Ever since Constantine legalized the Faith, Catholics have striven for perfection, far from the madding crowd of nominal believers and the outright corrupt. The first fruits of this quest were Ss. Paul the Hermit and Anthony the Abbot, from whom ultimately spring all the incredibly varied manifestations of religious life with which we are familiar. From time to time the same impulse has affected the laity, for whom it is always much harder — weighed down as they must necessarily be with temporal concerns, and with the difficulty of passing their initial vision on to their children.
The discovery of America led all sorts of people — Catholic and non-Catholic alike — to see in the new Continents space to try to build their idea of perfection. Given the large number of sects that soon populated Anglo-America, it is no wonder that both the countryside and the national imagination are littered with the remnants of such attempts. The Puritans and Pilgrims began the craze, of course, but many others followed.
For Catholics — inherently less disposed to believe in the perfectibility of man through his own efforts — such efforts began with the evangelization of the Indians. The Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Augustinians who came to the Spanish, French, and Portuguese colonies in the New World were only too aware that their new converts would need more than sermons to become complete Christians — a whole way of life must be given to them.
Throughout the Catholic Americas such efforts were made; most famous and most complete, of course, was the Jesuit mission state of Paraguay. (You can read a good book review of The Black Robes in Paraguay here.) But there were others: the Jesuit mission zones of Moxos and Chiquitos in Bolivia, in Canada, Baja California, and the Pimeria Alta; the Dominicans in Michoacan; the Franciscans in the Sierra Gorda, Texas, and California; and so very many other places. In one sense, the suppression of the Jesuits and post-independence secularization of the properties of the other religious orders doomed the original vision; but Catholics of today in those areas are still living off of their heritage.
The non-mission French and Spanish settlements in what are now the United States had no such utopian intentions — save that it was expected that the Church would play as great a part in their everyday lives as was the case for towns in their mother countries. In English America, Maryland was founded as a refuge for Catholics — but not as a Catholic colony. Rather, it would be a place where Catholics would enjoy equal rights with Anglicans; in every other respect it would conform to the laws of England. Similarly, starting in 1775 a number of Maryland Catholics would cross the Alleghenies, establishing what has been called ever since the “Holy Land of Kentucky.” Although boasting towns with names like “Holy Cross” and “St. Mary,” and primarily settled by Catholics, this region was not intended to be really separate in any way from its neighbors.
The ongoing evangelization of the Indians over the course of the 19th century led such missionaries as the Belgian Fr. Pierre de Smet, S.J. and the French-Canadian brothers Blanchet, Francois and Augustin, who would later be the first bishops in Oregon and Washington respectively. Both de Smet and the brethren dreamed of turning the Northwest into something like Jesuit Paraguay, but the Belgian saw it being done in partnership with United States and the Quebecois with the Hudson’s Bay Company. Both were doomed to disappointment.
In the same period, of course, any number of non-Catholic sects were building their own refuges in the wilderness: the Amana and Oneida Communities, the Shakers, Icarians, Spiritualists, Amish, Mormons, and on and on. But into the seemingly endless frontier also came a large number of Catholic groups from various European lands, often led by a charismatic priest. A number of these attempted to form Catholic commonwealths in the vast American hinterland. To mention just a very few examples, Wisconsin’s Fr. Adalbert Inama, O. Praem., founder of Roxbury, WI, and its church of St. Norbert (a center of traditional Catholicism today); Indiana’s Fr. Josef Kundeck, who founded a number of Catholic German settlements; Missouri’s Fr. Ferdinand Helias d’Huddeghem; the Dutch Dominican, Fr. Theodore Van de Broek, who led many of his Catholic countrymen to the frontier; and Arkansas’ Fr. Pietro Bandini. Most unusual of all was undoubtedly was Fr. Ambrose Oschwald, who established a 19th century Catholic commune with German settlers at St. Nazianz, WI — traces of which survive in the life of the town today. But it was not only pioneer priests who set out found Catholic settlements in the wilderness. Groups of monks, arriving in America from Europe, often encouraged Catholic immigration from their homelands to found villages to support their new monasteries; in later years this was sometimes done in concert with the railroads, also keen on finding settlers to inhabit towns along their rights of way.
