Antonio Demo, Our Lady of Pompei, Greenwich Village, 1899–1933

1993 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Elizabeth Brown
Keyword(s):  
Parochial Schools ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Catholic Clergy ◽  
Italian American ◽  
Greenwich Village ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
The Church

Italians have long been the exception to generalizations about ethnic American Catholicism. As early as the 1880s, American bishops considered them a “problem.” In 1946, Henry J. Browne summarized the “problem”: Italians did not regularly attend mass, did not receive the sacraments, did not contribute to the support of the church, did not educate their children in their faith, did not respect the clergy, and did not appreciate that they should be doing better in all these areas. Although Browne's work has become the subject of revisionist criticism among students of Italian American Catholicism, specialists in other aspects of American Catholicism have incorporated into their work generalizations generated by the Italian-American experts.James Sanders's study of Chicago parochial schools referred to Italians as least likely to support such schools. David J. O'Brien's history of the diocese of Syracuse emphasizes the difficulties Italians faced and the troubles they created for the clergy and hierarchy. Dolan's survey of American Catholic history has a large bibliography on which to base its conclusion that “thereligion of the [southern Italian] people was not the same as the official religion of the church.

The Church Irrelevant: Paul Hanly Furfey and the Fortunes of American Catholic Radicalism

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene B. McCarraher
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
Communion Of Saints ◽  
Dorothy Day ◽  
Milk Cows ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Radicalism ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
The Church

When prophets are honored, it is time to be wary. Placing prophets on pedestals can be a way not only of disarming them but also of evading all the lessons they can teach. American Catholic radicals, for instance, occupy several revered niches in the history of American Catholicism. Here, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin break bread on Mott Street and milk cows on Maryfarm; there, Daniel Berrigan destroys draft records and leads G-men on a merry chase through New England. Though vilified in their times, this communion of saints now commands respect in most quarters of American Catholic intellectual life and could even constitute a Catholic wing in the pantheon of American radicalism.

The New American Catholic History

1972 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moses Rischin
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Geographic Mobility ◽  
General Interest ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
John Xxiii ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
American Society ◽  
American Catholic

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.

John F. O. Fernandez: Enlightened Lay Catholic Reformer, 1815–1820

1981 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-129
Author(s):  
Patrick W. Carey
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Form Of Government ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
American Catholic Church ◽  
The Church

The American republican form of government and the effects of the Enlightenment upon the European Catholic church provided fertile ground for theological reflection and ecclesiastical adaptation in early nineteenth-century American Catholicism. A number of immigrant Catholic laymen were influenced by their previous European Catholic experiences and by the American enthusiasm for republicanism to reform their understanding of the laity's role in the American Catholic church and to adapt ecclesiastical structures to American political institutions. In light of these experiences, some of these laymen began to reflect upon the Christian Scriptures and tradition, and to formulate a democratic conception of the layman's role within the church.

American Catholics and “The Use and Abuse of Reading,” 1865–1873

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-64
Author(s):  
Erin Bartram
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Social Order ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Individual ◽  
American Catholic

ABSTRACTIn the wake of the Civil War, Father Isaac Hecker launched several publishing ventures to advance his dream of a Catholic America, but he and his partners soon found themselves embroiled in a debate with other American Catholics, notably his friend and fellow convert Orestes Brownson, over the “use and abuse of reading.” Although the debate was certainly part of a contemporary conversation about the compatibility of Catholicism and American culture, this essay argues that it was equally rooted in a moment of American anxiety over a shifting social order, a moment when antebellum faith in the individual was being tested by the rights claims of women and Americans of color. Tacitly accepting and internalizing historical claims of intrinsic and through-going Catholic “difference,” claims offered both by American Protestants and American Catholics like Brownson, scholars often presume that debates within American Catholicism reflect “Catholic” concerns first and foremost, qualifying their utility as sources of “American” cultural history. By examining American Catholic discussions of reading, individual liberty, social order, and gender in the 1860s and 1870s, this essay argues that Brownson's arguments against the compatibility of American and Catholic life were in fact far more representative of ascendant ideas in American culture than Hecker's hopeful visions of a Catholic American future made manifest through the power of reading. In doing so, it demonstrates the ways that American Catholicism can be a valuable and complex site for studying the broader history of religion and culture in the United States.

