A Catholic America?

The debate about "a Roman Catholic in the White House" continues against the background of a significant fact: U.S. Roman Catholics have greatly increased both in number and influence during the past 50 years. The prospect of Catholics' becoming the majority group may once have horrified U.S. Protestants. To what extent that climate of opinion has changed is demonstrated by the New Republic with a symposium of three experts: Congregationalist John C. Bennett, dean of Manhattan's Interdenominational Union Theological Seminary; Unitarian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., professor emeritus of history at Harvard and Pulitzer-prize-winning author (The Age of Jackson); Missouri Synod Lutheran Jaroslav Pelikan, associate professor of historical theology at the University of Chicago.

The New Republic asked them five questions. Dean Bennett and Professor Schlesinger answered each separately; Professor Pelikan dealt with all five in a single reply. P: Catholicism became the dominant religion in the U.S., would the church deny non-Catholics the right to propagate their faiths? No, say both Bennett and Schlesinger. Theologian Bennett gives two reasons: 1) Catholics in democratic countries have come to see that the church does better where it does not assert authoritarian influence than in places such as Spain and Latin America; 2) more and more Catholic scholars and church leaders are coming to accept religious liberty as a matter of principle. Schlesinger feels that "most Catholic leaders have honestly accepted the pluralism of American society."

Would the church try to outlaw divorce or birth control? No, say Bennett and Schlesinger. Bennett fears that the Catholics "will" (he does not say "would") try to make divorce "too difficult." But he does not foresee an effort to pass any further laws barring birth control, though "here is an area where there will be a good deal of conflict in the future." Historian Schlesinger agrees that future birth control legislation is unlikely, but castigates Catholic resistance to repeal of existing laws in Massachusetts and Connecticut (passed by Yankee Protestants in the 18703) as "mistaken and offensive."

Would Catholics in the majority vote Government subsidies for parochial schools? Both Schlesinger and Bennett feel that Catholics would like to go as far as possible in this direction, which says Schlesinger, . would be doing the church a "great disservice" by provoking anti-Catholic resentment. Says Bennett: "We might be able to discuss this issue with greater moderation if we would admit that, whatever the objections to parochial schools, the present emphasis on them is a natural response to the secularization of public education; [this is] also a problem for Protestants, about which they do very little."

Would the Catholics exercise rigid censorship on literature, movies, television? "We can expect a good deal of Catholic pressure along these lines," says Bennett. Organizations such as the Legion of Decency and the National Organization for Decent Literature, writes Schlesinger, "have already meddled outrageously with the freedom of non-Catholics . . ." But he sees them as "transient phenomena."

Would the Catholic Church try to change U.S. foreign policy? Neither Bennet nor Schlesinger feels that the church has a monolithic foreign policy with which to bend U.S. international aims.

Brushing aside all such details, Conservative Lutheran Pelikan gives his answer in the form of a blast at the questions themselves. They are, says he, symptoms of a kind of militant, secular liberalism that would homogenize religion in the U.S. The questions indicate a confusion that identifies " 'the American way of life' as a religion, the national temple under whose broad roof various shrines --Protestant, Jewish, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox--may be permitted to worship so long as they acknowledge themselves to be sects or parties within the one state Shinto . . .

"If that is the import of these five questions, 'the separation of Church and State' is indeed in very serious trouble, not so much from the Roman Catholic hierarchy with its inept political maneuvers, but from the priests and prophets of the new idolatry."

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