Between Rome and the Republic
D. G. Hart July/August 2025The winding path of American Catholicism from underdog to the Papal Palace.
Illustration by Jon Krause
The recent election of Bishop Robert Prevost as pope is one more wrinkle in the history of Roman Catholicism. As the first American to become pope, Prevost achieved what many Vatican watchers and historians had thought impossible—a native of the church from a predominantly Protestant country becoming the supreme authority in an ancient European institution steeped in ceremony and mystery. Adding to this twist is the name Prevost took for his papacy—Leo XIV. Although the significance of that choice will unfold over the course of his reign, for now the name points to the last Leonine pope, Leo XIII, who ruled from 1878 to 1903. Because the previous Leo was famous for his social teaching and theological conservatism, observers surmise that Leo XIV is signaling an identification with Leo XIII’s achievements.
Overlooked in estimates of the previous Leo is his verdict on the United States. Although he was not as hostile to the modern world as other popes from his era, Leo XIII did condemn Americanism as a heresy in his 1899 encyclical, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae. The pope was responding to American Catholics—their nickname was Americanists—who believed the country, because of its political institutions and economic opportunities, was a welcome home for Roman Catholicism. They also thought the Roman Catholic Church, which often looked to the past, needed to adjust to modern society. Leo XIII’s condemnation was mild, but it did take the wind out of the sails of bishops who had fallen in love with the United States. From the perspective of many European Catholics, the United States and Roman Catholicism were at odds. The church was historic, hierarchical, formal, and divine. The United States was new, democratic, anti-formal, and vulgar. How could they possibly mix?
Despite Leo XIII’s verdict, Roman Catholics in the nineteenth century proved that their faith could thrive in America. Although it took until the 1960s and the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, the evidence of harmony between the church and American society was obvious to clergy and laity in the United States. Chances are that the new pope, Leo XIV, has the American church’s experience of Roman Catholicism and American society deep in his bones. That makes the choice of his name all the more fascinating. To gain perspective on the intrigue behind that decision, an overview of American Catholic history is useful.
From Isolation to Assimilation
Originally, the American Catholic church had little to teach European bishops and cardinals who were preoccupied with Roman Catholicism’s place in Western society after the French Revolution. If American Catholicism had emerged either from the French or Spanish colonies, Roman curia may have taken the church in the United States more seriously. But because the American church’s members were predominantly English Catholics, a minority within the Protestant British empire, Rome had few reasons to regard American Catholicism as important. For the record, in 1790, the United States had 30,000 Roman Catholics out of a population of roughly three million.
After the colonial and early national establishment of Roman Catholic institutions by English Catholics, the face of the American church changed with the arrival of Irish and German immigrants. (Waves of Italian and Polish Catholics came to the United States in the late nineteenth century.) Because most of the German settlers settled on farms in the Midwest, they were less visible and politically active than their Irish counterparts, whose presence altered politics in cities on the East Coast. Historic antagonisms between the English and Irish, combined with more general anti-Catholic attitudes among white American Protestants (in denominations with British roots), set off political hostilities, both local and national. Those political battles reinforced the Reformation divide between Protestants and Rome and also set American Catholics apart as a minority group within the nation’s generically Protestant society.
At the local level, hostilities between Protestants and largely Irish-American Catholics broke out most notably in Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia. The case of Philadelphia particularly illustrated the question of immigrants assimilating to an American society in which Protestants were dominant. The so-called Bible riots took place in May and July 1844, in which Protestants organized patriotic events in Irish neighborhoods and provoked fights and arson. Protestants regarded their nation as Protestant in origin and saw the growth of Roman Catholics as a threat to the United States’ government and culture. The conflict also stemmed from opposition by Philadelphia’s archbishop to Bible reading and prayer in the public school. Roman Catholics did not use versions of the Bible that were not approved by the church and believed that prayer and Bible reading were devotional exercises that should be conducted in a church setting. Roman Catholic objections to Protestant piety in public schools was one reason for establishing a system of parochial schools.
