Throughout her 2000 year history, the Church has confronted a number of great heresies that put Our Lord’s promise that she would not fail to the test. The greatest of these may have been the first, Arianism. It challenged the divinity of Christ, labeling Him as the greatest of all divinely inspired creatures. The Arians taught that “He was”, as Hillaire Belloc put it, “granted, one might say (paradoxically) all the divine attributes but divinity itself.” At its height, almost ¾ of the world’s bishops were Arian along with most of the army. So widespread had the heresy become that there were many “rank and file” Christians who were Arians and didn’t even know it. Swimming within the Arian waters, they were presumably orthodox even though they were, in truth, heterodox. It was really the grace-filled insistence, mingled with plenty of personal suffering, of one man, St. Athanasius, that kept us all from becoming Arians (and not knowing it). But rather than offering an account of how he did this, instead he is put before us as an example to be followed. Many of us, wholly unawares, are swimming within the waters of a different heretical tank. It is the heresy of Americanism.
This term, Americanism, may be vaguely familiar to some of us, but for the most part it is as foreign as the term Arian was to our 4th Century counterparts. Although appearing under different guises such as Gallicanism, it is essentially a subordination of the spirit of Catholicism in favor of a nationalistic one. In an 1899 letter to James Cardinal Gibbons called Testem Benevolentiae, Pope Leo XIII warned his American colleague of the danger confronting both the American Church and, because of its rising prominence, the Church universal. It is, as one papal biographer of Leo XIII put it, “A spirit of independence which passed too easily from the political to the religious sphere.”
The Errors of Americanism
Pope Leo XIII attached four specific errors to Americanism. First, all external guidance is set aside as superfluous so that all that is needed is the interior lights of the Holy Spirit. It is the American ideal of rugged individualism, freedom of conscience, and a rejection of any authority that animates this error. Second there is a higher regard for natural virtues than for supernatural virtues as if the latter are somehow passive and therefore defective. This comes from the practicality of the American spirit that shuns philosophy in favor of the empirical and a do it yourself mentality. Third there is a rejection of religious vows as somehow incompatible with the spirit of Christian liberty. There is a certain irony here given how important religious communities like the Jesuits and Franciscans were in the beginnings of our country. Finally, and perhaps the underlying principle of the entire heresy is that the Church should shape her teachings in accord with the spirit of the age. To gain those who differ from us we should omit certain points of teachings so as to make the faith more palatable.
At the time the letter was written the US Bishops agreed that these would be a great problem if they were present in the American Church, but denied that they could be found and dismissed them. This point is obviously historically debatable, especially given that Americanist tendencies can be found from the beginning in the actions and writings of the first bishop in the United States John Carroll who was a cousin of Charles Carroll (of Carrollton as he reminded the British in signing the Declaration of Independence) and was mostly American before he was Catholic. But what cannot be debated in an age of “personally opposed but…” Catholicism Leo XIII was definitely prescient.
One of the reasons that Arianism had such great appeal was that at heart it was simply a clever attempt to save paganism by making Christianity more palatable. For a pagan, a religion in which a creature was endowed with god-like qualities is easier to swallow than the truth that the Creator became man and suffered to redeem wayward mankind. And so it is with Americanist Catholics who cleverly seek to focus only on those things that are easy for Americans to swallow. As she grows older, America’s palate becomes increasingly limited. For the Catholic the highest law is God’s law mediated through the Church. For the American it is the Constitution mediated through the Supreme Court without any reference to a Higher Authority. How long can these two things can co-exist without significant concessions by the Catholic? Regardless of the timeframe there will come a moment of crisis for both the individual and the Church. Simply agreeing to disagree and focus only on what unites us is not a solution. The problem with this of course is that there is no reason then to convert to the fullness of the truth that is found only within the confines of the Barque of Peter. Why convert when you are simply promised more of the same?
Patriotism and the Catholic American
Why would I offer this reflection on July 4th of all days on the greatest of all secular holidays? Could I be any more un-patriotic than to offer a criticism such as this on today, of all days? To ask the question is to admit the problem. We are not patriotic to the American ideal. That is to treat America as a religion, which is at the heart of the problem. To be sure we love America because it is our home, but it is our home only because we share it with people that we love. We are patriotic because we follow Our Lord’s commandment to love our neighbor. Those people who we share a home with are those that God has placed closest to us in order that His commandment might take flesh. And there can be no greater love than to offer to them the Truth that has been handed on to us by preaching and living it unapologetically.
We find ourselves in a society that is coming apart at the seams and it is because what unites us is not greater than what divides us. No matter how well the Founding Fathers framed the Constitution (and they did frame well) it was never strong enough to keep us united forever. There is only one thing in this world that can keep a people united and it is the Church. Only a reformation of Christendom can save this country and that begins with the Church being more Catholic not less. For a Catholic resident in a non-Catholic country it is an act of true patriotism to want to convert his country—what we need is an American Athanasius.