The Trouble with U.S. Catholics

European Roman Catholics have lately been eying the prosperous establishment of U.S. Catholicism like down-at-heel gentry looking over a forgotten cousin who has struck it rich. Surveying its growth, Novelist Evelyn Waugh found it, for his English taste, a bit too Irish: "In New York on St. Patrick's Day . . . the stranger might well suppose that Catholicism was a tribal cult." Last week, U.S. Catholic readers of the Parisian daily Le Monde got a chance to see themselves through the unblinking eyes of a Frenchman.

Too Enthusiastic. According to "Georges Escoulin" (a pen name said to conceal the identity of a well-known Catholic writer who has traveled in America), the chief difficulty of U.S. Roman Catholics is an inferiority complex. Because the church arrived late in the U.S., he says, the big problem for the immigrating Catholic was to get himself accepted. For this reason he has had to show, "and prove by his whole behavior, that. . . he is devoted to 'The American Way,' that he has adopted it, and will, in turn, get others to adopt it." He has had no easy time of it, either. The Protestants were suspicious, and "took up ... the facile theme that it is impossible to be a faithful Catholic and a good and loyal American at the same time."

In their anxiety for acceptance, says Escoulin, the Roman Catholics latched onto U.S. values, prejudices and habits too enthusiastically. He quotes one unnamed Protestant as complaining that far from being unAmerican, the Catholic Church is too American.

This tendency toward "super-patriotism," Escoulin finds, has sometimes in the past prevented U.S. Roman Catholics from taking an independent line of conduct on the most serious problems of national life, such as racial and labor questions. But on Communism Escoulin finds U.S. Catholics sinning in the other direction. So passionately committed are they, he says, that they "absorb the most exaggerated and false propaganda" and are often prevented from "protesting against invalid methods of fighting Communism."

Decisive Weight. Like Novelist Waugh, Escoulin criticizes the U.S. Catholic tendency to act as a social bloc--a condition which he sees "marvelously reflected in the American parish" (especially in small and average towns), where the church, school and parish house "make up a complete social unit sufficient unto itself . . . [and in which] the priest is the little king."

But Escoulin is optimistic. Priests, laymen and educators, he thinks, are beginning to put less faith in mere organization to accomplish their purposes, the Catholic press is growing more interested in social problems, and the contemplative life is coming into its own, e.g., monasteries are turning applicants away and the autobiography of Trappist Thomas Merton is a bestseller. Escoulin looks to "an American Catholic Church more sure of itself, and at the same time more humble, having eliminated the complexes created in it by the historical and social situation" to "throw its weight decisively on the destiny of the United States and the entire world."

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