Similar dynamics—Protestant nationalism versus Roman Catholic foreignness—played out at the national level. The rise of Irish immigrants provoked some Protestants to form nativist political parties, such as the Native American Party, which opposed Roman Catholics and immigration. Founded in 1844, the party was a factor in most federal elections until the Civil War. Although the Native American Party did not make a dent in the Senate, in 1854 in the House of Representatives the party fielded 52 seats in Congress (out of 234). The party also nominated candidates for president. Their most successful was Millard Fillmore, the 13th president of the United States. In 1854 he ran as a nativist candidate after his former party, the Whigs, broke up. Fillmore gained 21 percent of the popular vote (eight votes in the electoral college). These numbers indicate how strong and respectable anti-Catholicism was.
Beyond different ways of practicing Christianity, American Catholics were also divided from Protestants by class. With immigrants as the largest sector of the working class and the American church (at least in big cities) as an immigrant communion, the politics of industrialization and urbanization were additional factors in segregating Roman Catholics. In New York City, for example, Irish-Americans established political machines and dominated local government. Beyond political patronage, the conditions of the working class fueled the formation of labor unions. The Knights of Labor, founded in 1869, was controversial because the church opposed labor unions—known either for radicalism or rioting. But concern for the working class prompted some American bishops to cooperate with the Knights.
Tension between American and Roman Catholic convictions was behind Leo XIII’s 1899 condemnation of Americanism. American bishops were divided between those who favored isolation as the means toward forming strong Roman Catholic identity. Others saw assimilation as a way for immigrants to become part of a thriving American church. The pope ruled, in effect, that an incautious embrace of American ways was the wrong strategy if it undermined tradition, hierarchy, and theology. But Leo also praised the American church for mixing freely in America and building a strong faith community. (In 1891, the pope had also assisted the immigrant American church by granting legitimacy to labor unions in the encyclical Rerum Novarum.)
Despite Leo’s warnings, American Catholicism did not change significantly. The church’s rank and file experienced greater prosperity and became better educated through parochial schools, colleges, and voluntary societies that cultivated both faith and patriotism. During World War I and World War II, Roman Catholics displayed levels of military service that surpassed other religious groups.
One place that showed American Catholic success was the urban parish. In American Catholic (1997), Charles R. Morris observes that an anthropologist “landing in a working-class Philadelphia parish in the 1930s or 1940s would know instantly the centrality of religion.” “The rows of neat brick houses were invariably centered around, and dwarfed by . . . the Catholic church, always of neo-Gothic design, built to the scale of a medium-size cathedral.” Attached were a parish school, sometimes including a high school, a rectory, convent, and additional facilities for meetings. The school bound neighbors together, instilled piety, and enabled the priest to keep tabs on parents and children.
Although archbishops like Philadelphia’s Dennis Dougherty insisted that parochial schools inoculated American Catholics from an “atmosphere of heresy and unbelief,” mid-twentieth-century urban churches were quintessentially American. Hollywood provided audiences with charming portrayals of the American church. Between 1943 and 1945, movies in Roman Catholic setting received nominations for forty-three Oscars. Song of Bernadette took four Oscars out of twelve nominations; Going My Way, seven Oscars out of ten nominations; and The Bells of St. Mary’s, one Oscar out of eight nominations. Going My Way won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Story, and Best Song. However alien Roman Catholicism may have seemed to American Protestants, its presence was a frequent reminder of the American dream—namely that hard work and private initiative paved the way to success in the United States.
