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

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PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC
INTELLECTUAL
Even in New York, CCNY became equally populated with Catholics and Jews, not all
Catholics went to Fordham or St. Johns, many, like the Jewish immigrants, could only
afford a CCNY education. The Catholic Church frankly performed a great social function
in New York by setting up schools, hospitals, and orphanages. The City could not handle
the social issues presented by the influx of immigrants.
By having these institutions, the new working class could productively contribute without
costing the tax payers the added amount that would have been necessary for health and
education. The Catholic institutions also taught an ethic that reduced crime, it made what
the Italian and Irish gangs did sinful and used its social pressure in a manner which we
see little of in many of today's churches.
Hofstadter then continues:
"As one might have expected, the way of the Catholic intellectual in this country has been
doubly hard. He has had to justify himself not only as a Catholic to the Protestant and
secular intellectual community but also as an intellectual to fellow Catholics, for whom
his vocation is even more questionable than it is to the American community at large.
Catholic scholars and writers tend to be recognized belatedly by their.....co-religionists,
when they are recognized at all. All of this concerns, of course, not so much the antiintellectualism
of American Catholicism as its cultural impoverishment, its nonintellectualism.
But it will serve as background for a more central point: a great many
Catholics have been as responsive as Protestant fundamentalists to that it is against
modernity of which I have spoken, and they have done perhaps more than their share in
developing the one-hundred per cent mentality. In no small measure this has been true
because their intellectual spokesmen-who are now growing in numbers and influencehave
not yet, gained enough authority in the Catholic community to hold in check the
most retrograde aspects of that revolt, including its general suspicion of mind and its
hostility to intellectuals. "
American Catholicism for Hofstadter became a pervasive genetic disorder seemingly to
infect any person who professes to be Catholic and moreover any person in any way
related to the Catholic Church, such as a Catholic High School Graduate. Hofstadter
states that the Catholic holds a hostility to the intellectual, namely Hofstadter and his ilk.
The hostility is that the Catholic thinker may disagree with them, and this disagreement
to Hofstadter is prima facie evidence of dollardism. Hofstadter, and the Columbia clique,
somehow view that they are prophetic and without fault or error in their intellectualism,
that they solely have seen truth, and that it is their word ex-cathedra from Morningside
Heights which contains the truth and the light. The arrogance of these men, and they were
all men at the time, is appalling. It fundamentally rejects any other thought process.
"A great deal of the energy of the priesthood in our time has been directed toward
censorship, divorce, birth control, and other issues which have brought the Church into
conflict with the secular and the Protestant mind time and again; some of it has also gone
into ultra-conservative political movements, which are implacable enemies of the
intellectual community. Catholic intellectuals on the whole have opposed the extreme and
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