American Catholic: The Politics of Faith During the Cold War by D.G. Hart

Abstract

Reviewed by: American Catholic: The Politics of Faith During the Cold War by D.G. Hart Raymond Haberski Jr. American Catholic: The Politics of Faith During the Cold War. By D.G. Hart. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. 280 pp. $29.95. The title of D.G. Hart's book presents the first and most central dilemma that faced Catholics in postwar America. What is the proper arrangement: Catholic Americans or American Catholics? Each choice has implications for the relationship between church and state, as well as the practical considerations for how Catholics fidelity to their "Church" (with a capital "C") influenced their allegiance to their nation—a point some Americans harped on constantly. Hart's book is the best I have read in laying out the contours of this relationship and the debate that surrounds it. In particular, he [End Page 71] provides the most succinct overview of Americanism, or the once heretical concept that Catholics in America faced a moral dilemma by accepting that their status as Americans influenced their faith. The stakes rested on how the Catholic Church viewed the right ordering of society and if the United States fundamentally challenged that view by enshrining the freedom to practice religion. In other words, because U.S. law regarded other religions just as legitimate as Catholicism, by what principle did Rome enforce its view that there was only one true faith? Hart provides a detailed and lively discussion of how conservative Catholics transformed this heresy into a new ideology by arguing that American intellectual foundations worked with rather than against a Catholic understanding of social order. Hart focuses on "politically conservative Roman Catholics, primarily in the world of opinion journalism and magazines, [who] made Americanism safe for the church" (7). Such a group includes writers who worked for William F. Buckley, Jr. at National Review and the friends and collaborators with Richard John Neuhaus at First Things. Hart chose not to include liberal or politically left Catholics in his analysis because those figures have challenged both the hierarchical power of the Catholic Church and the role of the United States as a redeemer nation—they were unimpressed with Americanism. The version of Americanism developed by conservative Catholics has had far-reaching influence on domestic affairs, including, of course, the abortion debate, and in foreign affairs, especially in terms of the Forever Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But before Hart engages the work of these neo-Americanists, he writes extensively about the influence of John F. Kennedy's presidential election and the work of John Courtney Murray, perhaps the most influential Catholic theologian of the Cold War era. Kennedy's election represented a turning point in the machinations of Americanism. Hart contends that "Kennedy's insistence on Protestant pieties such as church-state separation and American exceptionalism launched a new phase in the American Roman Catholic experience … But with a Roman Catholic as president endorsing the United States' redemptive mission in the world, Kennedy was crafting and promoting an Americanism that even popes had not considered" (64). JFK advanced a more generic American civil religion that showed how to invest American power with sacred meaning. If Kennedy made peace with Americanism, Murray demonstrated how to build a movement upon it. Much has been written on the pivotal role the Jesuit played in both American Catholic thought and as perhaps the key thinker behind drafting the Vatican's Declaration of Religious Freedom, a document that closed the Second Vatican Council. [End Page 72] "Murray's involvement in the sessions," Hart writes, "also allowed the church in the United States … to achieve a measure of pride in the way American Roman Catholicism helped redirect the church and its understanding of the modern world. That high estimate of the United States, which Murray himself cultivated, not only meant an end to Americanism. It also opened the way for Roman Catholics in the United States to regard their nation as Kennedy had said, as a city on a hill, a country as decisive in world affairs as Rome had once been" (87). Murray's achievement was to bequeath to conservative Catholics a "neo-Americanism" that positioned Catholics in the United States as...