The Episcopate of the United States Catholic Church Has Always Been Americanist, Indifferentist, and even Heretical

I mentioned recently I have been reading books by Solange Hertz.  They are very valuable and enlightening reading, providing great insight into how the almost universally rock-solid Church of the 18^th century became the structurally modernist, indifferentist, and leftist body that it is today.

Reading Hertz has been part of a broader study I’ve been blessed to make over the course of much of 2019, reading histories of the Church over the period 1800-1950, principally in the  United States but also Europe.  This is history that is almost entirely forgotten, and deliberately so, as it reveals the means and methods by which the Church was first penetrated, and then overtaken, by revolutionary forces.  While many faithful Catholics today point to AA-1025 and communist penetration of the Church in the first half of the 20^th century, to be frank, that analysis misses the mark.  In point of fact, most of the damage was done in the 19^th century, and came not from European revolutionaries (they more or less took advantage of an already existing situation), but from American ones.

American, ahem, Catholics, were responsible for much of the most destructive beliefs that burst into open view, with apparent approbation of the institutional hierarchy, at Vatican II.  Indifferentism (rejection of Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus), almost a maniacal focus on both materialism and ecumenism, the exaltation, if not practical worship of, democratic forms of government and the free market, tacit endorsement of blasphemy and sacrilege under the guise of “freedom of speech” and “freedom of expression”………..all these ideas came primarily from the United States and, it must be said, mostly Irish-lineage bishops and priests, though they did find fertile ground for these ideas throughout much of Europe.

A few datapoints to illustrate.  The first American bishop, John Carroll, was a thoroughgoing Americanist, practically seeking to create an Americanist Gallist Church (a national church free from Rome’s influence).  He practically worshipped the US Constitution and the American state and was influenced, to an almost unbelievable degree for a man who called himself Catholic, by the liberal wing of the protestant sects in the United States. He was also extremely close with the freemasons who dominated the American elite.  He insisted, for instance, on the election of bishops, and even wanted election of priests, to go along with a vernacular liturgy and many other items protestants/masons would like to see changed regarding Church Doctrine.  He was only just prevented from doing this by intervention from Rome, and his death.

Carroll also did all he could to upset and frustrate attempts by the constant waves of immigrants to maintain their traditional Church structures and parish lives within their own communities.  Carroll and his disciples waged constant war against German, Polish, Italian, and other priests and lay people who sought to maintain the traditions of the Faith from Europe. They insisted all immigrants should be swiftly and thoroughly “Americanized,” bowing to the unique genius of the Constitution and the American(ist) way of life.

Thus, the tragic situation we see today, where the US episcopate demands unconstrained immigration in order to make up for the falling away of tens of millions of Catholics, has persisted throughout the Church’s history in this country.  In the latter half of the 19^th century, 25-30% of recent Catholic immigrants fell away from the Faith within 25  years of arriving in the US.  Most became some flavor of protestant.  This has been the regular reality of Catholic life in these United States, save perhaps for the brief period of the 1920s to the 1950s when the Catholic Church appeared much more orthodox, reliable, and robust compared to its rapidly collapsing mainline protestant counterparts.  This was about the only period in US history when, subtracting immigration, there was a net inflow of converts into the Church, as against Catholics falling away.

The following quote sums up the situation in Amchurch circa 1900 rather nicely, from The Star-Spangled Heresy: Americanism, pp. 186-188 (I add comments):

…[D]efenders of the Faith had little difficulty linking Americanism to communism, not to mention Semitism, Protestantism, Masonry, and outright Satanism. A Catholic paper in Paris accused Cardinal Gibbons [I haven’t even touched on Gibbons, but he is perhaps the principal villain in the Americanist story] of partiality to masonry on the basis of his persistent defense of such organizations as the Odd Fellows, Knights of Pythias……….all condemned by Rome, and of secret societies generally in the States. The French Canadian Jules Tardivel dubbed America “the eldest daughter of the sect,” and Leo XIII’s Belgian biographer stated its true center was located here.

In 1899  Leo XIII was finally forced to write Testem Benevolentiae condemning Americanism specifically as a heresy.  In the face of the threatened withdrawal of American support for Peter’s Pence, however, [the American Church, like the German Church today, routinely used its massive financial resources to threaten Rome with denial of funds – and this, at a particularly critical time when the Papal States had been stolen by Garibaldi and the Church was in desperate financial straits] none of the heretics was designated by name, although everyone knew who they were and had expected them to be formally excommunicated. Robert Cross relates that one Roman periodical, referring to the “satanic spirit” of America, exclaimed: “Put the mask aside, O Monsignor Ireland: bow down before the Vicar of Jesus Christ, Cardinal Gibbons, and deny the blasphemous theories of the heretical sect which are embodied in you!” Civilta Cattolica dubbed the heresy:

…….purely American…….employed at first to indicate in general the ‘new idea’ which was to rejuvenate the Church, and in particular the ‘new crusade’ against the uncompromising position of Catholics of the ‘old creed.’

