Join it, work it, fight it:

...The weakness of the evangelical approach is that, by defining issues and responses in Christian terms, its proponents become marginalized in the larger public debate...

...Later converts like Orestes Brownson and Isaac Hecker were attracted by Catholic authority, but both took for granted (as so many European Catholics did not) the need, in principle, to respect freedom of conscience and to subject Catholic claims to the discipline of reasonable public discourse...

...Such apparently radical, even sectarian, appeals punctuate documents notable for their manifestly republican concern for public morality and policy...

...A similar countercultural spirit informed the pastoral and reflective sections of the bishops' economics letter three years later...

...JOIN IT, WORK IT, FIGHT IT AMERICAN CATHOLICS & THE AMERICAN WAY DAVID J. O'BRIEN For Irish Catholics in Massachusetts, one rare highlight of the 1988 presidential campaign came when George Bush somehow managed that wonderful photo opportunity with Lou Holtz and Notre Dame's number one football team...

...Thomas Merton converted to Catholicism before World War II and entered a Trappist monastery...

...What deserves notice is that it necessarily places the laity, "citizens of two cities," at the center of the church's life and mission...

...In addition, they could best defend themselves against anti-Catholic enemies by uniting behind their bishop, supporting their own schools, and treating non-Catholic appeals to the public interest with suspicion...

...But these immigrant workers were peasants, with few illusions about public life...

...It represents a deliberate (though not necessarily ultimate) acceptance of religious pluralism, which, because it prevents the monopoly of culture by any particular religion, requires ongoing mediation between religious and civic obligations...

...Nor can the individual citizen effectively participate in the public debate, persuade non-Christians, or indifferent ones, or influence the larger culture by appealing to the authority of the Gospel...

...Questions that are provocative and embarrassing...

...While few Catholics joined the Catholic Worker or the various resistance, peace, and social justice movements, many did respond to a spirituality which called for fundamental commitment to the Gospel and the witness of Jesus, and reflection on that commitment in light of the all too obvious evils of contemporary society...

...groups can and do mobilize to influence popular perceptions and judgments...

...These terms have special meanings here, and the typology itself is an abstraction, derived from, but perhaps also imposed on the historical record...

...When Americans differ over the moral aspects of a problem, government can't act effectively to resolve it...

...Paul...

...To the faithful evangelical, it seems cynical: what would Jesus have to do with organizing groups to pursue their own interests...

...but as to whether we remained true to them even though the world go otherwise...

...Public opinion-more broadly, culture-is itself an arena of combat...

...Instead, they would measure culture, society, and politics by Christian standards and act directly on the result, without the mediation of citizenship or group interests...

...The trouble is that the answers are all over the lot, ranging at least from Archbishop John Whealon's well publicized 1988 switch to the GOP to Bishop Thomas Gumbleton's dedication to near universal reform...

...Catholics remain, as they must, strangers in the land...

...To use the teminology of Max Weber, their project would affirm both a "politics of ultimate ends" and a "politics of responsibility," to embrace if possible both Dorothy Day and John Courtney Murray...

...It might be helpful to look briefly at the historical origins of these three styles...

...The force of evangelical Catholicism will undoubtedly grow as the realities of voluntarism assert themselves more fully among Catholics...

...Brownson (at times), Hecker, Archbishop John Ireland, all believed that the United States represented the leading force of modern history: where it was going, all would follow...

...than "what would Jesus do...

...Unfortunately, there has been little theological reflection on this uniquely American form of social action...

...as a community of moral discourse, it may at times also have a serious obligation to promote a specific moral position...

...when it was condemned, this confidence in the possibility of a Catholic America was among the casualties...

...In the wake of Vatican II, however, unavoidable moral issues like racism, imperialism, nuclear deterrence, and abortion drew from the margins of Catholic life a more explicitly religious stance...

...They could not be satisfied with the subculture the church's leaders constructed to preserve the faith and insure institutional survival...

...His evangelical appeals for a truly American Catholicism, which would in turn make the United States, and eventually the whole world, Catholic, influenced John Ireland, the charismatic archbishop of St...

...One style, addressed to members of the church, begins with the message of Jesus and explores the responsibility of Christians...

...Churches, like other institutions, have to organize to protect their interests...

...But there can be little doubt that, taken apart from the republican tradition, its capacity to unify American political culture and underpin an authentic common life is limited...

