{"id":583,"date":"2009-07-04T11:38:02","date_gmt":"2009-07-04T11:38:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/07\/freedom-and-catholicism.html"},"modified":"2009-07-04T11:38:02","modified_gmt":"2009-07-04T11:38:02","slug":"freedom-and-catholicism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/07\/freedom-and-catholicism.html","title":{"rendered":"“Freedom and Catholicism”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\"Vatican<\/span>That is the title of Michael Sean Winters’ fascinating essay at NCR<\/strong><\/a> on Cardinal Gibbons’ 1887 sermon delivered in Rome at Santa Maria in Trastevere<\/strong><\/a> (my old neighborhood church, alas). The ocassion was the consistory elevating Gibbons, of Baltimore, to cardinal, just the second American so honored. This was the era of the Americanist debates as to whether one could be a good Catholic and a good American (plus ca change<\/em>), or really whether American Catholics were changing Roman Catholicism into an American<\/u> Catholicism. Church leaders rejected this, and Gibbons delivered a homily at his new titular church “defending the American constitutional model of church-state relations.” <\/p>\n

\n

“For myself, as a citizen of the United States, without closing my eyes to our defects as a nation, I proclaim, with a deep sense of pride and gratitude, and in this great capital of Christendom, that I belong to a country where the civil government holds over us the aegis of its protection without interfering in the legitimate exercise of our sublime mission as ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” the cardinal said. “But while we are acknowledged to have a free government, we do not perhaps receive due credit for possessing also a strong government. Yes, our nation is strong, and her strength lies, under Providence, in the majesty and supremacy of the law, in the loyalty of her citizens to that law, and in the affection of our people for their free institutions.”<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Winters continues the story:<\/p>\n

\n

In 1887 in Rome, those were fighting words. His biographer, Msgr. John Tracy Ellis, wrote, “Gibbons’ address, with its strong emphasis upon the liberty of the church in the United States, had an importance and significance quite beyond the ordinary sermon of this kind.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

In late 19th-century Rome, virtually all politics was seen through the lens of the pope’s loss of his temporal sovereignty over the Papal States. With the memory of Pius VI and Pius VII imprisoned by Napoleon, the spiritual independence of the papacy was thought to be bound up with its temporal independence. Both were threatened by the rise of liberal democratic regimes in Europe, most especially in Italy, which had annexed most of the Papal States in 1860 and took over Rome itself in 1870. Camillo Benso di Cavour, the leader of the Risorgimento, had suppressed almost all the monasteries and convents in Piedmont and seemed bent on doing the same throughout a united Italy. Liberalism, for all its protestations of guaranteeing freedom, was decidedly anticlerical in Europe.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pope Pius IX’s 1864 encyclical Quanta Cura<\/em>, which included the promulgation of the Syllabus of Errors, began as a reply to a speech by Charles de Montalembert calling for the reconciliation of the church with democracy. Montalembert titled his speech “A Free Church in a Free State.” None could question the religious devotion of this noble Frenchman, but the pope saw nothing but ruin coming from the French Revolution and its progeny. Pope Leo XIII declared in his 1885 encyclical Immortale Dei<\/em> that the church was not committed to any particular form of government and that she could work with all, but he also went on to condemn freedom of religion and freedom of the press as threats to civil society and true religion.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This, then, was the context for Gibbons’ heroic address at Santa Maria in Trastevere…<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Read on<\/strong><\/a>…and Happy Fourth of July!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That is the title of Michael Sean Winters’ fascinating essay at NCR on Cardinal Gibbons’ 1887 sermon delivered in Rome at Santa Maria in Trastevere (my old neighborhood church, alas). The ocassion was the consistory elevating Gibbons, of Baltimore, to cardinal, just the second American so honored. This was the era of the Americanist debates…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,6,7,3,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bishops","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-politics","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\n"Freedom and Catholicism" - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/07\/freedom-and-catholicism.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\""Freedom and Catholicism" - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"That is the title of Michael Sean Winters’ fascinating essay at NCR on Cardinal Gibbons’ 1887 sermon delivered in Rome at Santa Maria in Trastevere (my old neighborhood church, alas). 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}