American Catholicism Transformed

Abstract American Catholicism Transformed examines the intellectual vibrancy of the Catholic Church in the United States in the context of the political and social changes of the postwar world and the Second Vatican Council. Committed to the papacy’s struggle against totalitarianism and its adoption of Cold War containment patterns, the American bishops emphasized the immutability of natural law, the acceptance of nuclear deterrence, the idealization of family life, and an argument for the compatibility of Catholic faith with US political tradition. This emphasis engendered fears of a growing secularism. Adopting different strategies, Catholic bishops, clergy, and laity publicly diversified into positions on the right and on the left. Deep intellectual and political divisions predated the Council, even as the civil rights movement shifted the balance of the public debate. At the Council itself, American participants actively influenced and personally adopted major conciliar values: the people of God, collegiality, the primacy of scripture, liturgical reform, religious freedom, and openness to the contemporary world. This thrust of the Council developed a new public language for the expression of the faith, one that would dominate the first phase of conciliar reception. As the geopolitics of the papacy changed and the struggle against communism emerged, a more contained vision of the faith would once again enter into public battle with the splitting conciliar forces for change. These long-term interactive patterns continue to shape contemporary American Catholicism in a pluriform direction. A new engagement with an American Catholicism Transformed is now needed.