The heresy of Americanism
Jack Hanson on the new pope and his namesake
In deciphering what Pope Leo XIV wants to honor in the legacy of his namesake, Leo XIII (who reigned from 1878 to 1903), many commentators, myself included, have focused on the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum (“of revolutionary change”). That document established the foundation of Catholic social teaching, codifying the Church’s commitment to the rights and dignity of workers in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. The new pope’s first speech to the College of Cardinals confirmed that he did have Rerum Novarum in mind when choosing his name, and that he was invoking the treatise in a sophisticated way; the advent of artificial intelligence, he suggested, represents both a new industrial revolution and a new threat to human dignity.
But although Rerum Novarum was undoubtedly Leo XIII’s most important contribution, it was not his only foray into the thickets where church and politics meet. The Italian pope was also a strident critic of what he perceived as the tendency of the American Church to resist the guiding hand of Vatican authorities. That legacy makes him an especially intriguing namesake for the first American pope, who has already made headlines for criticizing his native country’s Catholic convert vice president. JD Vance, however, is far from the only American Catholic to have an occasionally testy relationship with the Vatican. Throughout Pope Francis’s regime, an increasingly voluble cadre of conservative American Catholics, both within the hierarchy and among the laity, agitated against what they saw as the Argentine pontiff’s radicalism: most significantly, his outreach to the marginalized, his reversal of Benedict XVI’s program making it easier for priests to licitly perform the Tridentine Mass, and his general disposition to emphasize structural, political teaching and mostly eschew bourgeois moralism. In this light, it’s hard not to wonder whether the new Pope Leo might admire Leo XIII not only for his commitment to social justice but also for his efforts to keep the American Church in line.
In 1895, a few years after Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII issued another encyclical, entitled Longinqua oceani (“wide expanse of the ocean”), in which, for the first time, the Holy See directly addressed the American Church as a whole. Longinqua is a friendly, almost cheerful document in which Leo praises the “young and vigorous American nation” for its faithful congregations and, above all, its evident promise of “greatness.” He is at pains to emphasize the intimacy between the United States and the Church, perhaps even overstating the case, considering the anti-Catholicism rampant in the American nativist movement of the time: “For when America was, as yet, but a new-born babe, uttering in its cradle its first feeble cries, the Church took it to her bosom and motherly embrace.” But such hyperbole might have been strategic, since the missive also contains hints of warning, especially against the intrusion into the Church of certain hallmarks of American society: rampant individualism, a preference for novelty, and, above all, an undue reverence for political power as a good in itself.
In the years that followed, the teachings of an American liberal Catholic theologian named Isaac Hecker began to spread in Europe. The founder of the Paulist Fathers, a society of priests that aimed to spread Catholicism in the United States in ways that were responsive to the changing country, Hecker’s ideas emphasized the compatibility of Catholic tradition with modern ideals such as republican government and free intellectual inquiry. John Ireland, the archbishop of Saint Paul, Minnesota and a friendly contemporary of Hecker’s, referred to the broader trend of Catholic modernization as a “glorious crusade” to unite “church and age.” In other countries, however, where secularization was being pursued far more rigorously, the liberalism that Hecker promoted began to feed attacks on the Church as a whole, something neither Hecker himself nor his colleagues had intended.
Leo XIII was concerned with the rumors of rebellion proliferating in Catholic circles; a particularly enthusiastic introduction to the French translation of Hecker’s biography served to focus the pope’s ire on the American situation. In 1899, he sent a letter to James Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore, pointedly condemning what he called “Americanism” as a heresy. In this missive, titled Testem benevolentiae nostrae (“Witness to Our Benevolence”), Leo argues that the American Church has confused “license with liberty,” and replaced the freedom that comes from the recognition of the truth — that is, the teachings of the Catholic Church and specifically the Roman Magisterium — with the freedom to do whatever you want to do.
The response among the American hierarchy was swift. Church officials defended themselves and their congregations — and Hecker, for that matter, who had accompanied Gibbons to attend the First Vatican Council of 1869-1870 — on doctrinal grounds, insisting that the rapidly proliferating American parishes were perfectly orthodox in their beliefs and practices. But a battle had long been raging between the conservative senior clergy and younger liberals within the United States, and however much they argued about its exact implications, the liberals knew that Testem amounted to the destruction of their cause. When Leo XIII’s successor, Pius X, issued his 1910 demand that all clergy sign an “Oath Against Modernism,” whispers of dissent passed among American priests, but they complied. The measure “brought an end to the American Catholic romance with modernity,” according to historian Jay P. Dolan. “Conservatism had triumphed and the Church now moved into a period of consolidation.” Nonetheless, the Americanism controversy confirmed once and for all that the United States was not simply an outpost of Europe, but a distant, almost entirely foreign country.
