progressivism, individualism, and the public ... - Telmarc Group

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PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC
INTELLECTUAL
In fact, it has done nothing of the kind, for it has failed to develop an intellectual
tradition in America or to produce its own class of intellectuals capable either of
exercising authority among Catholics or of mediating between the Catholic mind and the
secular or Protestant mind. Instead, American Catholicism has devoted itself alternately
to denouncing the aspects of American life it could not approve and imitating more
acceptable aspects in order to surmount its minority complex and "Americanize" itself. ..
In consequence, the American Church, which contains more communicants than that of
any country except Brazil and Italy, and is the richest and perhaps the best, organized of
the national divisions of the Church, lacks an intellectual culture. "In no Western
society," .Q. W. Brogan has remarked, "is the intellectual prestige of Catholicism lower
than in the country where, in such respects as wealth, numbers, and strength of
organization, it is so powerful." In the last two decades, which have seen a notable
growth of the Catholic middle class and the cultivated Catholic public, Catholic leaders
have become aware of this failure; a few years ago, Monsignor John Tracy Ellis's
penetrating brief survey of American Catholic intellectual impoverishment had an
overwhelmingly favorable reception in the Catholic press. .."
Hofstadter keeps seeing the Church and its members as one and the same. Although he
states that the growth of a Catholic middle class has presented a challenge to the Catholic
Church, he lumps the Catholic middle class in with the Church hierarchy as dolts. One
must also remember that this is also the Period of Vatican II with dramatic openings in
the Catholic Church, for better or worse. Hofstadter then continues:
"Two formative circumstances in the development 'Of early American Catholicism made
for indifference to intellectual life. First in importance was the fiercely prejudiced Know-
Nothing psychology against which it had to make its way in the nineteenth century.
Regarded as a foreign body that ought to be expelled from the national organism, and as
the agent of an alien power, the Church had to fight to establish its Americanism.
Catholic laymen who took pride in their religious identity responded to the American
milieu with militant self-assertion whether they could and Church spokesmen seemed to
feel that it was not scholarship but vigorous polemicism which was needed….
The Church thus took on a militant stance that ill accorded with reflection; and in our
time, when the initial prejudice against it has been largely surmounted, its members
persist in what Monsignor Ellis calls a "self-imposed ghetto mentality." A second
determining factor was that for a long time the limited resources of the American Church
were pre-empted by the exigent task of creating the institutions necessary to absorb a
vast influx of immigrants-almost ten million between 1820 and 1920-and to provide them
with the rudiments of religious instruction. So much was taken up by this pressing
practical need that little was left over for the higher culture, in so far as there were
members of the Church who were concerned with Catholic culture, exceptionally
unproductive in all areas of scholarship, achieve their best record in the sciences."
At the time of this book by Hofstadter, Catholics were educated in secondary and College
levels at Catholic institutions, but there was also a clear breakout into the secular world.
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