...Murray also defined the still dominant terms of Catholic debate on a variety of public policy issues...

...If social problems are at least in part problems of power, organization, and institutions, and if they almost always intersect with government policy, a pluralistic society simply cannot deal with those problems in explicitly Christian terms...

...Ethnic assocations, political machines, trade unions organized on the self-interested terms of Samuel Gompers's "business unionism," all were structures which emphasized unity, loyalty, and self-centered devotion to particular interests and ideals...

...There are appeals for ethical behavior and serious proposals for national policy, but the religious language and symbols are confined to the internal, explicitly religious "style of teaching," suggesting unintentionally that public life is devoid of spiritual and religious significance...

...In the face of such issues, the republican style seemed inadequate...

...The weakness of the immigrant style is self-evident...

...Its adherents find the republican style too temporizing, the interest-group style too selfish...

...But disdain for this dimension of the American heritage reflects a continuing ambivalence about democracy and a failure among evangelicals and republicans alike to come to grips with the contentiousness, ambiguity, and frequent unreasonableness of practical democratic politics...

...The problem of labor's right to organize was not resolved by a moral decision to recognize that right, but by labor mobilization, posing a threat to labor peace, community order, and successful anti-depression policy, while taking advantage of an anti-business climate to influence public opinion in a pro-union direction...

...No one wanted more passionately to make America Catholic than Hecker, precisely because he believed that Catholic doctrine and sacraments could provide the needed, and missing, spiritual foundation for the national experiment in freedom...

...But, in the United States, with a longer experience of detachment from regimes, it has long been clear that such a formulation is necessarily problematic: as an institution with concrete interests, the church indeed has a political agenda of its own...

...When an issue like abortion becomes defined as a Catholic issue and a test for the Catholic politician, the church ends up in the same position as the evangelicals, marginalizing its voice and restricting its potential influence by the sectarian strategy of loyal witness...

...Those who advocate this course are either persons who haven't taken the trouble to analyze the possibilities and implications of the moral reform proposal," or who don't really want reform at all...

...The once common blend of internal conservatism and external championing of labor and minority interests is reappearing in places like Los Angeles...

...In 1984, several bishops similarly challenged the abortion views of vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro and New York Governor Mario Cuomo, both Catholics...

...And, as happened among Protestants, social responsibility has come to be seen in personal terms...

...later church leaders, while professing to be aloof from politics, occasionally used their influence to seek aid for parochial schools, to resist changes in legislation regarding birth control, or to insure that Catholic interests were respected in welfare legislation...

...In similar fashion, the economics pastoral, in its several drafts, moved from a Vatican II emphasis upon work in everyday occupations as the locus of the pursuit of holiness to a more evangelical emphasis on family and church as repositories of countercultural values standing in opposition to the dominant values of American society...

...One suspects that, in the future, public Catholicism will not be contained exclusively in any of the three approaches discussed in this essay...

...Respected, even admired, Who wos who John Carroll, first bishop, later archbishop, of Baltimore, came from the well-connected Maryland Carrolls, who included Charles, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and Daniel, participant in the Constitutional Convention...

...No wonder Barnicle is angry and Cuomo thinks Catholics have to face some hard questions...

...From a public point of view, this style is ordinarily divisive, and rather deliberately so...

...The formative years of the American church were dominated by independent men committed to republican ideals...

...In the years that followed, he and others would ask similar questions about racism, about the Vietnam war, about world and domestic poverty, and finally about the nuclear problem, which by the 1980s seemed to carry the very fate of creation...

...During moments of perceived crisis, however, embattled immigrants appealed to the Bill of Rights, and machine politicians and ethnic leaders sincerely proclaimed their devotion to shared ideals and the public interest...

...Bush supporters loved it, but his opponents were even more grateful because the event triggered a Mike Barnicle column in the Boston Globe calling down curses on Notre Dame (and on Boston College whose students had just paid Oliver North a $25,000 lecture fee...

...At least three distinct, sometimes overlapping, forms, or styles, of public presence emerged...

...The goal is to make the church "a community of conscience, a body of citizens with a commitment to human rights and a concept of social justice which allows them to make concrete judgments of where and how to stand on questions of legislation, social policy, and specific choices facing their neighborhood and nation...

...A ll contemporary Catholics acknowledge the basic shift of Vatican II with respect to the church's public presence...

