Why the pastoral is shocking:

...The latter was a traumatic experience for Catholics who again kept a low profile and made their religion private...

...Most were elevated to the episcopacy after the cold war between Catholics and other Americans was ended...

...This would come only when Catholics felt comfortable enough in being American that they no longer felt it necessary to prove their patriotism by uncritically accepting the nation's foreign policies and by serving in the armed forces...

...The way for this had been partially paved by the issuing in 1919 of the Bishops' Program for Social Reconstruction, drafted by Father John A. Ryan of the Catholic University of America...

...That evening, Cardinal Dennis Dougherty of Philadelphia arrived in the special car provided him by the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad...

...FATHER Gerald P. fogarty, S.J., is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia...

...Catholics and their leaders, then, tended to ignore issues which had become "political," with exceptions to be noted below...

...Twenty years after the Council, the bishops are again in the news, this time for their stance on an issue many Americans wish to consider strictly political-the nuclear arms race...

...Unlike their predecessors, the present-day bishops are no longer afraid of being accused of being un-American if they challenge a government policy...

...Almost a century later, there seemed to be more ' 'billiard players'' to judge from the extensive news-coverage of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965...

...A group of prominent Protestant leaders, expressing the same fear of secularism, had already challenged the basis of the court's decision, but the bishops had to content themselves with quoting the Protestant statement...

...German-Americans fought against the nation of their ancestors and Irish-Americans temporarily put aside their antagonism for Britain to join other Americans on the side of the Allies...

...NOT ALL THE Catholic responses to this prejudice were well advised...

...In the post-conciliar years, American society began to change...

...The nuclear arms race is at least as important a moral question as going to see Baby Doll or The Moon is Blue.by Doll or The Moon is Blue...

...it mattered not to him that the Department of the Navy attested that the pennant had been in use since the Revolutionary War...

...The train had been given the right-of-way from New York across the country and had made several ceremonial stops on the way...

...It also prepared the groundwork for later Catholic support of the New Deal...

...World War II presented another opportunity for a display of Catholic loyalty to the American nation...

...Catholicism apparently was not Christian even for a president who counted among his most outspoken supporters leading bishops like John Ireland of St...

...Until now, the national pastorals have been concerned only with those public issues which directly or indirectly pertained to the family-the just wage, aid to parochial education, or opposition to abortion...

...Many observers have seen the election of John F. Kennedy as the sign of the acceptance of Catholics as American...

...In 1926, Cardinal George Mundelein of Chicago sought to offset the show of Klan power with a display of Catholic might at the first International Eucharistic Congress held in the United States...

...The festivities included the arrival often cardinals on a unique, seven-car train, specially built by the Pullman Company, painted cardinatial red, and nicknamed "The Red Special...

...NOT AFRAID TO CHALLENGE GOVERNMENT POLICY Why the pastoral is shocking GERALD P. FOGARTY IN 1869, as the Catholic bishops gathered for the First Vatican Council, Ralph Waldo Emerson commented that their deliberations were "interesting to the Catholics and a few abnormal readers, interested as the billiard players in the contest of billiard champions...

...On the recommendation of the State Department, Roosevelt had even approved the designation of Taylor's assistant, Harold H. Tittmann as Charge d' Affaires...

...She not only defended their right as citizens to speak out but she also queried why it had taken them so long...

...It proposed, among other things, a just wage and government regulation of industry and even, if anti-monopoly laws failed, government competition with private industry...

...Only rarely did they challenge either a law or the interpretation of the law by the courts...

...The pastoral does represent a new departure for American bishops...

...Why it has taken them so long and why their statement has drawn such attention can be answered, in part, through understanding the historical evolution of Catholicism as an integral part of American society...

...Though Jesuits are legendarily ingenious, even their enemies must have doubted that they could have wrought destruction with the two pieces of artillery which then graced the lawn of Georgetown University but which had arrived in Maryland on The Ark in 1634...

...With Spellman the sole exception I have found, the bishops actually opposed this appointment, but they were perceived by American society as attempting to gain a privileged position for the Catholic church in the United States...

...He considered Cardinal Mundelein a friend and accepted at least the influence of Francis Spellman, auxiliary bishop of Boston and later archbishop of New York...

...Irish-Americans were alienated by the failure of the liberals to place Northern Ireland on their agenda...

...The 1920s witnessed the resurgence of anti-Catholicism...

...Klan rallies spoke of the Jesuits having their cannon trained on the Capitol...

...With Mundelein already present in Chicago, there were in all eleven cardinals on the station platform-the largest number ever assembled in the United States and the show was not yet complete...

...On the eve of the Revolution, Charles Carroll of Carrollton may well have set an unfortunate tone for Catholics when a Tory opponent challenged him on his right to political views, though as a Catholic he was disenfranchised...

...They had moved beyond the immediate issue of education to the broader issue of the role of religion in American life and the growth of secularism or privatization of religion...

