Americanism (heresy)
Americanism was, in the years around 1900, a political and religious outlook attributed to some American Catholics and denounced as heresy by the Holy See.
This article is about Catholic definition and its subsequent condemnation. For political liberalism and individualism in America, see Americanism (ideology).
In the 1890s, European "continental conservative" clerics detected signs of modernism or classical liberalism, which Pope Pius IX had condemned in the Syllabus of Errors in 1864, among the beliefs and teachings of many members of the American Catholic hierarchy, who denied the charges.[1] Pope Leo XIII wrote against these ideas in a letter to Cardinal James Gibbons, published as Testem benevolentiae nostrae.
The long-term result was that the Irish Catholics who largely controlled the Catholic Church in the United States increasingly demonstrated loyalty to the pope, and suppressed traces of liberal thought in Catholic colleges. At bottom, the conflict was cultural, as conservative American Catholics from continental Europe, angered at the heavy attacks on the Catholic Church in Germany, France and other countries, sought to weaken individualist attitudes among American Catholics.[2]
Americanization[edit]
Others, such as Orestes Brownson—an abolitionist Catholic public intellectual—were not satisfied with the system of national parishes. Considered an Americanizer, he advocated for immigrants to believe their Catholic identities supersede national divides and personally opposed training priests in the ethnically divided American seminaries. Bishop John Hughes believed that Brownson was part of a "'club' of liberal intellectuals...who wanted to Americanize the church". He publicly denounced Brownson for giving the 1860 commencement address at Fordham University.[19]