Bad Faith

The (ongoing) problem at Catholicism in American life

Beautiful Bigot: Stained glass portrait of Anne Bradstreet at St. Botolph’s Church, Boston, England. I had the pleasure of paying homage to her and the founders of New England in making a pilgrimage there last summer.

In my last few posts, I’ve been writing about the Protestant experience in American life and its profound impact on contemporary secular society. In this one, I focus on a different faith tradition: my own. —Jim

I’m Roman Catholic. Catholicism is a house of many mansions. I inhabit an American one, in a wing built principally in the nineteenth century. There’s a pretty good window on the world there.

To say that the United States of America has Protestant origins is also to say that it has anti-Catholic ones, and to a great degree the nation remained anti-Catholic well into the twentieth century (to a significant degree, especially on the contemporary American left, it remains so). The nation’s foundations were laid at a time when religious fanaticism in the Western world was at its height, and it was simply a given for English Protestants of any variety that Roman Catholicism was the perfect embodiment of all that was evil in the world. One of my favorite poets is the Puritan Anne Bradstreet, whose meditations on family and faith are among the most beautiful ever set down in the English language. But get her on the subject of Catholicism and she turns into a raging bigot:

These are the days the [Anglican] Church’s foes to crush,

To root out Popelings head, tail, branch and rush …

Light Christendom, and all the world to see

We hate Rome’s whore with all her trumpery. 

Later in life, Bradstreet would question the intensity of her vitriol. “Why may not the Popish religion be right?” she wondered. “They have the same God, the same Christ, the same word. They only entrpret [sic] it one way, we another.” There were limits to her willingness to tolerate such views, however. Bradstreet lamented “the vain fooleries that are in their religion together with their lying miracles and cruel persecutions of [Protestant] saints … The consideration of these things and many the like would soon turn me to my own religion again.”

There were pockets of Catholicism in the English colonies, notably Maryland, chartered in 1634 as a gift from King Charles I with a mandate for religious tolerance, principally because the Catholic family that founded Maryland would have been seized by Anglicans from neighboring Virginia if it hadn’t been. (They ended up overrunning it anyway.) Charles I and the rest of the Stuart dynasty that ruled England for much of the seventeenth century were closet Catholics—suspicions about this eventually precipitated the Glorious Revolution of 1688—and indeed until the American Revolution Catholicism was a byword for elitism in the United States.

That changed—dramatically—in the early nineteenth century, when the Irish, fleeing persecution and famine, began flooding the nation. From that point on, to be an American Catholic was, virtually by definition, to be working class—at best. Gradually, the Irish (and, to a lesser degree, Germans, some of whom were Catholic) gained a foothold in American life and began to gain control of key institutions like police departments and political machines, those with social pretensions forming a layer of “lace-curtain” Irish. They were followed by a later wave of Catholic arrivals: Italians, Poles, Croats, and Maronites from modern-day Lebanon, among others. Their numbers began to taper in the early twentieth century, culminating in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which marked the end of an era. Over the course of the next forty years, this massive demographic pig in a python was digested with the enzymes of assimilation. Then the process started again in the sixties with another wave of immigration, much of it from Catholic countries such as Mexico and the Philippines. So did a new round of bigotry, one in which race and religion were woven into complex strands of faith, ethnicity, and class. In this regard, American Catholics were a bit like the American Jews I grew up with on Long Island, for whom Judaism was at least as much a culture as it was a religion.

My family is the product of the second-wave diaspora of Catholics. I’m told my father’s family hails from County Wicklow in southern Ireland, though we have been native-born New Yorkers for many generations now. My maternal grandfather, Pasquale Capone, by contrast, was born in Naples in 1899 and came to the United States the following year, part of a tidal wave of poor southern Italians who washed onto American shores at the turn of the last century.  My mother’s mother, born Harriet Johnson, was of English and German descent, but my mother always identified as Italian and Catholic. I’ve no doubt that there are other elements in my heritage; like most Americans, I’m pretty thoroughly mongrelized. Actually, by mid-twentieth century standards, I’m the product of a so-called mixed marriage—Italian and Irish, once referred to as of different races*— that became increasingly common among working-class whites in cities like New York at the time. Catholicism was an important source of stitching in such unions, even if it had distinctive ethnic accents in things like feast days and cuisines, which I began to understand in my childhood as I circulated among friends and family at the holidays, when corned beef and cabbage dinners alternated with and angel wings and cannoli for dessert.

Until I went to college, my religious heritage was something I took for granted. Neither of my parents was particularly devout in my childhood, though my mother became a more regular churchgoer by the time I had reached adolescence. My dad rarely went to mass, and yet I always had the impression that Catholicism—specifically Irish Catholicism, more specifically still the Jansenist variety of Catholicism that emphasized depravity and sin—made a deep impression on his worldview (I recall him telling a story of being smacked by a priest for touching holy communion that fell to the ground during a mass in his childhood). Though they made some effort to instill the traditions of the faith in my sister and me—we received the sacraments and received a full regimen of religious education classes—they elected not to send us to Catholic school. Part of this reflected the expense and part the quality of the public schools in the suburbs where we lived. But I also remember my mother explaining at one point that Catholic school students were poorly behaved: doctrinal severity fostered a culture of deviousness and hypocrisy. As an adult, I’ve met peers who have clearly been singed, if not seared, by this milieu; paradoxically, a discreet distance from the church has kept me tethered to it.

Mass itself was always a chore, a series of empty gestures and inscrutable readings (what the hell was Saint Paul talking about?) followed by sermons that were vacuous when they weren’t incomprehensible (so many African priests with thick accents). But from an early age, I loved Bible stories—children’s Bibles were an important means by which I learned to read. Like a lot of young children, I had my fair share of imaginary friends, and my internal conversations included regular discussions with God. The thought of becoming a priest did cross my mind on the cusp of my adolescence. In an earlier generation, such thinking would have been actively fostered by Catholic parents as a form of upward mobility (the ministry served a parallel purpose for African Americans). But again, I picked up my parents’ reserve about this. Perhaps they apprehended the toxic culture of abuse that would later erupt in scandal. More likely, they recognized that doors would be open to me that had been closed to previous generations of Catholics.

So it was that the pull of secular pleasures and the imperatives of secular education led me away from the faith. I went to a small New England liberal arts college founded to train Unitarian ministers, and, attended such services a few times as an undergraduate. But I found Unitarianism to be the worst of both worlds: uninspiring and unsurprising ideas in settings that lacked the majesty and rigor of Catholicism. So I suspended churchgoing altogether.

My attitude began to change once I got to graduate school. I began to consider the ideas, values, and myths that surrounded my faith as a point of comparison with the history I was studying for the first time in a systematic way. Catholicism became a more central aspect of my American identity, one I felt some obligation to sustain, procuring my wife’s agreement to raise our children that way. They have chosen not to embrace it, and I have not pressed them. But in my wayward way, I nevertheless kept the faith.

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* When, in 1989, I grappled with the resistance of my parents about marrying a blue-blooded Protestant woman descended from the Pilgrims, my dad explained that he too once had a problematic romance with a “Spanish” girl—his euphemism for Puerto Rican. I was less shocked by his racial consciousness than the way it had been trumped, at least temporarily, by the longings of his heart.

Next: Christianity as the foundation of democracy.