...If interest-group and evangelical Catholicism seem to exclude authentically public concerns-the one for the sake of integrity, the other for the sake of effectiveness-the republican style, reborn in the pastoral letters, Cardinal Bernardin's "seamless garment," Archbishop Weakland's "economic democracy," and the work of J. Bryan Hehir, David Hollenbach, and John Coleman, takes those concerns very seriously...

...For this to happen, Catholics must become convinced that public policy issues "are the business of the Christian community as part of [its] faith commitment...

...From both the republican and evangelical perspectives, community organizing, like self-interest politics and conflict-oriented unionism, seems unduly to compromise both Christian and civic ideals...

...republican Catholicism lives most fully in the midst of society...

...The second style, directed at the general public, is intended to contribute to the development of the public moral consensus, to influence public opinion, to help shape the public debate about policy by clarifying its moral dimension...

...If Catholics and their church can learn to understand and appreciate their history, if they can come to feel that this land, where they live, is their own, for which they are responsible, if they can come to see themselves as part of an American as well as a Christian people, then they may indeed help enliven public life and restore a sense of public responsibility in American institutions...

...Barnicle talked it over on the phone with Mario Cuomo, who was angry over Bush's appearance at Christ the King High School in Brooklyn, where he accepted the shield of a slain policeman and, in Cuomo's words, "screamed for the death penalty...

...Emphasis on this institution, or this group, does not automatically exclude concern for the common good, but unity, strength, and morale usually require particular concerns to override appeals to the public interest...

...It advocates fidelity to principle over pragmatic considerations...

...The evangelical style is also divisive in principle...

...Republicanism meant acceptance of civil and social equality with non-Catholics, thus assisting the assimilation of Catholic outsiders...

...It thus risks appearing self-righteous and authoritarian, and often appears more concerned with vindicating its own rights and commanding recognition than with doing something about the issue itself...

...The reason for the resurgence of this more radical language was the apparent inadequacy of republican categories in the face of spiraling problems of violence and injustice...

...Neither the evangelical emphasis on Gospel fidelity nor the republican emphasis on civic mindedness directly confronts these problems of power...

...His politics changed frequently...

...Indeed Murray himself had argued that because limited nuclear war might be necessary, it must be justified...

...Instead, when the church acts from the immigrant perspective, as it did in these cases, it seems compelled to escalate the moral language, making the policy it promotes appear to be directly related to Christian belief, and therefore to paint opponents as anti-Catholic or anti-Christian...

...Through Commonweal editor and later New York Times religion editor John Cogley, Murray's ideas influenced John F. Kennedy's articulation of church-state issues in the 1960cam-paign...

...The most dynamic and influential is now the evangelical...

...The tone of this theological and pastoral discussion is radical and demanding, tending toward nonviolence and calling for a separation from social values and practices that contradict the Gospel...

...Committed to building the public moral consensus, they are equally committeed to strengthening the church's witness to the Gospel, to preserving the integrity of the community of faith...

...Their pastors, for the most part, are only slightly more conversant with the teaching, and often sadly lacking in the knowledge of public issues...

...In fact, it has experienced a revival among newer migrants, most notably Hispanics...

...Both approaches required some modification of Gospel ideals and Catholic claims...

...Interest- group practice among Catholics rarely appealed to interest-group theory, probably because that theory conflicts so directly with Christian ideals and natural law teaching...

...So, even if people take church teaching seriously, divisions are natural and necessary...

...In the 1930s the Catholic Worker movement of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin began to construct on such foundations another form of public Catholicism...

...Republican ideals have always dominated episcopal political thought...

...Hughes and churchmen like him understood that the formal freedom granted by the Constitution could only be put into practice by a church which had the power to act, and he instinctively grasped the means to secure such power...

...Where republicanism mediated between the particular preoccupations of the church and the more general concerns of the public, the immigrant tradition gave priority to Catholic needs and interests...

...The immigrant style also arises from the experience of pluralism, but here the focus is less on the public good, with its accommodation and negotiation, than the good of the group...

...The individual Catholic, and in a certain sense the church, was both American and Catholic...

...It is the stance of relatively successful persons and organizations who recognize that their interests and ideals differ from those of others, so that, for the sake of the common life, some particular concerns must be modified, others negotiated...

...Republicanism was influenced by the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason, its optimism about humankind, and its insistence on civility, toleration, and common sense...

...immigrant Catholicism comes to life in the church's own works of mercy and justice...

