[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Catholicism in America
The Catholic Church in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century was still an Immigrant Church, but one that had hitched its wagon to the American dream of prosperity and progress. The monolithic structure of Catholicism, its ties to a foreign power, and the aura of mystery in its worship had made Catholics suspect members of American society. But the Irish Jansenist strain that dominated the American Catholic Church actually blended quite nicely with the Calvinist ethic that had guided the United States from colonial times.
So in the mid of the century found Catholics allied with what intellectual historians term "American innocence," a structure of values in the American culture that corresponded closely with the dominant Roman Catholic weltanschauung : belief in a rational cosmos and an objective moral order in nature, confidence in progress, and a preference for didacticism in art forms, especially in literature.
By the time John Carroll died in 1815, American Catholicism had been significantly transformed. The establishment of the episcopacy, religious orders, schools, and new congregations provided a solid institutional basis for further growth and development. The Catholic population, which John Carroll estimated at twenty-five thousand in 1785, almost quadrupled by 1815 because of natural increase, immigration, and the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory. Catholicism had also expanded geographically.
In 1785, Catholics were primarily located in Maryland and Pennsylvania, with a few in New York and throughout Virginia. By 1815, they were spread along the Eastern Seaboard from Maine to Florida, and from Detroit to New Orleans. Anglo and other ethnic Catholics also became a part of the early American movement into the frontiers of upstate New York, western Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and the Ohio River Valley and the Mississippi River Valley where French Catholics had previously established a few pioneer villages.......
