Understanding the American Church and the NCCB (Part 1)
Liberal policy, Bishop Conferences, Spies, and Pedophiles (Oh My!)
The bishop conferences are all over the news as of late. I would wager most catholics are a bit in the dark in regards to their function and history.
If we are to make sense of anything going forward, we must start from the beginning. It’s high time for a history lesson.
The Beginnings of the American Church
The inception of the American Church Hierarchy began in 1789 by Pope Pius VI, when he created the Primal See of Baltimore. And its first major player was the Jesuit John Carroll.
The Carrolls were one of the richest of the First Families and the largest landowners in Maryland. They were also a family committed to the ideals of the American revolution. Johns older brother and cousin both played pivotal roles in the movement, with Charles Carroll being the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence, and Daniel Carroll a master mason. John was raised in a cultural environment that lived and breathed American Republicanism.
In 1788 the Baltimore priests asks Pius VI for a special dispensation to elect their own bishop, as to “be as free as possible from suspicion and odium to their countrymen.” This request was granted. John Carroll was elected. Bishop John Carroll had a uniquely American vision for the church, one that encouraged assimilation into the dominant anglo American cultural milieu and maintained a level of independence from Rome. “Archbishop Carroll envisioned the American Church as a “private corporation,” not as an “institution-in-law” which was the European view. “In a sense, the whole history of the Church in the United States has been the gracious accepting of that change, a constant adaptation to that life in a new and secular environment,” wrote Carroll. “Adaptation” to the dominant Protestant secular culture meant the end of an unsightly and unwashed ghetto Catholicism in favor of a more refined genteel homogenized and secularized population despite the fact that non-assimilation was the Catholic immigrant’s strongest guarantee of the continuance of his strong faith. Carroll held great stock in the virtue of religious tolerance. Unfortunately, religious tolerance is not a Catholic virtue.”
From the beginning John Carroll attempted to shape the church in a distinctly protestant direction for the reasons stated above. He asked the Holy See to allow public worship to be conducted in the vernacular as opposed to Latin. Father Carroll claimed that, “to continue the practice of a Latin liturgy in the present state of things must be owing to either the chimerical fears of innovation or to indolence and inattention in the first pastors of the National Churches in not joining to solicit or indeed ordain this necessary alteration.” Of course, to Carrol the vernacular meant English, even though the vast majority of American Catholics at the time were not English at all. This was a push for anglicization.