Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950-1985

Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950-1985
Author: Patrick Allitt
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2019-01-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 150173315X

At the end of World War II, conservatism was a negligible element in U.S. politics, but by 1980 it had risen to a dominant position. Patrick Allitt helps explain the remarkable growth of the contemporary conservative movement in the light of Catholic history in the United States. Allitt focuses on the role of individual Catholics against a backdrop of volatile cultural change, showing how such figures as William F. Buckley, Jr., Garry Wills, John T. Noonan, Jr., Michael Novak, John Lukacs, Thomas Molnar, Russell Kirk, Clare Boothe Luce, Ellen Wilson, Charles Rice, and James McFadden forged a potent anti-liberal intellectual tradition. Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950-1985 is much more than a history of conservative Catholics, for it illuminates critical themes in postwar American society. As Allitt narrates the interplay of liberal and conservative politics among Catholics, he unfolds a history both intricate and sweeping. After describing how New Conservatism was shaped in the 1950s by William F. Buckley, Jr., and an older generation of Catholic thinkers including Ross Hoffman and Francis Graham Wilson, Allitt traces the range of Catholic responses to the cataclysmic events of the 1960s: the election ofJohn F. Kennedy, the civil rights movement, the decolonization of Africa, Supreme Court decisions on school prayer, the war in Vietnam, and nuclear arms proliferation. He shows how the transformation of the Church prompted by the Second Vatican Council not only intensified existing divisions among Catholics but also shattered the unity of the Catholic conservative movement. Turning to the 1970s, Allitt chronicles bitter controversies concerning family roles, contraception, abortion, and gay rights. Next, comparing the work of John Lukacs, Thomas Molnar, Garry Wills, and Michael Novak from the 1950s through the 1980s, Allitt demonstrates how individual Catholic conservatives drew different lessons from similar contingencies. He concludes by assessing recent ideological shifts within American Catholicism, using as his test case the conservative resistance to the Catholic Bishops' 1983 Pastoral Letter on Nuclear Weapons. Offering new insight into the subtle interplay between religion and politics, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950-1985 will be engaging reading for everyone interested in the postwar evolution of American politics and culture.

American Catholic Intellectuals and the Dilemma of Dual Identities, 1895-1955

American Catholic Intellectuals and the Dilemma of Dual Identities, 1895-1955
Author: Kevin E. Schmiesing
Publisher: Edwin Mellen Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2002
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

This work is as an example of what might be called Sixties history --the belief that in that decade there occurred major breakthroughs to a more enlightened and humane level of existence, with the concomitant rejection of much of what went before. Dr. Schmiesing is the first to examine in a systematic way the intellectual life of American Catholics between 1895 and 1955, and to approach that era in its own terms, not merely as a prelude to the changes of the 1960s. A common view of American Catholic history holds that two papal warnings against Americanism around 1900 had the effect of stifling real intellectual activity among American Catholics for six decades, until the liberating affects of the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65. This thesis is as an example of what might be called Sixties history - the belief that in that decade there occurred major breakthroughs to a more enlightened and humane level of existence, with the concomitant rejection of much of what went before. Kevin Schmiesing is the first scholar to examine in a systematic way the intellectual life of American Catholics between 1895 and 1955, and to approach that era in its own terms, not merely as a prelude

The Church Confronts Modernity

The Church Confronts Modernity
Author: Thomas E. Woods Jr.
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2004-06-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0231506872

As the twentieth century opened, American intellectuals grew increasingly sympathetic to Pragmatism and empirical methods in the social sciences. The Progressive program as a whole—in the form of Pragmatism, education, modern sociology, and nationalism—seemed to be in agreement on one thing: everything was in flux. The dogma and "absolute truth" of the Church were archaisms, unsuited to modern American citizenship and at odds with the new public philosophy being forged by such intellectuals as John Dewey, William James, and the New Republic magazine. Catholics saw this new public philosophy as at least partly an attack on them. Focusing on the Catholic intellectual critique of modernity during the period immediately before and after the turn of the twentieth century, this provocative and original book examines how the Catholic Church attempted to retain its identity in an age of pluralism. It shows a Church fundamentally united on major issues—quite unlike the present-day Catholic Church, which has been the site of a low-intensity civil war since the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. Defenders of the faith opposed James, Dewey, and other representatives of Pragmatism as it played out in ethics, education, and nationalism. Their goals were to found an economic and political philosophy based on natural law, to appropriate what good they could find in Progressivism to the benefit of the Church, and to make America a Catholic country. The Church Confronts Modernity explores how the decidedly nonpluralistic institution of Christianity responded to an increasingly pluralistic intellectual environment. In a culture whose chief value was pluralism, they insisted on the uniqueness of the Church and the need for making value judgments based on what they considered a sound philosophy of humanity. In neither capitulating to the new creed nor retreating into a self-righteous isolation, American Catholic intellectuals thus laid the groundwork for a half-century of intellectual vitality.

