Catholics and Politics

Msgr. Thomas J. Shelley, in his article Vatican II and American Politics (10/13), evokes a most interesting interlude in American history involving the candidacy of Al Smith. If many Americans wondered whether Catholics would impose an official religion if they became a majority, Catholics themselves had no need to speculate concerning their Protestant neighbors in that regard, since they already knew the answer. As Martin Marty, Robert Handy, Philip Hamburger and others have shown so well, Americans for more than a century had imposed a de facto establishment of nondenominational Protestantism that denied true religious liberty to Catholics and other outsiders.

What James Madison feared actually came to pass. He knew that a Bill of Rights represented only parchment barriers against majority oppression. However, the advent of Catholics in great numbers brought what he saw as the necessary pluralism of opposite and rival interests that would inevitably supply the checks and balances necessary to preserve true liberty. By their fidelity, opposition and persistence, Catholics contributed immensely to the creation of modern religious liberty, and in doing so they transformed this country. In 1960 the United States, by a hair’s breadth, acknowledged that transformationthat Catholics could be and were truly Americans.

Catholic scholars appreciate the development of doctrine and the fact that Catholicism is a historically conditioned religion. But they have not yet been able to apply the same thinking to American religious liberty, which they tend to see as springing full blown from the First Amendment. In the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Liberty (1965), the church declared that it would not impose an official religion if Catholics became the majority. But with the election of John F. Kennedy, America had already affirmed that it would not and could not continue to maintain the official religion it had established when the majority of Americans were Protestant.

Historians can see how the United States influenced Catholicism, but they can perceive much less clearly how Catholicism transformed the United States. When American Catholic historians are able to grasp the interrelationindeed interdependenceof these two developments, they will be far better able to find a significant place for Catholicism in the history of the United States than is currently the case.

(Most Rev.) Thomas J. Curry

Right Here

One of my duties as a newly ordained religious priest working in another diocese was that of offering the Eucharist and hearing confessions every Saturday morning in a state-run institution for about 1,300 troublesome girls, age 13 to about 25. I was reminded of those years, 1950 to 1954, as I read the review of The Magdalene Sisters by Richard A. Blake, S.J., and recalled that right here in the United States the girls in those state-run institutions had their heads shaved for major infractions of the rules, as in Ireland. For lesser violations, and far worse in my eyes, they were forced to take a pill that would make them sick to their stomachs for three or four days. Moreover, if the state officials decided that the girls were unfit to bear children, they would mutilate the girls’ bodies to that end. If someone wants to make a movie about the misuse of authority in such institutions, is it really necessary to go to Ireland and pick on Catholic sisters who, by and large, gave their lives for the well-being of young girls?

Edward V. Griffin, O.S.A.