Ironically, at the precise moment that the American bishops were striving to align themselves more closely with the Vatican, a variety of European Catholics were beginning to reassess their own stance on questions of ecclesial hierarchy and authority. These theologians, often identified with the movement known as “ressourcement,” or “return to the sources,” were interested not so much in modernization as in an expanded view of tradition, reaching back to the first centuries of Christian thinking. Their project culminated in the decentralizing efforts of the Second Vatican Council of 1962 to 1965. The last pope, Francis, who was elected in 2013, sought to continue the legacy of Vatican II by expanding “synodal” authority in the church, a synod being a council of bishops gathered to debate a particular issue of doctrine or church governance. Without officially threatening papal authority, synodal deliberation opens doctrinal authority to a more plural and democratic process. At the end of the most recent assembly (called, fittingly, the Synod on Synodality), Francis endorsed the bishops’ own document as the final word on the subject, rather than issuing an apostolic exhortation, or a letter written and signed by the pope himself, as has long been the typical method of settling doctrinal debates in the Church.
The paradoxical outcome of all these developments has been an American Church whose anxious efforts to defend and conform to “tradition,” as it was defined around the turn of the twentieth century, have once more brought it into conflict with top Catholic authorities in Rome. Like their Gilded Age predecessors, chastised by Leo XIII for tolerating dangerous innovations, many American Catholics spent Francis’s papacy insisting that certain “traditional” practices and beliefs be upheld and warning of the dangers of change. But now the changes from which they seek to protect the faithful are coming from the magisterium itself, and the traditions they are defending are often political causes, like free market capitalism and border security. On these, they side with the Republican Party against Francis and the mainstream of Catholic social teaching going back at least to Rerum Novarum.
Many conservative American Catholics also continue to display exactly the kind of undue reverence for the rituals of the civil realm that troubled the last Pope Leo. Robert Barron, Bishop of Winona-Rochester in Minnesota and a popular figure on social media, attended President Trump’s first address to a joint session of Congress and posted a video afterwards in which he reflects on the event, noting in approving tones its various devotional, ceremonial, and ritual aspects. Now, a Catholic leader who had learned from the Americanism controversy might have been expected to at least temper his flock’s enthusiasm for such ritualism, and perhaps note that while civil religion may serve a purpose, it is ultimately subordinate to the holy rituals of liturgy and communal devotion. Barron, by contrast, only lamented that some Democrats remained in their seats as the President entered the room. More recently, JD Vance explained in a conversation with fellow convert Ross Douthat that during his first visit to Pope Leo XIV, he could not show the new pontiff the reverence an ordinary parishioner might be expected to demonstrate, since he was there not as a Catholic, but as the head of President Trump’s delegation. The pair then spent a fair amount of time speculating on how Vance might approach a possible conflict with the new Pope, assuming a model of competing authority that looks more like Leo XIII’s worst nightmare than anything Isaac Hecker ever taught.
In the weeks since Leo XIV’s election to the papacy, speculation has run rampant as to how this native son might differ from his immediate predecessor in dealings with the American Church. Though he has been quite clear about his desire to maintain Pope Francis’s emphasis on justice, charity, and peace, some conservatives have been eager to seize on any indication of moderation, such as his recent remark that marriage is an institution “between a man and a woman,” as well as his perceived openness to the Latin rite. To my mind, these are slim pickings for the right. Without straying from the official Church teaching on marriage, Leo can hardly be said to have rejected Fiducia Supplicans, the Francis-era declaration allowing for the blessing of couples in “irregular situations,” saying only that the new practice should be implemented with particular attention to local cultural limitations and demands. As for the Latin Mass, I always suspected that Francis would have been more open to its practice had it not become a cudgel for contrarians among clergy and the laity.
On the most pressing issues of our time, the new Pope Leo may well prove as sharp a thorn in the side of the Americanists as the previous one was. But Americanism — the set of ideological commitments that have brought important currents of American Catholicism into conflict with the Vatican — no longer means enthusiasm for free inquiry and pluralism. Increasingly, it means support for mass expulsions; suppression of speech; weapons for the murder of civilians; and endless, rapacious extraction. Whatever the early tensions stirred up by American Catholicism, it’s now clear the Church has benefitted and even learned from the American political tradition, having come to see that religious pluralism, popular democratic movements, and a rights-based legal framework can complement, rather than merely compete with, its historical emphasis on doctrinal adherence, well-structured hierarchy, and mutual obligation. Perhaps the cardinals in last month’s conclave took stock of our current crises and decided that in order for Americanism to change once more, they must again make clear that the Church means something else entirely.
Jack Hanson is associate editor at The Yale Review. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Drift, and elsewhere. He lives in New York.
IIRC, Rerum Novarum also bitterly criticized "freedom of conscience", which was anathema in much of europe at the time. Rather, the Catholic Church preferred "Throne And Altar" style government, with a divinely-appointed Catholic monarch and a Church that was largely in charge of education.
The Vatican really only started to make peace with liberal democracy around 1945, and that was only because the alternative was Soviet-style Communism. For that matter, the Church was perfectly content with the "Man On A Horse" model of government all the way through the 1970s, and, in Latin America, even after that.