Some more interesting comments on Shaw's book
Lee Podles, who has written some of the most powerful and depressing commentary on the clerical abuse scandal, has a gloomy prognosis. A great deal of what he says is equally applicable to Ireland (including the ongoing self-destruction of Catholic education because Catholics, especially clerics and religious, have lost the will to maintain them and are naively optimistic about assimilating to the wider culture) except that trads and conservatives in Ireland have not engaged in institution-building to even the limited extent seen in America, which is why we are just scattered individuals where they have at least a counterculture:
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Russell Shaw’s new book American Church: The Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall, and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America, gives his interpretation of the relationship of Catholicism’s interaction with America. He agrees with Orestes Brownson, who was pessimistic about how Catholicism would do in America, rather than Isaac Hecker (founder of the Paulists) who was optimistic, Shaw also thinks that Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore set the Church here on a firmly Americanizing and assimilationist course.
The Irish especially were determined to make it in America. They were hostile to German immigrants, and even more so to Eastern Catholics. The Irish were determined to be complete Americans, and their high point came with the election of Kennedy. After Vatican II Catholics dismantled the “ghetto,” and wholeheartedly embraced the world. Catholic politicians have completely adopted secular establishment attitudes to sexuality and life issues. Visible practice among the laity has collapsed, and Catholics are indistinguishable from other Americans in divorce and abortion, and Jesuit colleges vie among themselves to sponsor gay organizations.
Shaw thinks the ultimate source of the collapse is the American attitude that individuals have a direct line to the Holy Spirit, and that, in modern terms, “conscience” or the “sensus fidelium” trumps the faith historically transmitted by an authoritative Church.
Shaw is correct in his diagnosis; that is certainly what has happened. He thinks that Catholicism cannot survive in a foreign and increasingly hostile environment without a plausibility structure, the network of schools, institutions, and practices that formerly allowed most Catholics to live in a Catholic environment. Shaw therefore places his hope in the new web of Catholic institutions, such as Thomas Aquinas College, the Nashville Dominicans, etc. , that will form a new Catholic subculture.
But these are miniscule, touching a fraction of 1% of the Catholic population. Catholic schools continue to decline rapidly, and nothing has replaced them as a means of transmitting both Catholic doctrines and practices to the next generation. Religious orders are rapidly dying out.
Progressives want the Catholic Church to be remodeled after the model of the Episcopal Church: accepting married clergy, gay clergy, gay marriage, contraception, abortion etc. But despite the advantages of wealth and social status, the Episcopal Church has been in a precipitous decline for a generation. Only Hispanic immigration has softened the decline of Catholic numbers, but they too will eventually be affected by American culture. Some have already departed to forms of conservative Protestantism; others are being secularized.
God may have surprises for us, but it looks like the Catholic Church in America is going to go the route of Catholics in Europe, without the advantages of an historic tie to the culture. Catholics will be a small remnant. The vitality of the Church is in the Global South.
The sad thing is that the decline of the American Church is self-inflicted. I remember in the 1960s arguing with a Dominican at Providence College. He insisted all Catholic schools should be closed and that Catholics should go only to public schools. I asked him how he expected Catholics to learn their faith. He said Protestants had Sunday School and that was enough. But of course it is not enough for Protestants, and even less so for Catholics, who need to learn both doctrines and practices.
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www.podles.org/dialogue/russell-shaws-american-church-630.htmHere are some comments on Shaw's thesis by an American church historian, whose remark about the limitations of drawing "lessons from history" are very well taken (and routinely ignored by the sort of American trad who argues, for example, that all would be well with American Catholicism if it had actively opposed assimilation to American civic nationalism, tried to preserve immigrant identities, thrown itself behind the defence of white urban ethnic neighbourhoods etc). Cardinal Gibbons in some respects reminds me of Archbishop Walsh and Archbishop Croke in their alliance with the land League and Parnellite nationalism; this had its downside, and those like Bishop O'Dwyer of Limerick who opposed it had some good points to make, but it is difficult to argue that the rival policy, if followed by the Irish Church as a whole, would have done much more than bring about a continental-style anti-clerical culture among Irish nationalists. The Wyszinski v. Mindszenty comparison is also quite relevant here. Nineteenth-century "Castle Bishops" and "Castle Catholics" get a bad press and tend to be seen simply as self-seekers, which some of them were, but others were driven by the same fear as Wyszinski; that an all-out alliance with Irish nationalism would produce a British "No Popery" backlash and the destruction of the Church infrastructure so painfully rebuilt from the beginning of the nineteenth century:
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As a trained historian, I am normally very suspicious of the mixture of history and contemporary affairs. The potential to distort history in order to promote a contemporary agenda is simply too great. Make arguments using reason and evidence, by all means; research and write about history, certainly—but don’t try to do both at the same time. The results are usually deplorable.
Yet I am forced to concede that it can be done well. When history is used to provide background, to illuminate current problems, to recount the choices that have been made so as to shed light on the choices before us today, then the lives, the failures, and successes of those who preceded us are paid due respect. In general, I am wary of mixing history and contemporary analysis, but in American Church: The Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall, and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America (Ignatius, 2013), Russell Shaw does it superbly well.
