Catholicism in America

Extract

My opportunities for studying Catholicism in the United States were fragmentary, in the course of a year devoted to university teaching and travel. I had the good fortune to be teaching at what is generally taken to be the best of the Catholic universities, Notre Dame, Indiana; and it was in the main from this particular listening post that I picked up my information and my views. I did travel a good deal in the Middle West and the Far West and this gave me an opportunity to see in passing some aspects of Catholic life. As well, I went to non-Catholic universities and was able to see both the reactions of non-Catholic Americans to Catholicism and the work of Catholics in non-Catholic universities, particularly through the Newman centres. I was also a steady and, in some instances, horrified reader of the Catholic press.

What I want to do is to examine American Catholicism as a social and political phenomenon. I do not think that anything I have to say is directly relevant to the problems of Catholic higher education in this country, except in so far as comparisons are always likely to turn out to be instructive. American society and its problems are so remote in many if not all respects from the problems of any European society that it is hard to see at first that American Catholic higher education offers either models for us to imitate or examples of what we should avoid.

Perhaps I ought to make it plain at the start that I conceived an enormous affection and respect for the society of the United States. It is possible that it will in fifty or a hundred years produce one of the great civilizations of the world. My critical comments, and there will be many in the remarks that follow, are those of an admirer. Perhaps I might even, before I begin my analysis, try to explain what it was about American society that fascinated me and filled me with affection and, it is not too much to say, a certain intoxication.