But the future of the Church in America did not lie in rural colonies, but in the big cities — where Catholics were thrown in among people of any religion or none. Even so, there were sporadic attempts to create Catholic communities within urban settings. Fr. Nelson Baker set up a network of institutions in Buffalo, NY, as did Fr. Omer Valois in New Bedford, MA.
These efforts came about as — in the aftermath of the French, Industrial, and other Revolutions — the Popes and Catholics throughout Europe were attempting to answer society’s ills with practical applications of the Faith. The European and other origins of so many immigrant Catholics — and the need to defend Catholics from abuse — led to all sorts of ideas being imported and movements founded in this country to try to put these ideas into practice on the American scene. Of course, these were divided from each other by the Americanist/Cahenslyite/Ultramontane disputes, but among the organizations and journals that emerged then were the American branch of the Kolping Society, the Catholic Central Verein, the Wanderer, the Union Saint Jean Baptiste, the Association Canado-Americaine, Knights of Columbus, Knights of Peter Claver, Knights of St. John, Catholic Foresters, Ancient Order of Hibernians, Catholic Knights of America, Catholic Slovak Union, and many more.
World War I and the Depression heightened these developments; the former called into being the National Catholic War Council, which, after a postwar stint as the National Catholic Welfare Conference eventually morphed into our United States Catholic Conference. Initially formed so that the Bishops and laity could assist the U.S. government in the war effort, the NCWC took on larger considerations. The economic, industrial, and agricultural changes shaking the country had a much wider impact then on the Catholic community alone; in an initial attempt to address these in the spirit of the Papal social encyclicals, the bishops commissioned Fr. (later Msgr.) John A. Ryan to draft the “Bishops’ Program for Social Reconstruction,” released in February of 1919. This document attempted to apply Catholic social teaching to the religiously mixed American scene; as a result, it dealt purely with economic issues. At that time, of course, the purely moral views of Catholics were identical to the vast majority of non-Catholic Americans; there could be no possibility of questioning the indifferentist nature of society and governance in this country.
At any rate, the interwar period saw in America as in Europe a wave of Catholic social ventures — these were strengthened by Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno, as well as by the Distributism of Chesterton and Belloc. In 1923, Fr. Edwin V. O’Hara of the NCWC and Fr. William Bishop (later to found the Glenmary Home Missioners) organized the National Catholic Rural Life Conference in order to coordinate the Church’s dealing with farm families, strengthen their Faith, and encourage them to economic and political action. Many of the laity served by the NCRLC were inhabitants of the Catholic rural settlements discussed earlier. Seventeen years later, the charismatic Msgr. Luigi Ligutti became the Conference’s first full-time director, and lead it from strength to strength.
In 1924, The Commonweal was founded; it was the first independent lay Catholic journal of opinion in the United States, and as such was initially supported by literate American Catholics of all stripes. It offered selections not only by American but prominent European Catholic authors as well. Unhappily, the journal’s editorial board’s decision to condemn Franco led to a split in its readership and the journal being identified as “left wing” — an identification exacerbated by its stance after Vatican II and until the present.
Four years after The Commonweal’s founding, New York’s Governor, Al Smith, was nominated by the Democratic Party to run for president of the United States; this marked the first time a practicing Catholic had been selected as a presidential candidate (John C. Fremont was lapsed when the nascent Republican Party chose him in 1856 — the anti-Catholicism he encountered then impelled him to take up the Faith once more). Smith, despite Protestant criticism, made no attempt to conceal his religion, and one might well wonder what he would make of some of the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation’s dinner guests in recent years. But the combination of Anti-Catholicism and prosperity under the Republican administration drowned the “Brown Derby’s” chances.
The following year the Great Depression erupted, prosperity vanished, and urban Catholics (and others) were hit particularly hard. New York’s latest Governor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, beat out Al Smith for the Democratic nomination, and was swept into office — to no small degree with Catholic votes. Msgr. Ryan was claimed to be the inspiration for many points of FDR’s New Deal and its myriad “Alphabet Soup” agencies — WPA, PWA, AAA, TVA, NRA, CCC, and on and on that mushroomed after the inauguration on March 4, 1933. Confronted by the tremendous centralization of power these represented, Smith turned against FDR, and opposed the New Deal on constitutional grounds, joining the American Liberty League.
