Is “Americanism” a Heresy?

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Orestes Brownson believed that there must reside a sanction for justice and order which cannot be found apart from religious principles. Without such sanctions, we fight the same battles in political season after political season under the various ideologies intending to make America great again; but only the standards of those “permanent things” taught by the church can refute the egalitarianism fashionable to secularism.

It seldom comes up these days of signs on lawns and street corners and feisty types at the front door with brochures that claim that such and such is not a true conservative and so does not deserve to occupy the office of county coroner.

One of the brochures has the word coroner misspelled: corner.

I voted for the “corner” in the primary run-up to November.

What does not come up is whether the eternal mystique precedes the temporal mystique, which means that divine authority precedes national authority.

The argument is not mine but Péguy’s.

And I believe he’s absolutely right.

What also seldom comes up is whether the American roots of order are pre-modern or modern. The differences and the answers are profound and enable us to argue whether “Americanism” is or is not a heresy.

If pre-modern, America’s founding is the result of centuries of unfolding ideas tested and preserved.

If modern, well, Americanism is thus born as an Enlightenment ideal, which when tested has ideological consequences including revolutions that have plagued history for more than two centuries. Ideology is inverted religion and denies the Christian doctrine of salvation through grace.

If the question is asked especially to those office seekers who proclaim on the multitude of their signs that they are “conservative,” I wonder about their answer.

A true conservative argument?

To please me the answer would have to be akin to the following, which I’m repeating.

A nation comes into being as the result of divine providence, which informs a nation as to its mission and purpose, which is to enable what providence began a long time ago first in the garden, then with Abraham and Moses and all that is symbolized by Jerusalem, and then all that is symbolized with Athens and then with Rome and then with London and, well, maybe Greer, my retirement home town… although that might press the issue a bit too far.

The argument, however, is also not mine but with Dr. Kirk, and also to be found with Orestes Brownson, who makes that salient point in his The American Republic, where he argues that the American Republic in original intention offered an extraordinary compatibility between Catholicism and the American tradition.

More on that in a bit also.

One might wish to note that history is replete with examples of things taken out of context and condemned. But let me add this personal qualifying point:

Gibbons, Hecker, Brownson, et al shared a dream of a Catholicism that would evangelize American culture while also rebutting the idea that Catholicism was an alien force in a democratic American pluralistic society.

One of the problems, however, is that the controversy was European, but spilling over into America and those currents of thought brought dishonor to American Catholics.

Should we then polish to high gloss what we know of the American tradition?

Surely not if Americanism over the last number of decades has come to hang on the horns of a moral confusion based upon progressive experiments, which have led more and more to a spiritual vacuum.

If that’s the case, American Catholicism must vigorously oppose an approaching very deadly moral chaos.

Turn we then briefly to Russell Kirk’s magisterial The Roots of American Order, which suggests that the roots of American order are pre-modern and which argues that the United States possesses an unwritten constitution bestowed by providence, and it’s only in that light that the written Constitution can be understood.

Modern variations from this idea suggest that the United States came into being as if from an Enlightenment blank slate and disputed issues regarding constitutionality, especially natural rights, which are then antithetical to the true founding, especially such notions that “law is the expression of the general will” or that “liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else.”

Perhaps America’s political story lines need a “reboot.” True justice and order cannot be found apart from religious first principles which suggests spiritual aid from the Holy Spirit ,moderating and restraining in exercising His grace.

Dr. Kirk’s concluding chapter to The Roots of American Order then informs the reader of a national problem. Dr. Kirk quotes James Bryce that after the age of Lincoln no longer were great men chosen for the American presidency. Bryce made this comment in 1888 in his book The American Commonwealth, where he surveys that thing called “public opinion” which he hoped would serve the growing American population at those breaking points called “elections”; he feared that with so many fleeting impressions the public mind would struggle to make proper connections.

We have one of these “breaking points” now with the election that just took place.

There are three volumes to Bryce’s work which in a few words call to mind that unless public opinion becomes properly formed the “WE THE PEOPLE” cannot have a set of bedrock beliefs.

Now then….

It must have been warm and humid in that second floor room in Philadelphia from May 25 to September 17, 1787, more so since the drapes were closed as were the windows. And although the original purpose was to revise the existing Articles of Confederation it quickly became obvious that the delegates had bigger plans.

