American Catholics Discussing American Republicanism

Catholic Herald: The US Church and liberalism: a failed friendship? Two writers discuss - James Patterson and Brandon McGinley

If non-Catholic Americans, especially paleocons, were to read this exchange, what would they make of it?



Patterson would do better to read more on American republicanism and historical sources than waste time debating Latin integralists. Then he may be prepared to write something normative.

From one of Patterson's messages:

Recent scholarship suggests that the deepest American traditions are not “liberal” ones. The American republican tradition preceded liberalism by a century and had deeply religious roots. The settlement of English colonies, including recusant Maryland, required colonists to engage in local and relatively democratic self-government mostly out of necessity. Colonies were far from the mother country and from each other.

The American republican tradition led to some excesses, as when Catholic laity affirmed a direct role in selecting clergy. Bishops responded by centralizing diocesan authority, perhaps giving rise to the institutional capacity for later bishops to surrender their religious responsibilities in the way you described. They have been effectively unaccountable, as the Vatican is reluctant to intervene where intervention may make matters worse.

Were Catholics affirming a direct role in selecting clergy because of "republicanism" or "liberalism"? That they were demanding such a role sounds familiar (Americanism?) and deserves a footnote with more information, even if promoting scholarship was not the point of the exchange. At any rate, even if their motivation was wrong, the intuition was correct, and could possibly have mitigated the sex abuse scandal through the selection of truly worthy men, known to the community, for holy orders. Do "American" bishops have more centralized authority than their European counterparts? I don't know. I don't see how bishops were truly accountable during the medieval period or in the "modern" period.

McGinley:

For all the real good in the republican tradition – and there is much, especially its recognition and nurturing of genuine virtue – its security is based on the separation of the political from the theological. This was seemingly necessary to skirt the differences over which Europeans came to blows in the centuries prior to the American Founding, but it also results in a thin and unsound vision of the common good.

Republicanism depends, of course, on the maintenance of a consensus among the people that virtue really matters. But to say that virtue is a political good, while the particulars of the faith that sustains virtue are private, is the very seed of liberalism and secularism.

This is a non-sequitur. A group of Christians of different denominations can agree to form a political community; they might even come to an agreement on blue laws to protect Sunday as the day of the Lord. "The particulars of the faith" cannot be regulated by political authority anyways. I'm not going to investigate further but McGinley sounds like he is a Latin integralist.

Patterson makes some more humorous claims about the existence of republicanism:

The American republican tradition is in no need of recovery. It is still alive today. Examples abound: from local homeschool co-ops to parish support for undocumented workers to the Cajun Navy providing flood relief. The diminishment of republican life is in places where self-government is hardest. These include lower-income communities in need of economic opportunity, but often overlooked are large cities. In cities, wealthy interests cooperate with municipal government to control land use, licensing, and nearly every aspect of city life and thereby marginalizing public service efforts. Even so, when there is no such structure, Americans prove ready to serve the common good, often for free. For example, to deal with Covid-19, neighbors in my parish have assembled masks and just left them for free on their front porches.

Patterson is ignorant of what republicanism, self-government by a community, entails. Republicanism is not mere civic do-goodism, and there is no "common good" in mass population centers. Like a good ultramontanist, Patterson appeals to Leo XIII in order to rebut his interlocutor. A pope's judgment of the history and concrete circumstances of some political arrangement holds no more authority than that of a historian, and a well-trained historian's opinion would have more authority than that of a pope. We see the same sort of mistake made when people give too much weight to opinions of John Paul II or Benedict XVI on such matters because they are ultramontanists or they are favorably disposed to these two popes.

McGinley:

And yet the virtues of republicanism – or republican virtues, for that matter – do not stand alone, detached from grace and the ministry of the Church. As Leo XIII said later in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, “To practice virtue there is absolute need of the assistance of the Holy Spirit.”

There are certainly some social virtues – neighbourliness, compromise, and so on – that are nurtured by republican political forms, but these are ultimately manifestations of Christian virtues – liberality, prudence, and so on – that are primarily nurtured by the Holy Spirit and the sacramental life of the Church. The practices and habits of republicanism require the support of correct notions of theology and ecclesiology.

McGinley is implying then that there are no virtues apart from Christian virtues, and that virtue is not possible without Christian initiation. And then there is the intellectualism that is present: "the correct notions of theology and ecclesiology," not the action of the Holy Spirit who transcends the beliefs and opinions of Christians, even when those beliefs are wrong.

One can claim that any sort of good habit (not necessarily "complete" virtue) is in danger of being lost because of a turn to habitual sin. One can also claim that the existence of such good habits in non-Christians is no guarantee of the stability and permanence of their political community or arrrangement. One can further claim that what is required for stability is the Christian life. But no Protestant or formerly Protestant people is going to accept a form of evangelization from Latins that is really just Latin triumphalism, and Latins are going to have to come to terms with the historical fact that some of the protests against the pope of Rome were actually justified. There is nothing to prevent Latins from providing their own witness to the faith while cooperating with Protestants. But if they make it a mutually exclusive choice, no cooperation unless Protestants convert, Latins will be stuck in their own ghettoes/religious enclaves, or worse, remain just atomized individuals.