American Catholic Expansionism: 1886–1894

Abstract

It was demonstrated elsewhere that after a visit to Rome in 1886–87 a small group of American Catholic bishops, later known as Americanists, came to hold a number of religious convictions which accounted for the reformatory activity of these men between that visit and the papal condemnation of Americanism in 1899. Briefly, a faith or myth was born alongside the standard Catholic orthodoxy of the period, one which affirmed God as rearranging the world, determining the decline of Europe and the emergence of the United States of America as a “New World,” destined, as in the puritan dream, to shed its influence around the world. The unique features of this American Catholic reinterpretation of the puritan myth were that it was housed within an international religious institution, and its object was not exactly the spread of political liberty or a purified Christianity, but a modernized or Americanized Catholicism.