And so a lot of debating.

And after being signed, well, ratification which meant that copies had to make their way throughout the colonies about to become states. And that meant public opinion pieces had to be written to be published in newspapers that explained the public philosophy implicit in the document.

And thus again the 85 essays written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay and intended to build support for the Constitution.

Point being something like this:

The Declaration of Independence was signed on August 2, 1776 and those who signed agreed with the text’s sentiments.

September 17, 1788, when the time came, 39 of 55 of the delegates in Philadelphia again signed which suggests majority agreement with the text’s sentiments; antifederalists were opposed because no Bill of Rights was included just then.

Only the Constitution is different because it needed to be ratified by the states. That took time, and a little over two years with five states favorable, four states divided, and four states generally opposed and so nine of thirteen and that was that until….

In the summer of 1789 the newly minted House of Representatives debated and then passed the Bill of Rights suggesting that the elected representatives agreed with the sentiments.

So, as for public opinion, then, formed by an emerging political philosophy, when the states ratified the Constitution one should understand that the ratification reflected agreement with the fundamental unity of the states with the ultimate authority in the Constitution and with a “we the people” rather than a confederation of singular states. All that suggests a communal if not friendly attachment of the people of America as a whole nation rather than an amalgamation of states.

Supposedly true today even if California is a nation unto itself.

Whatever political philosophy is to be found in that document, however, obviously reflects what is meant by “Americanism” properly understood.

What that means has become problematic and probably informed our parish father’s summary: Americanism is a heresy.

The issue has grown more complex those summery days of 2024.

It’s a serious challenge.

James Madison knew that public opinion had to be sovereign, but it takes time to form and must form gradually. He was concerned with what he called “impulsive majorities,” which he described as impetuous, hasty, overheated, and contaminated with toxic passions. Temporal passions too often reach conclusions in advance, he argued, whereas the reasoning faculty was capable of interpreting the facts. His idea of “we the people” was not a fluctuating, reeling mob falling quickly before flaming again, but a people championed by prudence, that classical virtue.

***

Some background information then before we arrive at Father Isaac Hecker and Orestes Brownson.

For a good many years I taught a class titled “We the People: An American Journey,” which included a section on the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and the ratification process. A student one day asked if there were any Catholics at the Convention? And the answer was “Yes”; there were five men from Catholic Maryland, a religious haven for Catholics persecuted in England.

Three of the five were Catholic, Daniel Carroll, and Thomas Fitzsimmons. They participated with a certain delicacy because, unlike other delegates, they were subject to British penal laws on Catholics, which included a provision against owning a horse.

The question in England was one of loyalty, which included a loyalty oath that required Catholics to be loyal to the Church of England—which was repugnant enough, but which also included a prohibition preventing service in public offices and thus no right to suffrage, rather isolation from public affairs.

This was before the waves of immigrants began arriving on our eastern shores. So, Maryland, a colony, became a state and ratified the Constitution, but also in predominantly Catholic Maryland the Diocese of Baltimore was given pre-eminence over the other dioceses in the now-United States, and this happened in 1789. Then, with the approval of Pius VI, came the election of the first American bishop. His name was John Carroll, the older brother of Daniel Carroll, and it’s usually assumed that John Carroll firmly established Catholicism in the United States and was influential in founding Georgetown University as a training place for priests. Part of his legacy is John Carroll University located in Ohio.

There were some other issues. One was the fear on the part of American clergy that in time a foreign bishop might be imposed on them. The solution then would be to create a method of appointing church authorities that would not make it appear as if they were receiving their appointment from a foreign power. We know that John Carroll wrote a report sent to Rome informing the Holy See on the status of Catholic Maryland, which had only nineteen priests at the time, but most of the prominent families were Catholic although given to dancing and reading novels, to which one can only say “for shame.”

The result was that the priests in Maryland were allowed to suggest two or three names from their familiarity from which the Pope would choose their bishop.

Two things occurred: the selection of the site for the first cathedral in the United States and the election of John Carroll as the Bishop of Baltimore by the clergy of the newly independent United States of America in April 1789, by a vote of 24 out of 25.

Although fledgling, it does appear to me to be uniquely an American story.