An American Blend
Strains between Roman Catholicism and the American way of life came to an end in the two decades after World War II. The 1950s started with another round of anti-Catholicism, thanks partly to Cold War conceptions of the United States as a bastion of liberal democracy. Paul Blanshard’s bestselling book American Freedom and Catholic Power (1953) claimed that Roman Catholicism was authoritarian and un-American. The Vatican itself did not help when it silenced John Courtney Murray, a Jesuit theologian, from writing about church and state. Murray had responded to Blanshard by arguing that the American Founding was an outgrowth of the Natural Law taught by medieval theologians. For some in the Vatican, Murray was contradicting official papal teaching.
But the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, the first Roman Catholic president, vindicated the American Catholics’ experience. He proved American Catholics were different from other Americans but not to the point of being alien. American Catholics were American in their own way—much closer to other Americans than to European Catholics.
Perhaps it was a coincidence, but the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) started while Kennedy was president. At the Council, bishops updated church teachings and practices in ways that resembled the American Catholic experience, at least as American Catholics had practiced their faith. Vatican II allowed for worship in the vernacular instead of Latin. The bishops affirmed the centrality of Scripture in the church’s witness. The council recognized Protestants as “separated” brethren, and advocated interreligious dialogue with Jews and Muslims. Bishops also defended religious freedom and liberty of conscience—which American Catholics had experienced for almost two centuries. Perhaps most significantly, Vatican II revised the church’s relationship to modern culture from antagonism to camaraderie. The church would not take its cues from the world, but Roman Catholicism would adapt the better parts of modern life for Christian ends. In this way, Vatican II was a dramatic reversal of Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864), which condemned the idea that Rome needed to adjust to modern politics, economics, and intellectual life.
Even if the bishops seemed to vindicate American Catholics’ experience, Vatican II also removed the logic behind the American church as separate from America. The number of nuns and priests declined significantly. Parents opted for public schools and students for state universities. In Garry Wills’ provocative book about Vatican II, Bare Ruined Choirs (1972), the author concluded that the post–Vatican II church was “superficially” reformed. “The vernacular Mass, congregational participation, popular singing—float above the same theological vacuum as before.” “Shallow sermons” were as common as ever.
Older American Catholics, like Ken Woodward, longtime religion reporter for Newsweek magazine, grew up in a pre–Vatican II environment in which American Catholics ran in networks that paralleled American society. Church members grew up as American and Catholic, with a clear sense of difference and of belonging to both the nation and the church. Younger American Catholics, like the new pope, Leo XIV, experienced church life when Roman Catholicism was fluid and when the United States was riding a roller coaster—from the lows of Vietnam and Richard Nixon’s resignation, the highs of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” and the end of Soviet Communism.
An Unfinished Story
However the new pope builds on the work of his papal predecessors, it is likely that his pontificate will show telltale signs of the American church. Already Americans are relating to him as an Italian-American from Chicago’s South Side who roots for the not-very-glamorous Chicago White Sox. Prevost went to ordinary American Catholic schools and universities, served in ordinary parishes in the United States and Peru, and then only recently joined the Roman Curia. Leo’s long trek has all the earmarks of the American rags-to-riches story. It is the American Catholic equivalent of Ben Franklin. Leo’s religious networks are obviously Roman Catholic, but the parts of his life that are not overtly religious are overwhelmingly America. To say that “a homily should be short and to the point, like a mini-skirt,” as Prevost did, is characteristically American. Most Americans are uncomfortable with pretense. When they look for displays of power, glory, intrigue, and mystery, they come up with the Super Bowl. That is not the Vatican’s way.
Differences between the style cultivated by immigrants and the formality handed down by apostles and emperors will make Leo XIV’s pontificate fascinating. He embodies a branch of Roman Catholicism that only became respectable globally when the United States emerged as the leader of the free world. Pope Francis wanted the church to go to the peripheries. For most of the American church’s history it was on the periphery. How the new pope mixes the New World experience with the Old World’s traditions may be the most important factor in Leo’s reign.
Article Author: D. G. Hart
D. G. Hart teaches history at Hillsdale College, Michigan, and is the author of American Catholic: The Politics of Faith During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2020).