Catholicism and the Making of the U.S. Pacific

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the context of the development of U.S. power in the Pacific, some American Protestants began to articulate a new approach to Catholicism and American national identity. In Southern California, Anglo-American boosters began to celebrate the region's history of Spanish Franciscan missions, preserving and restoring existing mission buildings while selling a romantic mission story to tourists and settlers. In the Philippines, U.S. imperial officials, journalists, and popular writers tempered widespread critiques of contemporary Spanish friars, celebrating the friars' early missionary precursors as civilizing heroes and arguing that Filipino Catholic faith and clerical authority could aid in the maintenance of imperial order. Against persistent currents of anti-Catholicism and in distinct and locally contingent ways, American Protestants joined Catholics in arguing that the United States needed to evolve beyond parochial religious bigotries. In both places, in popular events and nationally circulating publications, the celebration of particular constructions of Catholic histories and authority figures served to reinforce U.S. continental expansion and transoceanic empire.