Catholic Converts

Catholic Converts
Author: Patrick Allitt
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2018-08-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501720538

From the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, an impressive group of English speaking intellectuals converted to Catholicism. Outspoken and gifted, they intended to show the fallacies of religious skeptics and place Catholicism, once again, at the center of western intellectual life. The lives of individual converts—such as John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day—have been well documented, but Patrick Allitt has written the first account of converts' collective impact on Catholic intellectual life. His book is also the first to characterize the distinctive style of Catholicism they helped to create and the first to investigate the extensive contacts among Catholic convert writers in the United States and Britain. Allitt explains how, despite the Church's dogmatic style and hierarchical structure, converts working in the areas of history, science, literature, and philosophy maintained that Catholicism was intellectually liberating. British and American converts followed each other's progress closely, visiting each other and sending work back and forth across the Atlantic. The outcome of their labors was not what the converts had hoped. Although they influenced the Catholic Church for three or four generations, they were unable to restore it to the central place in Western intellectual life that it had enjoyed before the Reformation.

Left at the Altar

Left at the Altar
Author: Michael Sean Winters
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2009-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1458749703

In the 1930s, Catholics helped create Franklin Roosevelts New Deal coalition; they remained a loyal constituency of the Democratic Party for decades. In 1960, Catholics and Democrats united to elect John F. Kennedy, Americas first Catholic preside...

American Catholic

American Catholic
Author: D. G. Hart
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2020-10-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1501751972

American Catholic places the rise of the United States' political conservatism in the context of ferment within the Roman Catholic Church. How did Roman Catholics shift from being perceived as un-American to emerging as the most vocal defenders of the United States as the standard bearer in world history for political liberty and economic prosperity? D. G. Hart charts the development of the complex relationship between Roman Catholicism and American conservatism, and shows how these two seemingly antagonistic ideological groups became intertwined in advancing a certain brand of domestic and international politics. Contrary to the standard narrative, Roman Catholics were some of the most assertive political conservatives directly after World War II, and their brand of politics became one of the most influential means by which Roman Catholicism came to terms with American secular society. It did so precisely as bishops determined the church needed to update its teaching about its place in the modern world. Catholics grappled with political conservatism long before the supposed rightward turn at the time of the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Hart follows the course of political conservatism from John F. Kennedy, the first and only Roman Catholic president of the United States, to George W. Bush, and describes the evolution of the church and its influence on American politics. By tracing the roots of Roman Catholic politicism in American culture, Hart argues that Roman Catholicism's adaptation to the modern world, whether in the United States or worldwide, was as remarkable as its achievement remains uncertain. In the case of Roman Catholicism, the effects of religion on American politics and political conservatism are indisputable.

The Emergence of Liberal Catholicism in America

The Emergence of Liberal Catholicism in America
Author: Robert D. Cross
Publisher: Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 1958
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

No period in American Catholic history has attracted as much scholarly interest in recent years as the last third of the nineteenth century, when the Church underwent a series of internal conflicts over issues that were various, specific, but somehow interlocking. Catholic leaders quarreled about such matters as the propriety of interfaith meetings, the condemnation of secret societies, the tempo of Americanization, the creation of a Catholic university, and the relation between parochial and public education. In spite of the intensive study these issues have received, their significance has been hard to grasp. The monographs have treated them as tactical controversies and have so stressed the underlying doctrinal unity among American Catholics that the bases of disagreement have never come fully into view. The present book, a Harvard doctoral dissertation, takes the clash of opinion seriously. By ranging more widely than anyone else has done through the published writings of late nineteenth-century Catholics, Dr. Cross has defined the social and even theological attitudes that distinguished a liberal from a conservative style of Catholicism. Urbanely, respectfully, but without sanctimonious pussy- footing, he has shown how these habits of mind shaped the numerous practical disputes of the day; and he has related the whole story both to European Catholicism and to the development of American society. -- from http://www.jstor.org (August 28, 2013).