From the time Maryland became a state, Catholics were arriving in great numbers from French Canada and French Arcadians to Louisiana, and then of course the Irish, dubbed Irish Catholics. But there’s a problem inasmuch that established Catholics were not always happy with the newly arrived; French Catholics were often contemptuous of the newly arrived Irish, and then more complications when additional waves of Italians, Sicilians, and Eastern Europeans were coming in droves. If the facts are accurate in a sixty year period there were 700,000 or so converts in addition to the immigrants.

There must be something afoot to suggest such flourishing.

So, where’s the problem if there is a problem?

Down and around the Charleston area, in 1784 a little plantation called Whitemarsh was established in its own constitution with an article allowing for the congregational election of clergy and/or laypersons to have control of finances, which meant something different from a mere consulting role in decision-making processes.

We know that John England, still a young man, was elected Bishop of Charleston at age 33 and this in 1790 and by a vote of 23 out of 26. He had something of an ecclesial imagination and set up a Diocesan Constitution which called for popularly elected delegates in the diocese. One might call it suffrages near and dear to the American heart.

Did I mention that he adored the American political system which included the separation of church and state, religious toleration, and freedom of conscience and wrote at one time that if the pope too interfered in local affairs such would be an act of unjust aggression. And he was lobbying a bit for the independence of local churches at least in Charleston which by the way is the site of the first Jewish Synagogue in the United States.

If studied a bit more it looks like “Americanism” with greater contributions by laypeople. And in time it became a bit too much for Europeans and some American bishops who sensed that the Church in America was claiming too much independence. Please note that I’m using discretion in using the phrase “Church in America” as opposed to “American Church.”

The overall effect eventually was for Rome to declare “Americanism” a heresy, and any such thinking then occurring in Catholic colleges was suppressed, having drawn the ire of the Vatican. Many Catholic leaders in America, however, held the belief that a self-confident American republic with no established church was the best forum for the growth of Catholicism. Such was not favored by Pope Leo, who condemned these views, which effectively ended the movement. But there was some good news in as much as catholic colleges continued to be founded which included Boston College, College of the Holy Cross, St. Johns and St. Benedict, and of course Notre Dame which did upgrade the national cultural status of Catholicism.

Of course the problem evolved over time into the 1890s more so when European clerics, continental authoritarians, detected what they declared were signs modernism, the kind of liberalism condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors which appeared in 1864. One of the propositions defended the temporal power of the Pope over the papal states; Italy, it’s usually understood, but by extension other national states. At issue, or so some read into the document, was the temporal power of the sovereign Pontiff, but more strongly by Pope Leo XIII who lamented that in America church and state were severed and divorced and announced his preference for a closer relationship (what he referred to as favors) between the Catholic Church and the American Republic along European lines.

And in January 1899, Pope Leo penned an apostolic letter to Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore, in which he condemned “Americanism” as the ill-defined movement to reconcile Catholicism with American culture and American political philosophy. The church is one, he argued, by unity and doctrine, and placed the center and foundation in the chair of Blessed Peter and thus is rightly called the Roman Church. But there is suspicion, he again wrote, that “there are some… who conceive and would have the Church in America to be different from what it is in the rest of the world.” Thus, from all that he suspected, it was manifest that he was not able to give approval to those views which in their collective sense are called “Americanism.”

***

We need with patience to pause briefly to add some context.

One is for me to emphasize again that the roots of American order are pre-modern and the result of providence and that divine order precedes national order and thus informed by natural law, and common law, both of which should inform and influence statute law. If America has slipped into heresy, it’s the result of what we know to be modernism, which in terms of justice has become injustice, what with Supreme Court decisions legalizing moral relativism. Equally so if not more so is that the nation’s political leaders fail from lack of virtue and prudence, and the only way for America to become exceptional and achieve national greatness will be through moral reformation. Call it the result of ignorance if you wish, but as I look out and into the public square I see few profiles in courage. I see passions and toxic appetite and little in the way of precise language and eloquence in the service of human nobility. He who once said that America has the soul of a church would likely be more than disappointed.