...Yet they refrained from comment on other areas of government policy...

...In 1925, the Ku Klux Klan paraded 35,000 strong down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, propagandizing their hatred for Catholics, Jews, and Blacks...

...It was an era when anti-Catholicism seemed to some to be a politicafadvantage...

...When approached at the peace conference on Irish independence, he admitted that he denied himself the "personal satisfaction" of telling "the Irish to go to hell.'' Patrick Hayes, the future cardinal archbishop of New York, summed up the Catholic perception of Wilson by stating: "he certainly was not sympathetic to us...

...He also met with Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the papal secretary of state, who was elected Pope Pius XII in 1939...

...the next morning, Cardinal William Henry O' Connell of Boston set ashore from his private yacht...

...ONE WAY for Catholics to prove their loyalty to the nation was to serve patriotically in the nation's wars...

...While • Cardinal Spellman became famous for his flag-waving patriotism and his support of the Vietnam war, it is no wonder that most bishops refrained from making public statements on issues which were not directly concerned with Catholic interests...

...In 1898, suspicion was raised that American Catholics might refuse to fight against Catholic Spain...

...At the end of the war, there was a new outburst of public reservation about the compatibility of Catholicism and American society...

...In this, their recent pastoral is more significant than Kennedy's election, for Catholics are not only accepted as Americans but are also exercising their full rights as Americans...

...Why so long indeed...

...With other Allied diplomats, Tittmann took up residence in the Vatican...

...Catholics, in general, supported the Spanish-American War, only to hear President McKinley state that the American armed forces had no choice but to capture the Philippine Islands "and to educate the Filipinos and to uplift and civilize and Christianize them...

...Privatization of Catholicism was intensified by the nativist reaction to nineteenth-century Catholic immigrants, who began a long career of trying to prove they were Americans...

...This is true only to a point, for it remained for Catholics and their leaders fully to exercise their rights as citizens...

...POSTWAR ANTI-CATHOLICISM was gradually tempered by the new threat of Communism...

...they had also been successful in having the Council accept the uniquely American tradition of religious liberty...

...During World War I, American Catholics either fought in the armed forces or raised substantial funds for the war effort...

...Paul...

...During the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Catholics again established liaison with government officials...

...As a historian, Wilson had not hidden his dislike for hyphenated Americans and had written disparagingly of those immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who had tainted the purity of the American people...

...Private'' religion-or the interpretation that the separation of church and state means a divorce between religious belief and public policy-became the order of the day...

...Perhaps their pastoral will not invoke any more obedience than the earlier encyclical against birth control, but they have at least raised the major question of the Christian attitude toward the arms race...

...William Buckley previewed for his readers his new line of a blend of 65 percent nostalgia for the good old days of comfortable Catholicism (complete with the Latin liturgy) and 35 percent prediction that Catholics would pay no more heed to this new pastoral than they did to Humanae Vitae...

...One legacy of the Joseph McCarthy witch hunt was the conviction that, if nothing else, Catholics were not Communists...

...surely they are constitutional...

...But alliance between Catholics and liberals on domestic issues began to founder on foreign affairs...

...One sign of this was the renewed hostility to Myron Taylor's mission as the president's personal representative to the pope...

...The American church has not drawn such attention from France since conservative French churchmen, fearful of the growing military power of the United States and of the American notion of religious liberty, succeeded in having Americanism condemned in 1899...

...Roosevelt's appointment of Taylor on Christmas Day 1939 had been greeted with the charge of a violation of the First Amendment, but opposition died out as the United States entered the war...

...Not only did the White House attempt to warn the bishops off the issue (in a letter published first in the New York Times), but Charles Hernu, the French defense minister, referred to "the American episcopate that sends letters to French bishops and prelates that are perhaps more demoralizing than are the [neutralist] movements in West Germany...

...As the war was coming to an end, opposition again increased toward the Taylor mission and the State Department queried how Tittmann had been given an official diplomatic title...

...Taylor would continue in his post until 1950, but there were other areas of tension between Catholics and American society...

...Senator Tom Heflin of Alabama harangued his colleagues about the threat of the Knights of Columbus and argued that there was undue Catholic influence in the Navy from the fact that the church pennant, emblazoned with a cross (for Heflin, a Catholic symbol), flew above the national flag on all warships during religious services...

...The suspicion was reminiscent of the French and Indian War when Catholics in colonial Maryland and Pennsylvania were disarmed out of fear that their religious beliefs would supersede their political loyalties and cause them to ally with Catholic France...

...Hostility toward the bishops increased in 1951 when Truman attempted to appoint General Mark Clark as the American ambassador to the Holy See...

...my political principles ought only to be questioned on the present occasion...

...They have declared that religion is not merely a private matter but must influence the way in which people regard the world in which they live...