...After Pope Leo XIII condemned such "Americanism" in 1899, liberal Catholics were forced to speak within the narrower confines of a clerical, defensive subculture...

...J. Bryan Hehir places the pastoral letters in this context...

...Better, it forces to the surface, makes public, divisions and conflicts that already exist...

...The immigrant style more or less excluded loving concern for those outside the group, but it was an appropriate means of securing institutional and group interests...

...They regard continuing efforts to renew and apply a public moral consensus as an essential element of church responsibility in a pluralistic society...

...In their 1983 pastoral on nuclear weapons, the bishops came close to endorsing this position by emphasizing the dramatic demands of the Gospel, affirming nonviolence as an option for individuals, and calling their people to a discipleship that might include several forms of conscientious objection...

...The republican position arises from concern, professed or real, for the respublica, the public "thing...

...they are not seen as offering an appropriate or reasonable way in which the American public as a whole can evaluate problems and formulate solutions...

...The effectiveness of such organizations depends on their ability to claim the support of their people...

...In John Courtney Murray's advanced version of the republican tradition, natural law ethics provided no leverage for bringing about the kingdom of God, only for establishing minimal levels of decency...

...More than the self-proclaimed realist critics mentioned above, the writers of the pastorals and their advisers would challenge the drift of public policy and culture...

...Indeed, on this point, there is agreement between such men and critics like George Weigel, Michael Novak, and Richard Neuhaus...

...These styles, or traditions, are not easily integrated...

...The church's ability to influence public policy, he argues, depends on its "capacity for moral persuasion of its own community and of the civil community...

...In the United States, Catholics grappled with the unique circumstances created by the disappearance of religious establishments, the guarantee of free exercise of conscience, and the rich pluralism of Christian voices and communities...

...John Courtney Murray, for example, began his long years of work on religious liberty by arguing simply that the American arrangements of church and state deserved at least the degree of approval accorded those of Spain...

...Ireland raised a storm in Europe and the United States by defending democratic political institutions and calling upon the church to adapt to modem civilization...

...For those who despair of the Enlightenment project, for those who no longer believe in the possibility of a common language and therefore an authentically common life, the development of Catholic evangelicalism is promising, for it allows the emergence of at least small communities of witnesses to the Christian message...

...But it was also true of churchmen who placed institutional interests first, as when Bisnop John England of Charleston submitted to pressure to close a school for black children, or when later bishops avoided confronting racial segregation for fear of dividing the flock...

...Its advocates believed that America had something to teach the church...

...instead, she called for personal commitment and practice of the works of mercy and justice...

...Here the language is that of natural law, human dignity, and human rights...

...These can be labeled, for purposes of this essay, "republican," "immigrant," and "evangelical...

...Thereafter he was an untiring champion of the Catholic faith...

...But, at its best, the republican tradition occupied without apology that tense but potentially creative mediating ground between an increasingly isolated church and an increasingly pluralistic and "secular" culture (the location associated in Europe with liberal Catholicism...

...But of course public life is religiously significant, and there can be no escape from public Catholicism, for even a religion that professes to confine itself to spiritual matters influences the larger society by that very stance...

...Practicing voluntary poverty, experimenting with Utopian alternative communities, and offering a witness of Christian nonviolence to war and the arms race, the Catholic Worker represented the appearance of an evangelical style in American Catholicism...

...There were and are few pure examples of any one of these styles, but they do illuminate tendencies that have been-and remain-operative in the process of defining a public presence for the church and its people...

...Whether this effort represents a bonding or a mere mixing of styles remains to be seen...

...Twentieth-century republicans worked hard to make Catholicism civil and reasonable, and to persuade the universal church to acknowledge modern ideals of liberty and democracy, but they seemed to lose faith in the possibility of Catholicism offering something uniquely important to American culture...

...Interest-group Catholicism, or the immigrant style, did not disappear with the assimilation of European immigrants...

...Second, the council reattached the church to the political order around four mandates considered essential to its very existence as church: the promotion of human dignity, the defense of human rights, the building up of the unity of the human family, and the search for meaning in human affairs...

...It also must argue that its position corresponds with the public interest, that what is good for the church is good for the community...

...Avery Dulles, whose essay on the church as a community of disciples is an important mainstream expression of this style, argues that distance from the culture must be part of the very self-constitution of the contemporary church...

...Republicanism was, and remains, an appealing position for those who have come to feel at home in this country, and thus to feel a sense of personal responsibility for public life, political, social, and cultural...