The second context is historical since in our analysis we are sort of stuck in 1899 before toppling forward into the 20th century. The times are complex, especially in Europe in the latter days of the Third Republic in France. The circumstances are a bit like this: There are the monarchists, the authoritarians, and the republicans. The tensions are as follows: much of the older clergy are in agreement with the monarchists and the authoritarians inasmuch as they receive favors from the state which means, stipends and salaries, but the reciprocity is that the state has a substantial say in the choice of bishops. The republicans are the majority of French parishioners, and their circumstances are deplorable, and they have become strongly anti-clerical. In 1905, the French assembly passed a law separating the church from the state, the result of which was disastrous. Church schools were closed, priests resigned right and left, religious orders were expelled, church buildings became government property, and so on. Nothing much changed until the 1920s when a bearable co-existence became possible. Many of those younger priests who remained had for decades looked west to America for inspiration, and then on May 16, 1920, after a half-century of petitions, Benedict XV concluded the canonization process for Joan of Arc, much beloved by the republicans, and the suggestion is that French Catholicism, or Catholicism in France, began to gain traction.

Turn we then to Father Isaac Hecker and the Paulest Brothers….

But in the United States the issue of Americanism became compounded when a biography of Father Isaac Hecker appeared in the 1890s by one of the Paulist Fathers, Walter Elliott. The biography was much admired by French priests during this latter time of the The Third Republic. Hecker, it should be noted, had been dead for years, but the biography drew the “ire” of the Vatican. The problem was an interpolation in the French translation which inaccurately stated that Hecker had supported less emphasis on church authority and more on individual initiative. As a consequence, Pope Leo XIII wrote another letter to then Cardinal Gibbons expressing concern that the Church inAmerica should be much more cautious of adapting too much to American culture especially individual initiative.

So, who was this Isaac Hecker, and was he a radical, and was he pernicious, or was he interested in public opinion and public philosophy?

In brief… since space and time prevent much more than a smidgeon of his biography:

This might be little known, but in April 1865 (obviously a time of extraordinary disorder) Paulist Father Isaac Hecker founded a public opinion periodical titled The Catholic World for a growing Catholic population and intended to inform public philosophy. He insisted that it be a first-class publication in format, quality, and equal if not superior to any secular magazine in the country.

But why?

The question was whether those faithful owned a place at the “we the people” public square table or would they remain isolated. Could one, in other words, be both American and Catholic, or would such suggest an issue and thus perhaps be anathema.

The magazine included commentary on political and religious events of the day. The magazine was renamed New Catholic World in 1972 and then reverted to its original title in 1989 before ceasing publication in 1996.

Suppose then one meandered into a library archive to find and survey, say, in 1865 the first five or so editions, which carried articles on the Progress of the Church in the United States, one on Noah’s Ark, one on Christian Art, one on Recent Discoveries in the Catacombs, and interestingly a fine article on the Italian poet Dante and his influence on Christian poetry. The magazine was a bit esoteric, but proof that it was serious was that there were articles on Church history and a lovely chapter on Catholic Philosophy in the Thirteenth Century… and again was aimed at the dispositions and experiences of Catholic people in America.

So, if one were to survey those early editions, one would be hard-pressed to find anything radical, albeit some laundry being aired.

For example:

The Irish-born Roman Catholic Bishop John Hughes accused Father Hecker of inborn Protestant notions and advised him to take two years off to contemplate his errors; not so with Bishop Bernard Fitzpatrick of Boston, for whom Hughes gave rounds of applause.

Father Hecker continued to evangelize, which was to energize public opinion and a public philosophy among Catholics in America using the popular means of the day: preaching, the public lecture circuit, and the printing press.

The issue?

Hecker believed that the Catholic faith and American political culture of small government, property rights, civil society, and a republican government were not opposed but could be reconciled for the benefit of all.

Interestingly then, Cardinal John Henry Newman argued that Hecker was doing the same thing in America as he was doing back in England, and which has led to an occasional references to Father Hecker as the American Newman.

History records, then, that Hecker and The Catholic World were accused by a French cleric, Charles Meignen, of minimizing Catholic doctrine, the magisterium. In the briefest of terms again, Father Hecker was encouraging American Catholics to break out of their isolation and to take an active part in the intellectual life of their country, a sort of social amelioration into the culture in America—and thus his association with that phrase “Americanism.”

The backlash?

Such was considered especially by French authoritarian clerics to be a symptom of modernism and liberalism because it meant giving lay people too much power and breaking down the established distinction between priest and parishioner.

