Alfred E. Smith and the Americanization of the Catholic Church

Abstract

Prompted by the likelihood that a Catholic politician, Alfred E. Smith, would contest the 1928 presidential election on behalf of the Democratic Party, numerous Catholic and Protestant writers debated church-state relations. If Smith won the presidency, Protestants feared that papal influence would undermine the principle of religious freedom protected by the American Constitution. Catholics themselves were divided on this question and the debate led to the revival of arguments previously aired during the Americanist controversy of the late-nineteenth century. At that time, several U.S. bishops were promoting the separation of church and state, well established in their home country, as a model for the universal Church. However, Pope Leo XIII rejected this and, despite renewed interest in the matter following the debate over the Smith candidacy, an uneasy stand-off persisted between Roman teaching and American experience. It was not until the 1960s, mainly through the advocacy of the American delegates at the Second Vatican Council, that the Church enshrined the concepts of church-state separation and religious liberty in Dignitatis Humanae (Declaration on Religious Freedom). Thus the principles of Americanism, previously the subject of papal disapproval, were extended to the entire Church.