Love it or hate it, the New Deal (despite Msgr. Ryan) had little if any explicit Catholicity; moreover, a solid core of urban poor were unaffected by its attempts to revive the economy — and would be until World War II arrived and virtually eliminated unemployment through war industries. In an attempt to bring the Faith directly to bear on these problems in New York, on May 1, 1933, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin launched the Catholic Worker. It has grown into a network of 227 communities across the country.
In 1934, Fr. Charles Coughlin, pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan, founded the National Union for Social Justice, whose principles were grounded firmly in the Papal social encyclicals — which Fr. Coughlin quoted extensively in his radio broadcasts. At first a supporter of FDR, he turned against him, and he and his followers teamed up with Gerald L.K. Smith, leader of the remnants of Hughie Long’s Share Our Wealth movement, and Dr. Francis Townsend. The three formed a political party, the Union Party, to contest the 1936 presidential election. Not only was the Union trounced, but Msgr. Ryan — by now ensconced as “the Right Reverend New Dealer” — openly attacked Fr. Coughlin in a radio interview, and received a blistering response. The effect, of course, was to divide even further that element of the Catholic community that was interested in politics — and so reduce the Church’s chance of having any effect upon the country as a whole. Fr. Coughlin was discredited through being tarred with the anti-Semitic brush — and, as war approached, through the perception that he was pro-Axis.
In 1938, Baroness Catherine de Hueck Dougherty founded the first Friendship House, an interracial Catholic apostolate attempting to forge amity between Blacks and Whites; in 1941, a branch was established in Harlem. Falling out the leadership over personal issues, the Baroness moved to Combermere, Ontario and founded the Madonna House Apostolate.
World War II had an even more revolutionary effect upon American society than had the First World War — and American Catholics strove once more to discern the lessons that conflict had to give. The story of Fr. Feeney and St. Benedict Center and their rather counter-cultural struggle with the Archdiocese of Boston is too well known to be recounted here; but its root causes were far from atypical at the time. Another post-war group that sought to lead a more integrally Catholic lifestyle was the Marycrest group, centered around Integrity Magazine and its founder, Ed Willock — whose own roots lay in the Catholic Worker.
In 1953, Ed Rice and co-editors Robert Lax and Thomas Merton launched Jubilee: A Magazine of the Church and her People. In origin another attempt at a state of the art Catholic literary magazine, it was for a large chunk of its existence faithful to the Church and magisterium. But as with so many other Catholic institutions and movements, it lost its way during the post-Vatican II sacricide, and shut down in 1968. A similar case was that of Ramparts, which was begun in 1962 as another serious Catholic literary journal under Edward M. Keating; it became completely secular and left-wing five years later, and folded in 1975. The following year saw the end of Triumph, which had been founded in 1968 in reaction to abuses following the Council, and which provided an orthodox Catholic critique of the contemporary society. Where Jubilee and Ramparts had ended by being indistinguishable from Mother Jones (which alumni from the latter journal helped co-found), Triumph traveled so far away from conventional politics as to be entirely outside them: admirable as that was, it left the magazine without a fan base.
Much has happened since the mid-70s — the elevation of four Popes not least among them. What survives of the impulse to build a truly Catholic system in this country? On the political arena, not much. The struggle during the 50s between Fr. John Courtney Murray and Fr. Joseph Clifford Fenton over the proper relationship between Church and State was won completely by the former cleric. This was evidenced not only by Fr. Murray’s influence at Vatican II, but by JFK’s speech to the Houston Ministerial Association. Although ably refuted on its 50th anniversary by Philadelphia’s Archbishop Charles Chaput, it remains the great charter of Catholic flaccidity in American public life.
But the vision remains in various Catholic communities and groups. The New Catholic Land Movement and the Catholic Labor Network, for example, as well as the afore-mentioned National Catholic Rural Life Conference, the Catholic Worker groups and Madonna House all continue the quest, as do such “intentional communities” as the Bethlehem Farm. The orthodoxy, depth, and stability of all of these must be measured on a case-by-case basis. But what they serve to prove — as do those monasteries and religious orders that still get vocations — is that the basic impulse toward a more perfect Catholic life in this country has not and never shall die.
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