Protestant-Catholic Relations in America

World War I Through Vatican II

Lerond Curry

• Editorial: The University Press of Kentucky
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813187945
• Categoría: Théologie et religion
• Categoría: Œcuménisme religieux et interconfessionnel

The first general survey of relations between Protestants and Catholics in America during the past half century will be welcomed not only by social historians but by clergymen and laymen interested in the development of constructive interfaith relations.

Lerond Curry has traced the major trends in this fifty-year period and analyzed the underlying factors that influenced them. Much of his account is based on correspondence and personal interviews with people who took part in the events and movements he describes.

The rapid growth of Catholic population just before World War I, along with increasing urbanization and tensions related to the war itself, produced a period of intense religious conflict often expressed in violence. After the campaign of 1928, religious leaders made earnest efforts to ameliorate these conflicts, but with the appointment of a United States representative to the Vatican in 1939, hostilities again arose. Nevertheless, Curry finds that in the middle fifties more mature interfaith relationships began to appear, and after Vatican Council II, Protestant-Catholic dialogue developed a new depth.

Notes

I. Protestant Adjustment to Catholic Growth

1. Among the many sources dealing with the name-calling in the 1928 campaign is Edmund A. Moore, A Catholic Runs for President: The Campaign of 1928 (New York: Ronald Press, 1956).

2. U.S., Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, D.C., 1960), pp. 229–30.

3. See Gerald Shaughnessy, Has the Immigrant Kept the Faith? A Study of Immigration and Catholic Growth in the United States, 1790–1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1925), pp. 145–82, for a generally contemporary study of those statistics.

4. John Tracy Ellis, American Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), p. 122.

5. Interview with Canon Michael Hamilton of Washington National Cathedral, Washington, D. C., Nov. 18, 1969. For a study of urban influences on interfaith patterns in a particular time and place, see Kenneth Underwood, Protestant and Catholic: Religious and Social Interaction in an Industrial Community (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).

6. An examination of the statistics for total population and for the various religious affiliations during the years leading up to and immediately following World War I can bear this out.

7. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955), p. 159.

8. For a treatment of immigration patterns during this period and some resulting issues, see George M. Stephenson, A History of American Immigration, 1820–1924 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964). Two acts were passed by Congress in the early 1920s limiting immigration, one in 1921 sponsored by Senator William P. Dillingham of Vermont, the other in 1924 sponsored by Congressman Albert Johnson of Washington. The earlier bill is listed by American Catholic historian John Tracy Ellis as a calendar event in the story of Catholicism in the United States. See Ellis, American Catholicism, p. 186.

9. Ellis, American Catholicism, p. 137.

10. See Everett R. Clinchy, All in the Name of God (New York: John Day, 1934), p. 138.

11. Higham, Strangers in the Land, and Gustave Myers, History of Bigotry in the United States (New York: Random House, 1943), both devote attention to an analysis of nativist attitudes.

12. Higham, Strangers in the Land, pp. 286ff.

13. Myers, History of Bigotry, p. 296.

14. P. 293.

15. A contemporary study of the Klan and its methods can be found in John Moffatt Mecklin, The Ku Klux Klan: A Study of the American Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924). A more recent study is that of David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The First Century of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865–1965 (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1965).

16. Evans, “The Klan: Defender of Americanism,” Forum 74 (Dec. 1925): 811.

17. Ibid.

18. Lowell Mellett, “Klan and Church,” Atlantic Monthly 133 (Nov. 1923):588.

19. Higham, Strangers in the Land, p. 292.

20. Arnold S. Rice, The Ku Klux Klan in American Politics (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1962), p. 46.

21. Literary Digest 74 (Aug. 5, 1922):14.

22. See Oscar Handlin, Al Smith and His America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958), pp. 118–23, and Emily Smith Warner, The Happy Warrior: A Biography of My Father, Alfred E. Smith (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), pp. 149–64.

23. Higham, Strangers in the Land, p. 293.

24. John W. Owens, “Does the Senate Fear the K.K.K.?” New Republic 37 (Dec. 26, 1923):113–14. Rice, The Ku Klux Klan, p. 13, puts the membership in Indiana at 500,000.

25. Rice, The Ku Klux Klan, p. 13.

26. Reuben Maury, The Wars of the Godly (New York: Robert M. McBride, 1928), p. 283.

27. Myers, History of Bigotry, pp. 292–93.

28. Maury, The Wars of the Godly, pp. 283–84.

29. Mecklin, The Ku Klux Klan, p. 160.

30. Myers, History of Bigotry, pp. 287ff.

31. Maury, The Wars of the Godly, p. 289.

32. As quoted in “Protestants Disowning the Ku Klux,” Literary Digest 75 (Nov. 25, 1922):23.

33. “Ku Klux Klan Condemned by the Religious Press,” Literary Digest 71 (Oct. 1, 1921): 30.

34. 118 (Dec. 1923): 406–8.

35. Mellett, “Klan and Church,” p. 589.

36. As quoted in Moore, A Catholic Runs for President, pp. 47–48.

37. Ibid.

38. Charles C. Marshall, “An Open Letter to Governor Smith,” Atlantic Monthly 139 (April 1927): 544.

39. Letters from Ellery Sedgwick, Jr., to author, June 24, 1970, and from Mrs. Marjorie Sedgwick to author, June 26, 1970.

40. Atlantic Monthly 139 (May 1927): 721.

41. Correspondence from Miss Teresa FitzPatrick to author, July 16, 1970. This correspondence includes an article clipped from Yankee, Jan. 1968, containing recollections of Miss FitzPatrick’s days with the Atlantic Monthly, in which she ...