Catholicism, Americanism, and the Kennedys.

The history of Catholicism in America is, to say the least, a tumultuous one. The first colonists of what would eventually become the United States were the Puritans, religious refugees from England who had been driven out for attacking the Anglican church as overly Catholic in its liturgy and sacraments. Later, widespread immigration to the US from Catholic countries like Ireland, Italy, Poland, and Germany was met with harsh opposition by the Know-Nothing movement. When JFK first ran for President in 1960, he faced widespread fears that he would make the United States a vassal nation of the Vatican. He effectively responded to those fears with the phrase "I do not speak for the Church, and the Church does not speak for me."

In doing so, he bought full admission into the American experiment for the unsure Catholic citizen. For that reason, he and his family are still immensely revered by American Catholics. At Ted Kennedy's funeral, President Obama delivered the eulogy in The Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. It was not so very long ago that for an American president to appear in a Catholic Church would have been an unspeakable scandal. The victory of the Kennedys in normalizing American Catholicism was so complete that it is a thought that would scarcely even occur to us today. Indeed, if anything, the Catholic Church, with its positions against abortion, same-sex marriage, and contraception, has come to represent what America thinks of as "the establishment", rather than something that stands outside of and in opposition to it.

But in opening the gates for Catholics to participate fully in the American way of life, the Kennedys obscured a very real antagonism of traditions between what gave birth to the United States and what has traditionally characterized the social teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. It is an antagonism that this author, a believing Catholic and a loyal American, thinks we may do well to remember more keenly at times.

The United States was conceived, born, and baptized in the spirit of the Enlightenment. We may very well be, to one degree or another, a "Christian nation", but if so, it is a Christianity very specifically rooted in the kind of individualism that began in the Reformation and matured in Europe's Enlightenment. When we speak of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", we are implicitly assuming that value is something that a man creates for himself. Since man is responsible for his own flourishing, the general assumption that underlies the Declaration of Independence, US Constitution, and the other key texts of the American enterprise is that, insofar as he is not harming others, man should be at liberty to pursue his own happiness as he sees fit. What this creates is what I will term a "legalistic" tradition of thinking about ethical and political life. Morality is seen as a set of rules existing for the purpose of protecting the rights of the individual so that he can go about creating value, and a person is "good" or "bad", insofar as they have an aptitude for following those rules.

As this notion has marched forward on issues such as abortion and same sex marriage, it has come up against an older notion. It is a tradition which is older than the Catholic Church but which is transmitted to modernity through that Church's inheritance, in the Middle Ages, of the Greco-Roman philosophical vocabulary, grafted on to the revealed truths of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. In the pagan expression of this tradition, value is not created by man but rather is discovered by him in the exercise of his own faculties. In the poetic tradition of Homer and Virgil, a man's "goodness" or "badness" is spoken of not in terms of a legalistic set of rules and his respect for them, or lack thereof (e.g: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, or to draw on a modern dispute, the Right to Healthcare) but rather in terms of desirable or undesirable qualities of character which he possesses (Bravery, Strength, Wisdom, etc.) In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church inherited this tradition, and combining it with Christian theology, thought of value not simply as discovered in man, but as designed. This is, in essence, the idea behind divine law: That a human life can be judged good or bad based on standards outside of the individual, or indeed outside of man himself.

Because the watchword of the Catholic tradition was "virtue" rather than "rights", Catholic social teaching tended to favor an organic order rather than a legalistic one. Formal declarations, organized constitutions, and bills of rights are, for obvious reasons, associated with a legalistic vision of political order. The poetic tradition of the Catholic Church was primarily concerned not with upholding legal arrangements but with encouraging a given vision of what the good life of man was. For this reason, it is associated with organic arrangements such as landed aristocracies and monarchies, and a church with earthly, as well as spiritual, powers. In the view of the legalistic tradition, such things constitute unacceptable infringements on the rights of man. Not only would the poetic tradition not consider these concerns in those terms, it would itself raise problems with the legalistic tradition which it cannot consider internally, questions regarding what the good life is for man that cannot be thought of in terms of the exercise or infringement of rights.

In America today, these traditions co-exist in contradiction, usually in an unspoken manner. Thus, when questions come up about, say, healthcare, we often find ourselves speaking with two moral vocabularies. The supporter of universalized healthcare, speaking in the poetic tradition, might argue that we must offer it because man cannot achieve his own flourishing without the goods of his body and health being reasonably attended to. The opponent, speaking in the legalistic tradition, might talk about how universalized healthcare represents an intolerable infringement on the property and rights of the individual.

Prior to the rise of the Kennedy family, it was understood in the American discourse, if in different terms, that the moral tradition which Catholics came from was not the same moral tradition that America's founders came from. This often led to irrational fear and unjust treatment of Catholics; as someone interested in American Catholic history, I am familiar with the stories.

But when the Kennedys brought American Catholics fully inside the American project, they also obscured the moral debate in America by obscuring the fact that it was a debate not within a single vocabulary, but between two competing vocabularies. American Catholics (and conservative Protestants) can, and should, participate in the American moral discourse. But if they seek to cogently express their positions, they may do well to remember more frequently that when they speak in the voice of the Catholic tradition, they are speaking in the voice of a tradition that is not always identical to, and is oftentimes at odds with, the tradition of the American Revolution.