As the mid-century approached, it is true, there came another ray of hope when a small band of intellectual converts afforded a temporary expectation that the American Church might witness an Oxford Movement of its own. Within the single decade of the 1840’s Orests Brownson, Augustine Hewit, Isaac Hecker, Anna Hanson Dorsey, George Allen, Clarence Walworth, James Roosevelt Bayley, Jedidiah Huntington, William Henry Anderson, and Joseph Chandler found their way into the Church. They were all native-born Americans of prominent families, most of them had received that best American education of their time in predominantly Protestant schools, and practically all of them were of a literary turn of mind and might be termed intellectuals. They did, indeed, lift the intellectual tone of Catholicism in this country. But the predominant cast had already been given to the religious society they now entered, and the fact that in the decade of their conversion the immigrant population accounted for 700,000 out of the 1,606,000 Catholics in the country by 1850, would explain in good measure the relatively slight impression which this little band of converts made upon the intellectual life of the vast majority of their coreligionists. With the latter the all-absorbing ambition was to find a livelihood and to make the minimum of necessary adjustments to their new environment. In the end the native-born converts with their thoroughly American background were no more successful than the European-educated and European-born Catholics of an earlier generation in establishing a lasting intellectual tradition. – from “American Catholics and the Intellectual Life,” 1955
The barriers to a Catholic intellectual tradition
The prevalence of this egalitarian spirit and the leveling process which it inspired prompted Orestes Brownson to inveigh against the American practice of dethroning all distinction when he delivered the commencement address at Mount Saint Mary’s College in 1853. On that occasion he pleaded with the graduates to resist with might and main this tendency which he characterized as “the grand heresy of our age.”11 Nor have matters greatly improved since the time of de Toqueville and Brownson, for it has been our own generation that has given birth to the terms “brain trusters” and “egg heads” to designate the popular concept of professors who have descended from Mount Olympus to engage actively in the realm of public affairs.
In this respect, I regret to say, I can see no appreciable difference between the attitudes assumed by American Catholics and those commonly held among their fellow countrymen of other religious faiths. The historian looks in vain–always excepting the lonely few–for a higher evaluation and a more understanding attitude toward the pursuits of the mind among those who are Catholic in this country. In that – as in so many other ways–the Catholics are, and have been, thoroughly American, and they have shown no more marked disposition to foster scholarship and to honor intellectual achievement than have any other group. In this their European coreligionists have often been far in advance of them. One recalls, for example, the splendid efforts made by the Belgian hierarchy, their priests and people, in rallying so bravely–and so successfully–behind Rector Pierre F.X. de Ram and his colleagues in 1834 in restoring the great Catholic University of Louvain. In terms of the comparative attitudes of many American and European Catholics to matters of this kind, it would be gratifying to record that the Catholics of the United States were an exception to the witty extravagance of a certain dean who once remarked that “in the Old World an ordinary mortal on seeing a professor tipped his hat while in America he tapped his head.” But, alas, as far as my reading and observation enable me to speak, I find no grounds for the exception.
One of the principal reasons for the lack of such an exception is, I think, the absence of an intellectual tradition among American Catholics. Obviously the establishment of such a tradition was impossible amid the stifling persecution and discrimination which Catholics experienced in colonial America. With the dawn of religious liberty after the American Revolution there was a brief span of years when it seemed that a tradition of this kind was slowly taking root among the families of the Maryland Catholic gentry. For the personal wealth of some of these families like the Carrolls, the Neales, and the Brookes, along with their deep and ardent Catholic faith, had enabled them to send their children to Europe where they acquired an education that was second to none among Americans of their generation. Moreover, when the French Revolution had turned violently anticlerical in the 1790’s there came to this country a large number of highly cultivated French priests who exercised a strong and uplifting influence upon the intellectual life of the small and beleaguered Catholic body. . . .
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