Shaw exhibits his brilliance as an investigator of Church history and an observer of Church affairs in countless ways. There is, to begin, his selection of Cardinal James Gibbons to serve as the apotheosis of American Catholicism. In the Americanist debates of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Gibbons was seen as a moderate figure, of Americanist leaning. His theology was orthodox, to be sure, but neither theology nor doctrine was his central concern. When he exerted himself, it was for the most practical—which is not to say unimportant—of causes: intervening in Rome to head off condemnation of the Knights of Labor, a move that would have cost the American Church dearly among the majority of its adherents, who were decidedly working class.
The choice of Gibbons highlights, moreover, the exquisite historical sensibility that Shaw brings to his story. Church history cannot be understood, in my estimation, unless one appreciates two related features: contingency and irony. Shaw does not always make these phenomena explicit, but he clearly understands their role.
By contingency, I mean the fact that decisions made in a historical context must be understood within the same context. Such decisions necessarily entail a set of trade-offs. In most cases, there is no clearly right or wrong decision—one path sends Catholic history off in one direction; a different path sends it in another. There are various advantages and disadvantages along each path. Where the trail leads depends on a number of other decisions made in the course of the journey—decisions made not merely by one or a handful of actors but also by multitudes of other actors whose choices lay outside our control. It is difficult to sort out the implications of past actions with the benefit of hindsight; it is impossible to predict all of the implications of one’s actions in the present and yet, decisions must be made, for better or for worse.
To return to Gibbons then. Shaw likes him, I think, or at least respects him. But he recognizes the contingency of his choices. Gibbons chose to emphasize acculturation to American society rather than Catholic distinctiveness. He strove to prove to Protestant America that Catholics could be good Americans and he pushed the predominantly immigrant Church of his day toward the respectability that would support this claim. This is not a “good” choice or a “bad” choice. It is simply one among the various choices, each with its own advantages and liabilities.
This contingency can be a difficult thing for traditional Catholics to appreciate, because our minds are trained in moral theology to distinguish between what is good and what is bad. Killing an innocent person is bad, we avoid it; performing a work of mercy is good, we pursue it. Yet, some of our actions, though morally freighted as all human decisions are, do not reduce to a clear right or wrong. Should a bishop in Chicago in 1900 permit the construction of a Polish-speaking parish? Or should he insist that German and Polish ethnic Catholics worship together in a single parish? There is not a right or a wrong answer, just different responses that set the Church moving down different paths.
Shaw understands that Gibbons’ decision, in some ways, led to the difficulties the Catholic Church now faces. Deference to American culture certainly facilitated the assimilation of immigrants and their ascent up the socioeconomic ladder. This is no small consideration for Irish Catholics fleeing starvation and arriving penniless in a strange land. But the same thirst for accommodation also brought about Catholic politicians and voters, schools and universities, charitable organizations and charitable practices that are all but indistinguishable from their secular counterparts.
Yet, who can say that Gibbons was “wrong”? Shaw cites the Cassandra cries of Orestes Brownson. Brownson’s warnings about accommodation do indeed appear to be prophetic from the vantage point of 2013. But what if Brownson had been archbishop of Baltimore? The history of the Church in the United States likely would have been very different, but would it have been “better”? As an example of refusal to accommodate in the face of an incompatible national state and culture, Shaw cites Dietrich von Hildebrand’s fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933. It’s a good example. But what if Hitler had for some reason, voluntary or involuntary, moderated his views and the persecution of the Church had been mild, and the Holocaust never happened? Von Hildebrand would appear to be an extremist who overreacted.
A telling comparison of the different possible ecclesial approaches to a hostile national culture/state is that between Poland and Hungary under Communism during the Cold War era. Poland’s church, led by Cardinal Wyszynski, pursued a policy of accommodation. It made certain compromises—though, arguably, on nothing of essential importance—and it survived. Hungary’s church, led by Cardinal Mindszenty, assumed a stance of absolute opposition to the nation’s Communist government. The church was decimated.
Wyszynski and Mindszenty were both wise, holy men with outstanding leadership qualities. Was one course right and the other wrong? What worked in Poland may not have worked in Hungary. Who can say? This is contingency.
This leads us to the second ubiquitous reality in Church history: irony. The full meaning of an event or course of action is never exhausted by its superficial meaning. Throughout Christianity’s past, the most glorious accomplishments—when subjected to close examination—display the weaknesses that will lead to their demise; the most ignominious failures contain within themselves the seeds of reform. The magnificent basilica that Pope Julius II built in Rome is an aesthetic masterpiece that has enriched the spiritual lives of countless Catholics and non-Catholics ever since. The money raised to pay for it came in part from the selling of indulgences in Germany, which spurred a young friar named Martin Luther to foment radical reform that would in time splinter the Western Church into seemingly irreconcilable factions...
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Read the whole thing at the link - it's well worth the trouble
www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/2178/accommodation_and_americanism_yesterday_and_today.aspx#.UaPHy0CmjW5