On the other hand, given the number of immigrants arriving from European Catholic countries and the number of converts, all holding to their faith, the problem still was isolation or assimilation. Father Hecker and Orestes Brownson saw no contradiction between being an American and being Catholic and were laboring in the court of public opinion that on the basis of ideas no problem per se existed in promoting Catholic assimilation into the culture of America

Of course, part of this again emerges in Europe with a reaction against the Syllabus. In Spain came the worry that the Spanish government might disestablish the church. So, there are issues as to how authoritative the Syllabus really was meant to be. Newman argued that those who were reacting negatively should read the thing more closely because he thought it more likely that the Syllabus was really a recourse to original documents and those documents alone carried the force of an apostolic voice.

Controversy rages while over the seas and with the United States the country was just trying to celebrate the 4th of July albeit one might suspect with a bit too much adulation.

The concern of the European authoritarian clerics began to finger point westward to America where civil allegiance was deeply present again with obviously too much faith in the argument that only the Americans had chosen the right manifest destiny path and would soon surpass all the nations in human history in wisdom and that nothing remained but to continue on in the way we had so far followed which meant to indulge in the most glorious and thrilling anticipation of future greatness and renown.

It could smack of a bit too much of what the Greeks would have called “hubris.”

And would Catholics in America need wider latitude in a nation largely Protestant? In that argument was the latent suggestion that the Catholic Church in America would become different than the Catholic church, say, in Europe.

Back in America, however, Father Hecker traveled up and down the east coast lecturing to most who were not Catholic. One writer quipped that “He is putting American machinery into the ancient ark and is getting ready to run her by steam.”

To say the least, the man had pluck, but his message was also one of caution and a bit different standard of greatness than self-adulation.

One should, however, regard Father Hecker as a very serious man and as an American missionary creating a public philosophy with his life and writing and a journal of public opinion creating a Catholic “space” in that phrase “We the People”; his name is thus closely associated again with that phrase “Americanism” since his “missionary” activity on behalf of the Catholic Church in the United States argued that the church would remain isolated unless a means could be found to clear away misconceptions.

Enter Orestes Brownson, Father Hecker’s friend and a convert, who in 1844 began a life work in defense of the Catholic Church in America with a prolific amount of writing and a rightful place not only on the historical chronicle of religion in America but Catholicism in America, and political philosophy also for an America vested largely in pre-modern history. Among numerous topics, he took up the question of how loyal Catholics can be in the United States because again public opinion seemed to be stacked: Catholic citizens couldn’t be loyal to American political philosophy and would prefer, if given the chance, to overhaul the Constitution to make it compliant to the Vatican.

Dr. Kirk believed him to be a luminous figure who became more important about the 1950s time when the phrase “under God” was placed in the Pledge of Allegiance, which suggests the beginnings of a Brownson revival that develops into the 1960s and following.

And we know that Orestes Brownson contributed frequently to The Catholic World and his own Brownson’s Quarterly, including a pair of seminal pieces in 1870 on “Church and State” and “Civil and Religious Freedom.”

So, kindly bear with me because we do need to dig into a bit of American history post War between the States.

***

In his article on Church and State, Brownson first of all retreats to America’s pre-modern founding by arguing that America is the product of a combination of Christian and secular influences but with an uneasy marriage to the latter who saw natural rights as unconnected with anything transcendent, in effect, modern and autonomous. The Christian influence, however, acknowledges that natural rights were derived from the authority of God and therefore dependent upon the eternal Christian mystique. So, we’ve had this discussion before. The American nation comes into being as a consequence of providence, which owns a constitution albeit unwritten.

So, the key word there is “authority” and for Brownson consent within the American order of “We the People”cannot ultimately be grounded in the so-called will of the people: popular sovereignty is limited by the authority of God and both Exodus and Deuteronomy are his bench marks.

In that regard, what institution he writes is available to so influence public opinion and public philosophy in the public square? He notes that yes indeed the people are as a result of the Constitution and Bill of Rights freed from a class of political masters over whom they have no control but they need governing and must be governed lest one follow the failed French example.

Where do we turn?

Here’s where it gets interesting and is again likely the reason for the later Brownson revival.

Catholicism recognizes the equality of all men before the natural law, which he argues, is the true basis of liberty. To the argument that Catholic principles are at odds with fundamental American principles Brownson argues by echoing Augustine that Catholicism is not hostile to any political order save tyranny. In point of fact, it’s the church that provides the remedy for defective orders where there are no other checks upon arbitrary power and it does so by imposing moral restraints on its use and where such checks do exist the church hallows them and renders them inviolable.

