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.FDR courted bishops.He would have liked a favorite, Bernard J.Sheil of Chicago, as archbishop inWashington, and he found Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago sympathetic.But themost public of the bishops was Francis J.Spellman, archbishop of New York from1939 until his death in 1967.His position as the Catholic church s supervisor ofmilitary chaplains and his closeness to Pius XII, pope from 1939 to 1958, foundedhis influence.He personified the old clerical culture that was dying even as he livedout his final years.49Radicalism growing out of the immigrant segment of American Catholi-cism was not unknown before the 1960s, but the vast mass of American Catholicshas been socially and politically conservative.Until recent years, that did nottranslate into membership in the Republican party, however, although CatholicRepublicans were not unknown.John Ireland was perhaps the most prominent.260 New ConfigurationsFrancis C.Kelley, a priest and founder of the Catholic Church Extension Society,was another.A sometimes violent opponent of Woodrow Wilson s Mexicanpolicy, he provoked Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan to the outburst: When our side of the Mexican story is told, there are some Catholic Republicanswho are going to feel very uncomfortable. 50 Political reasons operated: RhodeIsland Franco-American Catholics voted Republican because they could not get alook-in with the Irish-controlled Democrats.Sometimes the motivation waseconomic.My own immigrant grandfather, who had done well as a cotton trader,told his children he voted for the Republicans because he didn t want the cheapforeign goods following him in. On my mother s side, we were Democrats, in thestyle of Mayor Frank Hague s Jersey City, surely one of the more conservativebaronies in the Roosevelt coalition.Social historians can probe the American (and European peasant) roots ofAmerican Catholic conservatism.It was mightily encouraged by the authoritariancast that developed in Roman Catholicism during the nineteenth century and thefirst half of the twentieth.To be sure, not until 1950, and then only in the sin-gle matter of the assumption of Mary, did a pope exercise the infallibility definedin 1870 by the First Vatican Council.An aura of authority nonetheless settledover officeholders in the church.Scholarship was discounted.Donna Merwicksummed up much of it when she described Archbishop William O Connellof Boston as authority s answer to intellectual curiosity. Michael Gannon hasdocumented the intellectual isolation of the American priest early in thetwentieth century.51 The situation was ready-made for simplistic single-issuedemagoguery.Nineteenth-century Catholicism had known it in immensely in-fluential editors like Louis Veuillot of L Univers and, in the United States, JamesA.McMaster of the New York Freeman s Journal.In France and in America, nojournals had greater circulation among Catholic clergy.Twentieth-century counterparts were the radio priest, Charles E.Coughlin, and, two decades later, Senator Joseph R.McCarthy.Neither can bedismissed as aberrations in the Catholic community.They spoke to deep-seatedfears, prejudices, and insecurities and provided simplistic answers.Coughlinpreached voodoo economics long before George H.W.Bush coined the term,supported an abortive third-party movement in the presidential campaign of1936, degenerated into anti-Semitism, and was finally forced from the air by acombination of church and federal government pressure.During the long night ofthe Cold War, McCarthy s anticommunist rampage attracted widespread sup-port from Catholics.Both he and Coughlin remain folk heroes in certain circles.An eleven-cassette set of Coughlin s talks is for sale, offering Fr.Coughlin spredictions of the days to come. Roman Catholics and American Politics, 1900 1960 261The final decade before the Second Vatican Council opened in October1962 saw American Catholic political reliability once again under fire.PaulBlanshard s 1949 American Freedom and Catholic Power covered, as BarbaraWelter remarked, much the same territory as had Maria Monk s Awful Disclosuresa century earlier.Catholic Americans were pilloried for their un-American ser-vility to the absolute rule of the clergy, and the parochial school system wasdenounced as divisive and undemocratic. Protestants and Other Americans forSeparation of Church and State kept an eagle eye cocked for Catholic mis-creancies.52 President Harry S Truman did not help matters with his nominationin 1951 of General Mark Clark as ambassador to the Holy See.The last U.S.diplomat regularly accredited to the Holy See had left Rome in 1867; the timewas not ripe for resuming diplomatic relations.Nor, beyond a small number ofbishops, had the idea ever particularly appealed to American Catholics.Proposedin the early 1950s, it stirred a hornets nest.53Simultaneously, within the American Catholic community, a debate was inprogress, unnoticed save by scholars.Joseph Clifford Fenton, professor at theCatholic University in Washington, was vigorously engaged in defending then-standard Catholic positions on relationships between church and state and onreligious liberty against the challenge of the Jesuit John Courtney Murray, pro-fessor at nearby Woodstock College in Maryland.Fenton argued that the idealarrangement was one in which the state supported the church.Deviation fromthat ideal and equality of free exercise of religion might be tolerated in givencircumstances, but only as the lesser of two evils.Murray argued that, in the mod-ern world, the state s care of religion consisted in assuring the church s ability tooperate.He grounded his assertion of the compatibility of Catholicism andAmerican democracy in a natural-law analysis of individual human dignity and itsconsequences.His defense of the acceptability of the separation of church andstate and of religious liberty as a natural right led the way to the Second VaticanCouncil s declaration on religious liberty in 1965.54Toward the end of the 1950s, in October 1958, Angelo Giuseppe Roncallibecame pope.He took the name John XXIII.Under his leadership and that of hissuccessor, Paul VI (1963 1978), a radical shift took place in Roman Catholicthinking that materially affected the approach to the political world both of theofficial church and of Catholic people.A static and conceptual approach to realityyielded to one more biblically and historically conscious.Sacred and secular, churchand world, clergy and laity became less contrasted, less stratified.The councilsingled out as its primary metaphor for the church that of the people of God.Thesense grew throughout the community that we all of us are the church
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