All the heresiarchs loudly disclaimed being tainted by what they termed a ‘phantom heresy’ existing largely in the minds of the Curia or at best in a few French dioceses, and they continued on as before. [Indeed – an encyclical sent to the lead American cardinal, talking only about the United States, only applied to a few foreign dioceses, and those strangely French.  But do we not see the exact same kinds of dissembling tactics today, especially in the US episcopate?] The American flag was displayed ever more prominently at altar-side, as if also intended for worship, despite the frowns of Rome, which steadfastly refused approval for the tricolor within the sanctuary.  Episcopal progress in socialism was steady. At the close of the First World War the American bishops under the leadership of Msgr. John Ryan became so convinced that “so-called  ’socialistic’ measures were practically synonymous with Catholic moral principles” – to quote a popular Catholic history textbook – that they boldly embarked on their own social program. Advocated were minimum wage legislation, unemployment and old age insurance, prohibition of child labor, legal protection of unions, national employment service, public housing for workers, control of monopolies, curtailment of ‘excess’ profits, participation of labor in management and wider distribution of stock ownership.  Christ was now harnessed to the Revolution as to His Cross. [These efforts were through the “National Catholic War Council,” supposedly set up to help fight WWI, but then extended after the war as the National Catholic Welfare Conference. The first permanent episcopal conference in Church history, it was banned by Pius XI but later, of course, was given approval at Vatican II, where the Church awoke and groaned to find itself Americanist.  Of course, episcopal conferences have turned into  charnal houses of sex abuse, graft, larceny, and radicalization political agendas, along with constantly reducing the Faith to the lowest possible common denominator, in concert with ‘right democratic principles.’]

……[I]n 1928 indulgent America permitted a Catholic, Al Smith, to run for the Presidency for the first time in the nation’s history. Ten years later in Madrid the anti-Catholic writer George Seldes was able to say in The Catholic Crisis:

‘The future of Catholicism may lie in America because of the growing Catholic population, the large increase of bishoprics, the financial support of the Church which is said to be larger than that contributed by the rest of the world.  But it may lie in America because America is the stronghold of democracy. American Catholicism is the Catholicism of the famous credo of Al Smith……which states that the Syllabus of Pius IX which is anti-liberal, anti-democratic, and in a way anti-American, has ‘no dogmatic force’ as Cardinal Newman said long ago……..[I hope Cardinal Newman did not say that.  I don’t know]

By the Smithian system of dialectics no Catholic need fight Socialism, or Communism, or pay any attention to Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, Casti Connubii, Lux Veritatis, or the late Pope’s utterances in favor of Franco’s Spain, if he individually disagrees.  The American Catholic, according to its most important spokesman, can take it or leave it. [The primacy of the individual conscience, circa 1930!] However, no Catholic outside the United States has ever expressed the same views and remained in the Church.

Thus, the Americanist heresy is at the root of the crisis in the Church, and contrary to the relatively conservative body most Americans are propagandized to believe it is, has been one of the key driving forces behind the revolution against the Church conducted principally by those given sacred trust to promote and defend the authentic Faith.  Unfortunately, Americanism is deeply rooted in the basic patriotism of the United States, and so constantly finds new adherents.  It’s a difficult and tragic thing to find one at odds with one’s country, but that is exactly the position thinking, informed, believing Catholics find themselves in.  That this nation has produced so precious few of that group only demonstrates how insidiously effective that propaganda is.

They have now. Apparently, As Bishop O’Gorman once wrote his friends from Rome, “Americanism, which was supposed to be our defeat, has been turned into a glorious victory. We are surely on top.” The lucrative waters of the Potomac were now flowing freely into the Tiber. Only a faithful few in the US today recall that their Lord “suffered under Pontius Pilate,” after Pilate and the “religious” Herod became friends. “If they have persecuted Me, they will also persecute you…….The servant is not greater than his master.” And “no man can serve two masters” (Jn xvi:20).

Mindful of this difficulty, Hilaire Belloc predicted the “necessary” conflict between the civil state and the Catholic Church in America. He said in so many words, of course, “the Catholic Church in America.” He was not referring to the star-spangled “American Catholic Church” which is after all only a modernist sect of long standing, with a large growing membership. No conflict with Pilate should arise there. [Since, after all, for Cardinal Gibbons and most current and historical American bishops, their greatest fear was and is that they might ever give offense to the protestant majority, and especially the formerly protestant but now thoroughly secularized and leftist political-cultural elite.]

————End Quote————-

This post is already very long, and I hope to get out one much shorter post today, but I’ll conclude with this: it is a profoundly unsettling realization to make, that one’s Faith, and one’s country and culture, are totally at odds.  It is even more discomfiting to realize that, in many ways, only one can ultimately survive.  It was, of course, fear of this realization that drove the thoroughly American bishops and priests (again, most all of them, strangely enough, Irish) to attempt to posit a typically American ‘new and improved’ church, one that fit in fine with the surrounding culture and political landscape, one that wouldn’t make any waves, and one that would rarely, if ever, expose its practitioners to persecution.

But Our Blessed Lord told us that if we love Him, the world will hate us, and that if we are faithful, it will persecute us like it persecuted Him.  This is the narrow path of salvation.  The Church in the US, by and large (there were numerous countervailing elements, especially German), chose the wide, soft, easy road.

We all know how those two stories end.