Prelude To ‘Americanism’: The New York Accademia and Clerical Radicalism in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The Americanist crisis in the last decade of the nineteenth century climaxed the attempt of a group of liberal prelates and their associates to adapt Roman Catholicism to democratic institutions and values. Almost twenty years ago Robert Cross put this complex movement within the context of a growing American Catholic liberalism in the postbellum period. The full dimensions of that liberalism are still coming into focus as archival materials and unpublished sources become more available to the historian. The recent discovery of a remarkable association of New York priests shows another facet of the Americanist controversy that better enables us to appreciate the peculiar lines that the episcopal struggle assumed.