...Community organizing-grass-roots empowerment of poor people and minorities through self-help organizations built up in neighborhoods or among ethnic and racial groups-remains the major form of Catholic social action, reflecting the legacy of Catholic experience in parishes, political machines, and trade unions...

...Understandably concerned to Americanize an immigrant church, loving their country perhaps too much, they sometimes forgot the need to evangelize America...

...These sections of the document are carefully nuanced, their conclusions tentative, the language guarded, most dramatically in the "strictly conditioned moral acceptance of deterrence...

...whatever cost they may exact in terms of accommodation, they seem inseparable from the experience of pluralism...

...In 1840 he wrote an almost Marxist attack on capitalist exploitation of industrial workers but in later years he was skeptical of popular pretensions and doubted that republican institutions could survive without the sanctions and authority of the church...

...Cuomo concluded that there was a Catholic, not just an Irish-Catholic, problem: "It's time for questions within our church about what we believe, how consistent we are...

...Signs are already appearing that internal Catholic divisions will be even more evident in upcoming state-by-state battles over abortion...

...What was effective for this self-making institution worked as well for many of its people...

...John Courtney Murray argued that the church-state question had been transformed from an institutional question to a question of conscience, so that Christian influence on public life depended less on the institutional church and the hierarchy than on "the quality and credibility of Christian witness in secular society...

...We believe that success, as the world determines it, is not the criterion by which a movement should be judged," the Catholic Worker maintains...

...In reaction, writing to peace movement leader James Forest, Thomas Merton exclaimed: "Are we going to minimize, and fix our eyes on the lowest level of natural ethics, or are we going to be Christians and take the Gospel seriously...

...His friend Isaac Hecker, founder of the Paulists, pursued precisely this goal of uniting American ideals and Catholic faith...

...For some Catholics, the immigrant approach was too selfish...

...perhaps they should not be...

...Catholic faith and piety, like that of other American Christians, is increasingly centered on the Scriptures and the person of Jesus...

...Yet, the immigrant, interest-group style persists, evident in the work of Catholic lobbying agencies, in the assertion of single-issue absolutes, and in persistent efforts to mobilize poor and working-class people around bread-and-butter economic objectives...

...For the early Anglo-American Catholics like the Carrolls, such values were prescriptions for family and group survival...

...Civil rights legislation became possible only when a widespread national consensus developed...

...Evangelical Catholicism flourishes in movements...

...When the advocate of group interests is a church leader, the problem is even more evident...

...New York's Archbishop John Hughes taught his people that they must rely on their own resources if they were to prosper...

...What that something is is ordinarily the political issue, and on that question the church does not have, or claim to have, the answer...

...Such persons sought a reintegration usually found in the religious life...

...While John Carroll supported the Revolution and Constitution, he was personally rather conservative, sympathizing more with the upper-class Federalists than with Jefferson's more populist Republicans...

...They knew that power mattered, and that rewards came to those who were shrewd, tough-minded, and dedicated to their own survival...

...Here the church could, and must, learn how to deal with individual and group liberty, popular participation, and industrial civilization...

...Neither did it provide an emotionally compelling ground for resistance to evil...

...Of course, current uneasiness can distort historical memory: the unity of the past was more apparent than real, and today's differences have roots in a heritage of differing, sometimes conflicting, traditions...

...The rapidly growing church had few resources of wealth or personnel and faced anti-Catholicism without and ethnic conflict within, so that a more self-interested style of public presence than that of the wealthy Maryland planters was understandable enough...

...His contemporary, Dorothy Day, convert and cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, had little use for political action or legislation...

...In many ways, the Trappist Merton and the Jesuit Murray defined the alternative poles within which serious American Catholic commentary on politics and culture has moved for a generation...

...Thus they adapted relatively easily to interest-group politics and to the economic marketplace...

...bishops sought to make a contribution...

...In doing so, they left a vacuum which, when it became evident, was filled by Catholics less concerned with the common life, more concerned with the life of the church...

...Local and state governments did little to relieve poverty or to ease the adjustment of newcomers to the almost anarchic cities...

...Even when a moral consensus emerged, black leaders had learned from long experience that issues are resolved finally by the relative power that groups can exert in the legislative and administrative process...

...The requirements of citizenship and discipleship could conflict, but the person-and the church-could live with integrity by subjecting both citizenship and discipleship to tests of reasonableness, using especially the resources of natural law...

