For more than a century, from the time when Ireland’s potato crop failed and starvation sped a great migration of Irish to the United States, nativists feared the influence of Roman Catholicism over American life.
Anti-Catholic sentiment helped fuel the Know Nothing movement of the 1840s and 1850s. The prejudice poisoned the 1884 presidential campaign with charges of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion” against the Democratic Party.
It marched alongside racism in Ku Klux Klan parades of the 1920s and doomed Democrat Alfred E. Smith’s presidential bid in 1928. John F. Kennedy’s narrow victory in 1960 was thought to be a stake through the heart of hatred.
Ironically, the influence ran in the opposite direction. Popes had relatively little impact on the formation of American morals and culture compared with the enormous changes wrought on the Vatican by U.S. modernizing power.
Pope John XXIII’s historic decision to call the Second Vatican Council to begin gathering in 1962 was, in many senses, a recognition that the Catholic Church must engage with the free and individualistic world that the postwar United States was making.
Two priests who served as theological experts at Vatican II would go on to alter that dynamic and to bring Roman Catholicism to a place of prominence in American life unmatched throughout our history.
One, from Poland, was Karol Wojtyla, then an auxiliary bishop of Krakow, now Pope Saint John Paul II. The other, a brilliant young professor from the University of Bonn, was Joseph Ratzinger, who would serve John Paul II as chief keeper of the faith and succeed him as Pope Benedict XVI.
With Benedict’s death at 95 on Saturday in Rome, the shared work of these two men can be read in American Catholicism’s dramatic shift toward the cultural right. From John Paul’s election to the papacy in 1978 to Benedict’s unusual resignation from office in 2013, every bishop consecrated in the United States (and worldwide) was approved by one of these two, and every professor licensed to teach Catholic theology according to church doctrine was subject to their potential review.
Their view of Vatican II was not the one that prevailed in the United States immediately after the council adjourned in 1965. Most observers expected that engagement with the modern world would liberalize Catholicism and lead quickly to new policies on birth control, abortion, marriage for priests and so on.
John Paul’s strong anti-communist activism in Poland, along with his movie-star looks and approachable smile, led many Americans to mistakenly believe he would align the church with modern Western culture. But they had not read his theological work, especially the series of meditations that elevated him to eminence in Rome and were published as “A Sign of Contradiction.”
Written for a 1976 retreat called by Pope Paul VI for the Roman Curia, these essays explained John Paul’s view that post-Vatican II engagement with modernity was not meant to change the church so much as it was meant to change the modern world. Catholicism would stand in contradiction to liberal trends in society, offering its unchanging doctrines as an alternative to a world evolving for the worse.
John Paul took his smile on the road, traveling the globe as no pontiff had ever done before. He appointed Ratzinger, then an archbishop and cardinal, prefect of the powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — the old Inquisition — and there he served as the hammer within the velvet glove, purging liberal theologians, clipping the wings of left-leaning bishops and elevating cultural conservatives to positions of power.
Their work continued after John Paul’s death in 2005 as Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI and kept up the countercultural momentum. Storms of scandal over priestly sex abuse prompted some thinkers to ask if the ideal of celibate male leaders in the church had fostered a culture of lies. But for Benedict and his like-minded churchmen, modern promiscuity was to blame. Their solution: tighter screening of seminarians for mental health and orthodox commitment.
The defining engagement in American politics has been over the issue of abortion. As John Paul’s hammer, Ratzinger taught that “not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion.” Under his influence, opposition to abortion became a defining aspect of Catholic identity here: Catholic schools bus students to protest rallies. Catholic hospitals refuse to offer certain medical procedures. Catholic churches raise money to fund antiabortion campaigns.
On June 24, the U.S. Supreme Court contradicted nearly 50 years of its own jurisprudence by holding that the Constitution does not protect a woman’s right to choose an abortion. Five of the six justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade are conservative Roman Catholics. (The sixth was a graduate student under a leading expert in Catholic legal philosophy.)
Catholic leaders hailed the decision — which might never have happened without the ministry of Pope Benedict XVI.