Part One (continued)...

Immigrants and Religious Practice

As Liam Riley had stressed with forceful conviction, some knowledge of history is necessary for grasping how certain events occurred and why people acted in the way that they did. Furthermore, without knowledge of the past, a person will have little understanding of the present and no real expectation or reasonable hope for what lies ahead. Without an historical perspective, he or she will merely live in the here and now, ignorant of what was and indifferent to what may come.

Americans seem to have neither a sense of history nor a taste for it. The well-known entrepreneur, Henry Ford, summed up this deplorable state when he proclaimed, "History is bunk." Thus, many lay people in this country have little or no knowledge of either salvation history or of secular history, or, more importantly, of the Catholic view that all history converges in the Person of Jesus Christ. This disturbing condition requires a look back at the arrival of religious practices in America by way of European immigrants.

Since popular devotions arise according to spiritual needs, in the sixteenth-century, the Protestant Reformation compelled a host of Catholics in Europe to establish "passed-on" religious practices. In the main, these practices became ancestral cultures of piety for two reasons. First, many bishops, clerics, and monks had fallen into states of infidelity or of moral corruption. Second, faithful bishops, priests, and monks were persecuted, went into hiding or exile, or were martyred, all of which created a spiritual vacuum for the ordinary lay person.

Historical circumstances, then, forced the laity in Europe to develop religious practices for daily living, such as praying the rosary and novenas, and petitioning popular saints. Devotions included the prominent placement of a crucifix and holy pictures in the home. Under or outside of clothing, religious medals or scapulars were worn.

Catholic immigrants from Europe brought to the dioceses of the United States their ancestral cultures of piety. Other religious practices, such as benediction, the stations of the cross, public processions, and veneration of relics, arrived in America by way of priests or consecrated religious. Religious practices soon became regular activities in parish life and in Catholic education, and they served as backbone material for the institutional Church in this country.

It did not take long for most immigrants and their offspring to receive ongoing parish instruction or formal Catholic education. And that is the reason why so many Catholics grew up with basic knowledge of Christian belief and matured as morally-responsible citizens. Despite manifest and manifold successes, weaknesses existed in parish life and in the educational system. This is not to say that the content of the instruction was problematic. The difficulties resided in some teaching methods, ways of learning that became ripe for exploitation in the post-Vatican Council II period.

Prior to Vatican Council II, parish instruction and formal Catholic education did not consist of the whole of the Deposit of Faith: sacred scripture, apostolic tradition, and living magisterium. One glaring weakness, for instance, was the lack of study in sacred scripture. Possessing little knowledge that the Word of God is the foundation of Christian belief, the newcomers to this country and their offspring simply memorized the short version of the Baltimore Catechism.

Catechesis generally consisted of learning the Ten Commandments, the valid administration of and participation in the sacramental life of the parish, the natural laws of moral and social living, the human statutes of the institutional Catholic Church, and the positive laws of the political regime. In a nutshell, the Old Testament Commandments and licit reception of the sacraments directed the lives of the laity more than the New Testament Commandment: "You must love one another just as I have loved you" (Jn 13:34).

Another weakness was the strict obedience required of the laity. When it came to the application or interpretation of the above-mentioned laws, diocesan bishops exercised a paternalistic authority which, in turn, was employed by pastors of parishes, resident clergy, and teaching religious orders. As a result, the laity became habituated to obey ecclesiastical authorities without question — whatever the bishop, father, brother, or sister said was to be followed to the letter.

Paternalistic authority sometimes even entered into free-willed human acts that necessitate individual choice, such as the exercise of personal freedom when entering into the marriage covenant, or priestly or consecrated religious life. The exercise of that style of leadership sometimes attempted to influence political and social matters that contained neither a Faith-related subject nor a moral principle. Consequently, law and morality, in an odd way, assumed the stature of a quasi-religion.

Relying too heavily on strict adherence to the ancestral cultures of piety, parish instruction and formal Catholic education established in the baptized a mentality that was legalistic and moralistic. Even though most lay people possessed strong personal beliefs, Faith, morals, and paternalistic authority had become so tightly entwined that it was near impossible for most of the laity to distinguish one element from another.

An unbalanced emphasis on morals reduced religious practice to obeying laws and rules. Enforcement of laws and rules was via the notion of "possibility": possible punishment in the hereafter. Violators of laws or rules were made to consider the content of a minor offense as possible grave matter and, therefore, a mortal sin punishable in Hell. Too many Catholics, for example, attended Mass on Sundays because the threat of mortal sin and Hell-fire was very real to them.

Paternalistic oversight of their popular base was considered by bishops to be necessary. It not only preserved unity among the laity, it protected, they thought, the institution against attacks, such as those experienced during the French Revolution. But, by the twentieth century, it was clear that the Catholic Church in America was no longer under siege. In fact, the institution had not only survived, it now prospered.

Weaknesses such as the ones mentioned above produced a multitude of mechanical Catholics. As Monsignor Romano Guardini suggested, "There was too much outward show and too little inner reality." In the long run, parish instruction and formal Catholic education created — from top to bottom — a religious culture of routine formalism and narrow piety: a "culture of laws" (Saint Cyril of Jerusalem). Consequently, for many lay people, the institutional Church had become an empty enterprise:

The tragedy of baptism, at any age, is that so often we are incorporated into a Christian community that has forgotten its splendor. Frailty and dust are given predominance in teaching. The possibility of splendor, glory, and holiness, the call to be saints, is the wealth hidden away. . . Overemphasis on the magical wiping away of sin has created some very bad habits in Church people. These bad habits emerge from an attitude that [theologian Dietrich] Bonhoeffer calls cheap grace. Cheap grace is never really valued because those receiving it put forth little effort on their own. (Macrena Wiederkehr, Benedictine nun)

Although it may seem harsh to some, the assessment above is not intended to malign in any way the heroic efforts or impugn the character of bishops, priests, and teaching religious who sacrificed their lives to transmit basic Catholic beliefs to childlike believers. Nonetheless, it must be recognized that there was a tendency in Catholic life, prior to Vatican Council II, to place the tower of morals in front of, if not above, the tower of Faith. To understand this phenomenon, we will take a look at the pontificate of Pope Pius X, his exposé of Modernist ideology, and the rebellion of Martin Luther.