...They go out, score in places like the bond market, which is a haven for kleptomaniacs with business degrees, then pray that someone will mistake them for Republicans as they sing psalms to greed...

...The emphasis must fall on the Catholic member of the school board, the Catholic professional, executive, teacher, labor leader, or social worker, rather than the Catholic Worker or the lay director of religious education, important as such persons may be to the life of the church...

...Merton posed his question about this "lowest level of natural ethics" and asked about the Gospel in 1962...

...The immigrant style will persist as long as there are groups in need of power, as long as the church feels insecure about the integrity of its witness to specific Catholic values or teachings, as long as the church needs to act as an organized institution to protect its interests and promote its ideals...

...The civil rights movement reached deep into the churches and drew on the evangelical heritage, so strong among American Protestants, and it regularly explained how its program would be good for the nation as a whole, but it succeeded by focusing directly on the facts of racism and black oppression...

...D.J.O'B...

...Whether the future development of public Catholicism is constructive, making a substantial contribution to the nation and the universal church, or simply further fragments the American church and weakens its witness and influence, depends, in the end, on attitudes toward history, toward the human community, and most important toward American society and culture...

...The goal must be the nurturance of a body of lay people who seek to live with integrity as Christians and responsibly as citizens...

...Few bishops ever matched Hughes's political activism...

...Unfortunately, until recently the case was rarely argued in republican terms...

...His Seven Storey Mountain was a runaway postwar bestseller...

...The important thing is that we adhere to these values which transcend time and for which we will be asked a personal accounting, not as to whether they succeeded...

...On its own, then, evangelical Catholicism challenges the church, but limits the audience, restricts the language, and shortcircuits a sense of responsibility for the common life, tending toward a perfectionism, even an apocalyptic sectarianism, that questions the legitimacy of all secular institutions, devalues citizenship, and reduces the moral significance of work, politics, and community life...

...The problem is how the clarification of consensus and the debate about differences can be made constuctive, both within the church and in the civil community...

...John Hughes was the first bishop to mobilize Catholics for public goals...

...The evangelical warns others of the dangers of accommodation and of self-interest...

...As the American bishops put it in their 1983 letter on nuclear weapons, Christian discipleship in "a society increasingly estranged from Christian values" requires an "adult" Christian community notable for its renunciation of prevailing values...

...more than evangelical purists, they would acknowledge responsibility for what already exists and for what will be...

...The next chapter remains to be written...

...This was true of lay Catholics anxious to avoid having their consciences pricked on slavery, the exploitation of labor, or racial segregation...

...ethnic and working-class groups must do the same...

...Catholic participation in political machines, trade unions, and community organizations represented clear expressions of the immigrant, interest-group style...

...But the Bernardin-Weakland outlook also affirms the possibility of evangelical radicalism...

...The question is less "what does the church teach...

...To this problem, the pastoral letters of the U.S...

...John A. Ryan was the first priest to be an official spokesman for the hierarchy on social and political issues...

...At its worst, in the watered-down version that has worked its way into popular piety and educational materials, it slips into a soft sentimentality that excuses inaction on public issues by arguing that until people decide to be good, reform will not be possible...

...John Courtney Murray was best known as the theological champion of religious freedom...

...This faith fueled the movement called Americanism in the late nineteenth century...

...The combination of evangelical zeal and republican civility, in turn, appears at a time when prominent bishops like Archbishop Whealon and Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law make an interest-group approach to abortion their dominant form of public witness...

...That one should work first for the moral reform of individuals before seeking political and economic reform is altogether too simple and superficial," John A. Ryan once told a friend discouraged by economic and racial injustice...

...Catholics are deeply divided, not only about parties, policies, and candidates, but over the most basic questions of the church's public role...

...At their best, republicans also believed that Catholics had something to teach the nation...

...To take but one example, in 1961 America magazine published an article justifying the use of force to keep neighbors from invading one's fallout shelter in the event of nuclear war...

...In 1976, despite public statements that insisted on a multi-issue, republican approach to the election, the bishops aroused widespread criticism by appearing to test candidates Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter on their views of abortion...

...yet finished...

...Later republicans like John A. Ryan and John Cogley were less messianic, but they too believed that the American experience of the church taught universal lessons...

