A constant refrain among Jason and the Callers is the notion that Roman Catholicism has one, holy, catholic, and apostolic interpretive paradigm for reading the past. (Jason has 26 posts in the category of paradigm.) I believe this is supposed to apply to the early church fathers as much as Trent, Vatican I, or the post-Vatican II church. It is, of course, a very flat view of history (and maybe the planet). As a historian, I don’t understand how this paradigm (derived from the magisterium’s dogmatic utterances almost as certainly as the neo-Calvinist w-w follows from neo-Calvinist epistemology) can actually make sense of an institution as vast and old and idiosyncratic as the Roman Catholic Church. But I am especially intrigued by the historiographical ignorance (this is Roman Catholic historiography, mind you) that claims to a single interpretive paradigm require. It is like the Landmark Baptist notion that all other Baptists, except those that trace their lineage directly to the New Testament, are not Baptists and therefore not true churches.
If Jason and the Callers read more history they might understand how far from mainstream Roman Catholic discussions of history their paradigm is. To help them out, a few excerpts from Peter D’Agostino’s important book, Rome in America:
For more than a century before Vatican Council II, American Catholics had been making two claims central to the invention of “American Catholicism.” First, like Pius IX, they demonized a vast spectrum of European liberalisms as evil, Masonic, and linked to secret and criminal forces bent on attaching the Holy Father and destroying the Church. . . . Second, American Catholics insisted that the liberal premises of the U.S. political order were profoundly different from the false, degenerate liberalism of Europe. Normative American liberalism was warm and welcoming, and it granted true liberty to the Catholic Church. In fact, Catholics argued, the natural law principles behind American liberalism and the U.S. Constitution were derived from medieval Catholicism. Both claims shaped Father John Courtney Murray’s classic essays brought together in We Hold These Truths (1960).
A new generation of Catholics who lived through, or vicariously participated in, the enthusiasms of Vatican Council II have reinvented “American Catholicism.” From Murray’s Catholic argument for an American exceptionalism, the new generation made a theological and historical leap to an environmental argument for an American Catholic exceptionalism. The unique American environment of liberty, this new generation of historians and theologians claimed, gave birth to a unique Catholicism in the history of the Church. This American Catholicism was part and parcel of the American landscape, a mainstream denomination, and not . . . a loyal minority religion operating under distinctive premises within the United States. This American Catholicism was a denomination like any Christian denomination, not “the Church.” For Ellis and Murray, it had been self-evident that the Church was a hierarchical, clerical, patriarchal, and international institution (although they might not have used those terms). Their concern had been to demonstrate that the one, holy, apostolic Church founded by Christi thrived legally and loyally within a properly ordered republic. The new generation, in contrast, claimed normative American Catholics was democratic in impulse, congregational in polity, collegial in leadership; a Catholic version of the novos ordo seclorum. (311)
This should sound familiar to Protestants in the United States who made similar intellectual moves by forgetting their European origins, conflating their churches with the American republic, and producing their own American exceptionalism. The odd feature about Roman Catholic American exceptionalism is that these Christians were supposed to be subject to a prince and prelate on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, an attachment that would supposedly undercut investing so much providence in the United States. At the same time, this exceptionalism does help to account first for Rome’s branding of Americanism as a heresy and second for the “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” phenomenon where U.S. civil religion has helped Protestants and Roman Catholics forget about their differences.
But D’Agostino believes that this exceptionalism among Roman Catholics has obscured the real tensions between Rome’s antimodernism and the West’s modernization:
The two foundational claims of American Catholic exceptionalism need to be historicized and relativized . . . . First, there was no shortage of anti-Catholicism in the eighteenth century embryonic American nation. The founders, both deists and a broad spectrum of English-speaking Protestants, did not have to seriously contend with Catholicism and surely did not have to protect the new state from the instransigent likes of Pius IX. If they had, anti-Catholic fangs would surely have shown themselves more frequently. Whether or not the American Revolution was a transatlantic religious war between dissenting Protestants and Anglicans (the English approximation of “papists”), it surely drew upon cultural forces that were deeply anti-Catholic. . . .
Second, many European liberals were also liberal Catholics. The moderate advocates of Risorgimento, those men who ruled the Kingdom of Piedmont and then the Kingdom of Italy until 1876, were overwhelmingly Catholic. After they defeated their republican opponents and protected the Church in Italy from a Kulturkampf, they granted privileges to the Church and secured the safety and independence of the pope. Had the papacy cooperated with the Catholic constitutional monarchy and taken the opportunity to reform the Church’s more antiquated structures, forces that were genuinely anti-Catholic might never have won the influence they gained in the decades of the nineteenth century. (314)
In other words, the Vatican dug in against liberalism and moderate constitutional political reforms in nineteenth-century Europe as much as Vatican II made it possible for Jason and the Callers to be spirituality of the church Roman Catholics, indifferent to politics and uncomfortable with past papal pronouncements. Hitching your wagon and paradigm to the papacy means you are in for one roller coaster of a ride.
Old Life 