The launch of the American edition of the Catholic Herald brings to these shores our own version of a journal that has been making British Catholic history since 1888. Such well-known British names as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene have written for it in the past; GK Chesterton loved the Herald so much that he advertised it in public. Today, Britain’s most talented Catholic writers follow in their footsteps in the Herald’s pages. This US edition comes to us at a time when the faith of many of our nation’s Catholics has been shaken by widespread and deep-rooted scandal. May it prove to be as much of a support for the Church in this country as it has been in Britain.
There are obvious likenesses between American and British Catholicism – for example, the Irish heritage of many members of the hierarchy and the faithful, and the tendency for working-class Catholic votes to be gobbled up by the more liberal parties (despite said parties’ opposition to Catholic moral teachings).
Both countries are dominated by non-Catholic socio-political establishments, against which Catholics must define themselves – and which the local bishops are loath to oppose when those establishments impose various immoralities. The American hierarchy was actually created in England when John Carroll, the first American bishop, had to cross the Atlantic to Lulworth Castle to be consecrated to the episcopal office.
Yet there are very many differences, and these go far beyond such surface things as the omnipresent “circus-tent” style tabernacle veils rife on English altars but rare in this country. These United States are extremely large and their inhabitants far more diverse than in the Mother Country; the American Church reflects this. There are 70,412,021 registered Catholics of at least 55 ethnic communities in this country, at varying levels of practice; this dwarfs the 5.7 million in the United Kingdom. The United States are covered by a single bishops’ conference numbering 197 dioceses and other particular churches. Partly as a result of their historical links to political movements that opposed mergers between the three kingdoms, Catholics in the United Kingdom are gathered into as many bishops’ conferences: England and Wales (26 dioceses), Scotland (eight dioceses), and Ireland (26 dioceses covering both British Northern Ireland and the independent Republic of Ireland).
America’s Catholic history is as diverse as its present. As noted, English Catholicism was intimately bound up with the initial formation of the American hierarchy: Maryland was founded as a Catholic refuge in 1632, and there were crypto-Catholics at Jamestown in 1607. But Spain founded St Augustine, Florida, in 1565 and Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1610; France followed with New Orleans in 1718. At the time of American independence in 1783, there were French and Spanish Catholic settlements from California to Florida and throughout the Mississippi Valley; but the area initially included within the new country saw Catholics confined to just four states.
It was only the waves of foreign immigration, beginning with the flight from the Irish Potato Famine in 1847, that eventually gave Catholics sufficient numbers to matter politically – an essential factor under any political system where reality is alleged to be controlled by popular vote. Certainly, the ethnic kaleidoscope was dominated by the Irish – but they had trouble maintaining their supremacy over other ethnic groups, especially the Germans. An unexpected consequence of this was the creation of schismatic Polish and Ruthenian churches. In any case, the surviving English Catholic colonial presence was restricted to its present Maryland and Kentucky haunts.
By way of contrast, Catholicism in the British Isles may go back to apostolic times, if there is any truth in the Glastonbury legends; certainly, it was well established by the time St Alban was martyred in the 3rd century. After the pagan Anglo-Saxons obliterated Roman Britain, the faith returned in 597 to Kent; by 1497, all three realms were as Catholic as Italy or Spain had been in living memory. Even after Henry and Elizabeth tore their subjects from the Church, the shadow of the faith remained – especially in the monarchy and the temporal aspects of the Church of England, which were mummified remnants of what had been a living Catholic reality.
To this day, the generationally Catholic Duke of Norfolk – the senior peer of the realm and hereditary Earl Marshal – has remained attached to the faith (with the odd unfortunate lapse). Indeed, after the Reformation, it was the Catholic nobility and gentry that kept the faith alive in their private chapels. These “recusants” lent a certain aristocratic air to Catholicism and ensured continued lay leadership in the local church. After the Oxford Movement began in the 1830s, waves of converts – often of academic or literary background – flooded into the Church; this continued until Vatican II and lent British Catholicism a patina of learning and sophistication.
Moreover, until the Council, the zeal of these converts made prayers and work for “the conversion of England” de rigueur. A vast wave of Irish immigrants multiplied the size and boosted the faith of the Catholic community, which developed a flourishing urban presence, and after World War II, Catholics from Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe arrived as well.
By contrast, the United States had no Catholic aristocracy. For the most part, as one Catholic historian put it, “the faith arrived here in steerage”. Converts were relatively few and there was little call for the conversion of America. Instead, our efforts concentrated on seeking respectability in the eyes of the non-Catholic majority by waving the flag (and putting it in our church sanctuaries), loyally supporting all wars the country engaged in, and not seeking to apply Catholic social principles to political life. The apogee of this approach was the election of John F Kennedy (on the day of my birth).
Despite these differences between the Churches in the two countries, the collapse of morality outside and doctrine inside Catholicism, and the growing realisation among the laity that we too must evangelise, is certainly bringing us closer together – a development that the foundation of the ex-Anglican ordinariates underlines. May the coming of the Catholic Herald to America begin a spiritually fruitful cross-pollination that will bring both countries closer to Christ the King.
Charles A Coulombe is an author and lecturer based in Los Angeles
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