...John Hughes, archbishop of New York from 1838 through the Civil War, vigorously asserted episcopal authority within the church, attempted to use Catholic power to promote church interests, and befriended Whig politicians he thought might help break the Democratic party's stranglehold on the Irish Catholic vote...

...In the 1960s, he became an eloquent and cogent critic of modern culture and American society...

...The strength of the immigrant style is its recognition of how often the moral dimension of an issue is irrelevant in practice...

...Each was intended to enable the church to be faithful to its distinctive mission as a church and, at the same time, to be a responsible participant in a democratic culture...

...In 1968, Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia seemed to favor the election of Richard Nixon because he supported aid to private schools...

...The story of American Catholicism is not yet finished...

...The "two styles of teaching" outlined in the peace pastoral show the influence of the evangelical revival, while at the same time bringing the republican tradition up to date...

...Merton struggled less with immediate political matters than with the challenges posed by the evil and suffering of the twentieth century...

...In their later pastoral letter on economics, they recommended a "fundamental" or "preferential option for the poor," not only as a requirement of Christian discipleship but as a guideline for economic policy...

...by insisting on a ban on all abortions, the bishops in question allowed no room for compromise and almost never paid attention to problems of enforcement...

...He served from 1919 to 1945 as director of the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, predecessor of today's United States Catholic Conference...

...Mntil the 1960s, most Catholic politics involved an interplay of the first two styles, with bishops upholding republican civic virtues in theory, occasionally winning respect and access by doing so, but adopting the interest-group approach in practice...

...The republican was a lay style because the tensions were more immediate for lay persons, immersed each day in the secular, pluralistic experience of business, labor, and government, than for those whose lives centered more exclusively on the church and the Catholic community...

...The evangelical style challenges the concern with effectiveness that marks republican and immigrant styles...

...But neither could they accept the dualism of a republican tradition that seemed to require polite neglect of Christian ideals as the price of participation in public discourse...

...The strength of the evangelical approach is its appeal to integrity, calling the church and its members to live out their faith and bear witness to the demands of Christianity...

...the institutional leader reminds others of the importance of organization and resources...

...Nationality, language, and class as well as religion kept them outside the dominant culture...

...The result was a new sense of distance from American culture, and a renewed determination to salvage the credibility and integrity of Catholic Christianity...

...While public debates continue to feature discussion of papal teaching, church documents are less significant than the Scriptures and works of piety that emphasize Christian discipleship...

...the republican warns against sectarianism and self-isolation...

...First, the council, by endorsing church-state separation, detached the church from particular regimes and allowed the claim that the church has no political agenda of its own...

...To the republican, the immigrant style seems divisive as well: the business lobbyist and labor organizer seem equally abhorrent to the citizen concerned with the public good...

...he lived to make the case for religious liberty and church-state separation as normative for the church at large...

...Orestes Brownson was one of the nation's best-known intellectuals when he shocked his friends by becoming a Catholic in 1845...

...ince Vatican II, the three distinct approaches to the public presence of the church have persisted, but the balance among them has shifted dramatically...

...It exposes the impersonal character of the state and public life, condemns a spiritually empty pursuit of material self-interest, and expands the social imagination to embrace all human persons, including society's outcasts and unfortunates...

...Neither provided powerful moral or emotional support for challenging, much less transforming, the common life, but a church and a people on the move hardly noticed...

...An untiring champion of social reform legislation, Ryan was termed by critics "the Right Reverend New Dealer...

...As Cuomo and Barnicle well know, the questions are being asked, and have been for some time...

...The next chapter remains to be written...

...The success of the American church demonstrated that people could be trusted, that Catholic faith could survive, even prosper, in an atmosphere of contentious pluralism, and that ecclesiastical authority over church members could be exercised more fully and directly when church and state were freed from one another...

...Furthermore, human rights, human dignity, and human solidarity, however compelling as moral norms, can generate at best negative consensus: something is wrong and something must be done about it...

...The problem is that disputes over public issues appear irrelevant to the experiences of most Catholics, who remain largely unfamiliar with church teaching in these areas...

...At times, advocates of republicanism segregated religious from civic loyalties, and limited the jurisdiction of church teaching to religious as distinct from economic or political affairs...

...The only thing the Fighting Irish Catholics in this country fight for these days is the right to go shopping," wrote Barnicle...

...The third style, a Catholic form of evangelicalism, is a more recent phenomenon...

...four years later he and several other bishops leaned in Nixon's direction because of his professed opposition to abortion...