...The civil rights movement, which did have strong Catholic support, and the painful experience of the Vietnam war distracted from the Council's reforms before the bishops had a chance to digest and implement them...

...and Paul Blanshard suggested that bishops be made subject to the Foreign Agents Registration Law since they received their appointments from the pope...

...Catholics as a group could not countenance the liberal support of the Spanish Republic which they saw strictly in terms of Communism...

...All most people knew of the Council was that the Mass was put in the vernacular...

...But such a display of popish pomp may well have had the opposite effect to that Mundelein intended...

...After the Ursuline Convent in Charles-town, Massachusetts, was burned in 1833, the nuns were told they had no right to sue because they owed allegiance to a foreign temporal ruler, the pope...

...Though this direct challenge to the Supreme Court had taken place in the context of an educational issue, the bishops had at least expressed their concern for American society...

...Meg Greenfield, editor of the editorial page of the Washington Post, may well have published the most balanced reaction to the bishops' pastoral...

...The War Department denied that Roosevelt had the right to bind the government to any responsibility for war damages to papal territory outside the Vatican (the issue was the American bombing of Castel Gandolfo...

...Often, however, their efforts fell upon deaf or insensitive ears...

...He considered the peace overtures of Pope Benedict XV as little more than efforts to settle the "Roman Question,'' the status of the papacy in regard to the Kingdom of Italy, or to prevent the defeat of the largely Catholic Austro-Hungarian Empire...

...Maturity as Americans and the intellectual and pastoral absorption of Vatican II, then, help explain why, on the one hand, the bishops were somewhat late on the scene and why, on the other, their action has provoked such a variety of public responses...

...The bishops were intent on bridging the gap between their flocks and the American cultural majority...

...Some political cartoons-e.g., one showing a bishop in a confessional listening intently to a Soviet commissar-could well have been published in any number of nineteenth-century, anti-Catholic journals...

...it may have increased the fear of Catholicism which led two years later to the defeat of Al Smith...

...There is one final observation to make on the current group of bishops...

...Their defensiveness increased under the presidency of Woodrow Wilson...

...It is perfectly correct, as some commentators have noted, to remember that Catholics are no longer immigrants in need of a type of leadership to protect them against a frequently hostile environment...

...Yet the American bishops failed to grasp the opportunity presented by the publicity to explain Catholicism to American society and to exercise, if not leadership, influence within that society...

...Catholics had again found themselves on the defensive, though they took part in a war against a Catholic nation...

...Roosevelt consciously wooed Catholic leaders both in this country and in Rome...

...One million gathered for the ceremonies on the shores of Lake Michigan...

...The bishops at Vatican II had fought against the charges that Catholics were not American and had breathed a sigh of relief that being a Catholic did not prevent the election of John Kennedy...

...Critics of the bishops' projected pastoral have surfaced inside and outside the Catholic church...

...Most did not participate in the Second Vatican Council, but all were nurtured in that council's teaching that the church is immersed in the world and has a duty at times to criticize governments...

...What my speculative notions on religion may be," he wrote, "this is neither the place nor time to declare...

...If we are to be true to the British and American common law tradition, on which is premised the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, true patriotism might entail criticism of the government, which exists only to serve its citizens...

...the-desire to prove their loyalty to the nation and its laws led Catholics to take no notable part in the abolitionist movement, though their failure to take a stance against slavery was also aggravated by the abolitionists' being also anti-Catholic-Lyman Beecher had preached the sermons in Boston which led to the burning of the Charlestown convent and his daughter, Harriet Beecher Stowe, had written several anti-Catholic works...

...They are now fully Americans in need of moral challenge if they are to remain Catholic as well as American...

...It was branded by the National Association of Manufacturers as "partisan, pro-labor union, socialistic propaganda...

...The bishops' criticism of government policy has come as a shock to many Americans, Catholic and Protestant alike, long accustomed to considering religion as a strictly "private" matter...

...Catholics, then, had to prove their temporal loyalty to the United States while retaining their spiritual loyalty to the pope, though he happened, in the nineteenth century, also to be the temporal ruler of the papal states-this was the distinction drawn in the bishops' pastoral of 1837...

...But at war's end, they found themselves the subject of' 'scholarly" studies showing that Catholics were in disproportionate numbers among the ranks of deserters...

...As president, he ignored the overtures of Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore to remain neutral toward the Mexican revolution and recognized the government of Venustiano Carranza, who was persecuting the Catholic church...

...On one such occasion in 1948, the bishops did challenge the use by the Supreme Court of Jefferson's phrase, a "wall of separation" between church and state, in declaring unconstitutional released-time religious instruction in public schools...

...On this issue, incidentally, they faced misunderstanding from another quarter-the Vatican, which forbade formal cooperation between the Catholic church and other religious groups...

...But if Catholics in the 1950s began to be perceived as good Americans, it was at best a new-found perception and one which might not last...

...The war effort overshadowed the strained relations between Catholics and other Americans...