The Making of American Catholicism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Pfeifer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
The United States ◽  
Regional Culture ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
American Catholic

The Making of American Catholicism: Regional Culture and the Catholic Experience argues that regional and transnational relationships have been central to the making of American Catholicism. The book traces the development of Catholic cultures in the South, the Midwest, the West, and the Northeast and their contribution to larger patterns of Catholicism in the United States. Exploring the history of Catholic cultures in New Orleans, Iowa, Wisconsin, Los Angeles, and New York City, the book carefully explores the history of American Catholic cultures across regions and their relation to factors such as national origin, ethnicity, race, and gender. The chapters include close analysis of the historical experiences of Latinx and African American Catholics as well as European immigrant Catholics. Eschewing a national or nationalistic focus that might elide or neglect global connections or local complexity, the book offers an interpretation of the American Catholic experience that encompasses local, national, and transnational histories by emphasizing the diverse origins of Catholics in the United States, their long-standing ties to transnational communities of Catholic believers, and the role of region in shaping the contours of American Catholic religiosity. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book argues that regional American Catholic cultures and a larger American Catholicism developed as transnational Catholic laity and clergy ecclesiastically linked to and by Rome in a hierarchical, authoritarian, and communalistic “universal Church” creatively adapted their devotional and ideological practices in particular American regional contexts that emphasized notions of republicanism, religious liberty, individualistic capitalism, race, ethnicity, and gender.

A CHURCH DIVIDED: ROMAN CATHOLICISM, AMERICANIZATION, AND THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 348-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Wetzel
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
Spanish American War ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
American Nation ◽  
Do So

AbstractStandard accounts of American Catholic history generally note in passing that American Catholics supported the Spanish-American War but do not examine what reasons provoked them to do so. At the same time, recent literature on the war itself has described various factors that motivated American support, but few of these studies have noted the central role that religion played in Americans' interpretations of the conflict. This article brings these two historiographies together by showing the importance of the war for the Catholic Church in America as well as the significance of religious belief for how many Americans understood the conflict. In particular, providentialist interpretations of the war held by a large number of Catholics reveal a crucial moment in the church's process of Americanization. Yet more importantly, this article focuses on the significant number of Catholics who steadfastly opposed the war, demonstrating the contested nature of the Americanization process. Ultimately, this article maintains that skepticism concerning the righteousness of the American nation motivated antiwar Catholics' resistance to prevalent American attitudes. By integrating American Catholics into our understanding of the Spanish-American War, this article sheds new light on the development of fin de siècle American Catholicism and on the war itself.

Apologia for an American Catholicism: The Petition and Report of the National Catholic Welfare Council to Pius XI, April 25, 1922

1974 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 514-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth McKeown
Keyword(s):  
American Catholicism ◽  
American Catholic History ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
American Catholic

The article that follows is a discussion of a document of some importance in American Catholic history, one that has not yet received consideration by historians. The Petition and Report of the National Catholic Welfare Council to Pius XI of April 25, 1922, is a protest by American bishops against a decree of suppression issued by the Consistorial Congregation of the Vatican, the effect of which would have been to destroy the newly organized Welfare Council.

From Advent to Easter: Catholic Preaching in New York City, 1808–1809.

1994 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-377
Author(s):  
James M. O'toole
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
White House ◽  
White Males ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Catholic History ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Scholarly Discourse

The recent interest in reconstructing the history of spirituality and religious belief is nowhere more welcome than in the history of Roman Catholicism in the United States. From the very point of its emergence as a recognizable subdiscipline at the turn of the century and lasting into very recent scholarship, American Catholic history has been a relentlessly “topdown”affair. It focused on the leaders of the church—almost all of them white males—and on official church institutions. Episcopal biography was the preferred form and, as often as not, “progress” was the theme: the hierarchy established itself steadily along the advancing frontier; populations of clergy, religious, and laity all increased heroically; immigrants once despised were transformed into the American mainstream. There was even an inspirational final chapter to the tale, as one American Catholic finally grasped the brass ring of acceptance and moved into the White House. The story was a deliberately edifying one, but it was a story primarily for insiders. Perhaps for that reason alone, American Catholic history seemed to remain, as Leslie Tender has recently observed, “on the margins” of serious scholarly discourse.

Deus Migrator—God the Migrant: Migration of Theology and Theology of Migration

2016 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-868 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter C. Phan
Keyword(s):  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
World Religion ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theology Of God ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
American Catholic Church ◽  
The Church ◽  
Christian Beliefs

Our time, which has been dubbed “The Age of Migration,” demands a new way of doing theology (“Migration Theology”) and a new conceptualization of basic Christian beliefs (“Theology of Migration”). This essay begins with a survey of the American Catholic Church and eight migrations in the history of Christianity to show that without migration there would have been neither a US Catholic Church nor the emergence of Christianity as a world religion. “Migrantness” is therefore a mark of the church and of Christianity itself. The construction of a theology of migration, then, requires a method composed of three mediations: analytic, hermeneutic, and practical. Using this method, the author sketches a theology of God, Christ, Holy Spirit, eschatology, and Christian existence from the perspective of migration.

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