That is not only Augustinian but it’s Thomistic.

In a nutshell, a sound constitutional order must connect with the natural law if it is to govern the people—which does not call for government imposition of a state-sponsored religion. But if the Constitution affirms a constellation of natural law truths then the deep moral reserves of religious authority lie at the base of the Constitution and such was also the ultimate source of the Declaration of Independence. In fact, since the Constitution owns a protection of the free exercise of religion such assumes that religious practice is benevolent and worthy of defense and the government cannot invade it with religious establishment.

The state, Brownson also worried, must not become so secularized that its only authority is human will itself which surely understates that the will is also depraved. We face that problem today with an argument for unfettered human will under the auspices of natural rights.

Near the end of his life he declared that the Constitution needed no change. The state, however, does need a spiritual authority above and independent of the Constitution and that authority must be competent to define what are and are not the natural rights of men and to enforce through the conscience of the people respect for those rights and obedience to them. The key word here is competent. In then what might be words for all time he gave Catholics in America a perpetual vocation by writing that by divine providence they (as part of we the people) are Americans as well as Catholics and must preach and teach with humility the primary truths of God and man which is a task that does not end.

In a republic, he writes, which is not a democracy, the church restrains popular passions, subjects the people to the law of God, and then disposes them to go out to practice those public virtues that render a republic secure.

To that end, he continues, thinking in terms of public opinion and public philosophy in the public square, he repeatedly stresses that Catholic teaching is not at odds with the notion of political or civil liberty but instead is the very ground of such liberty and then he points his finger back across the ocean to those European states presumably Catholic but are not so but rather despotic.

One should not draw from this that Brownson believed that the church should dictate the contours of public policy but should rather provide the bedrock of stability for the family and for civic associations that promote social harmony.

Now it’s likely that what Brownson might call the American ethos sadly transforms over the next batch of decades by the intellectual classes especially to the point where public opinion and the public philosophy no longer take their bearings from the claims of faith and transcendent truth and natural rights theory becomes confused.

Then in 1993, roughly 117 years after his death, Peter J. Stanlis revisited Orestes Brownson’s political thought by reviewing Gregory Butler’s In Search of the American Spirit: The Political Thought of Orestes Brownson. Butler’s book appeared seventeen years after Father Thomas Ryan’s 1976 biography of Brownson. What was emerging was a more contemporary argument, from say the 1950s and the Cold War years, as to the meaning of America and the American identity, which had been the concern also of Orestes Brownson in the mid-nineteenth century, where we find Brownson challenging secular reform schemes, which made him a brilliant critic of antebellum American culture and would have made him an equally brilliant critic, say, of The Great Society. The basis of his argument is to be found in his conversion to Catholicism.

Dr. Kirk’s interest is found in his discussion of Brownson in both The Conservative Mind and in The Roots of American Order, the latter in a dozen or so pages in the concluding chapter, “Contending Against American Disorder,” “Brownson and the Just Society.”

***

Dr. Kirk’s point?

He mentions not just in passing how Brownson argued that Americans in their triumphant materialism and swaggering individualism could not long endure without knowing the meaning of justice. And he contended against the radical doctrine of the French “Rights of Man,” not those natural rights of which the Church had long spoken, but the arrogant abstract if not ambiguous rights of Thomas Paine and, at that time still in memory, the French Revolution divorced from duties and shorn of religious sanctions.

Americans, he writes, had sadly put forward the delusion that the voice of the people is equal to the voice of God, which had becoming the rallying cry of the French, “to the people” and which led then to the sound of the guillotine rising and falling.

Brownson feared that if the voice of the people was the equal of the voice of God, well, assuming the voice of the “We the People” was the majority, the consequence was an excuse to alter all law as they might choose even if it sacrificed the common good in public affairs to money-getting and private advantage.

Brownson believed that there must reside a sanction for justice and order which cannot be found apart from religious principles. Without such sanctions we fight the same battles in political season after political season under the various ideologies intending to make America great again; but only the standards of those “permanent things” taught by the church can refute the egalitarianism fashionable to secularism.

He makes two other prescient points:

Brownson struggled against the sentimentality of Rousseau who mistook misty-eyed compassion for justice, a sort of “I feel your pain” notion.

And he struggled against smug secularism, which looked upon sin as merely a vestigial survival from barbarous times, desitined to disappear with the march of manifest destiny progress, which diminished the teaching and authority of the Christian Church.

If we look back, then, say some seventy years to the beginning of the Cold War, we can find bits and pieces of information that suggest something different was in the offing, which included that moment on June 14, 1954, when President Eisenhower signed an executive order to insert the phrase “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance to emphasize the distinction between the United States and the officially atheistic Soviet Union.

The issues continued into the 1950s, those years prior to Vatican II, with the point being that Catholics are Catholics first and Americans second, which again presumes a question of loyalty and which presumes that Catholics are subject to an external authority apart from America’s founding documents and their unequivocal argument for self-government under law. And if we gather this up a bit more, well, the moral authority teaching of the church is presumed to be a powerful corrective against Americanism, which is a clear and present danger to the church.

But there was this: From the 1950s into the 1960s a variety of American conservative Cold War journalists appeared who were also conservative Catholics. Politically at the time, Kirkean conservatism had taken on ripe ferment with the conservative journalists as vocal defenders of the United States as the standard bearer in world history for political liberty and economic prosperity. Dr Kirk’s The Conservative Mind in America had taken deep root in Cold War American political philosophy. He was joined by Bill Buckley and his National Review, Brent Bozell, Michael Novak, and of course Richard John Neuhaus… to mention just a few.

So, contrary to the standard narrative, political conservative journalists were also devout Catholics who were among the most assertive with their brand of Americanism politics and an influential means by which Roman Catholicism came to terms with American secular culture. And to a very large extent they were following the script from Father Isaac Hecker and Orestes Brownson. Whether this coming to terms led to conclusions hoped for by Hecker and Browson is probably still up for grabs because as these conservative Catholic journalists labored to make this turn in American political philosophy, American bishops were preparing for Vatican II with a mission to create rapprochement and for the church to modernize.

And if there was a devastating moral turn to everything that had been advocated by Dr. Kirk and those conservative Catholic journalists, it arrived with the landmark decision in 1973 Roe v Wade, which we likely understand as an instance of judicial activism facetiously decided on the basis of the “best” medical science, but nowhere near transcendent natural law and equally far removed from any idea of a Christian society.

Let me add this personal provision: It’s difficult to be loyal to America when America seems to be almost solely characterized by the latest iterations of sexual liberation and identity politics, which also suggests that America’s origins are rooted in the worst aspects of Enlightenment ideology—secularism, individualism, materialism, relativism, all perhaps the beginning of a fated end or what happens when liberty becomes self-defining and the human will becomes completely emancipated. If so, well, those of us who cling to the old beliefs might be left whispering our thoughts only in the hidden recesses of our own homes.

With that in mind at the end here, Brownson argued that it may be worth our while (and by that he meant everyone including Catholics) to subject the estimate which we have of ourselves to a more rigid examination than we seem to have done. If such an examination returns the conclusion that all we are doing is pre-modern founded, no harm will be done. If not well-founded, we must be prepared to adopt with cultural courage a conclusion unfavorable to national vanity.

Perhaps his admonitions are greater today than when he died.

Brownson went to be with God on April 17, 1876 and was originally interred in a cemetery in Detroit. Ten years later his remains were subsequently transferred to the crypt of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame, where all his personal papers are also archived in the Notre Dame library. His burial place is often referred to as the “Brownson Chapel.” It’s unclear these days what’s written on the large, flat tombstone; generations of student footsteps have left the inscription largely illegible.

But this is very close:

Here lies Orestes A. Brownson, who humbly acknowledged the truth faith. He lived a life of integrity. With tongue and pen he strongly defended both church and country, and although his body has passed over into death, the works of his mind survive, immortal monuments to his genius.

The author would like to thank his former student, Cabie Lamb, for editing this essay. Miss Lamb is a graduate student at the University of Dallas, pursuing a degree in Humanities. She received her undergraduate degree in Liberal Arts from Hillsdale College and is an advocate for the revival of Classical Liberal Arts in K12 education.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

The featured image is “Religious Freedom Byway – Reconstruction of the Brick Chapel at Historic Saint Mary’s City,” and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.