Roman Catholicism in the United States

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The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. is the largest Catholic church in the United States.

Roman Catholicism in the United States is part of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church, the Christian Church in full communion with the Pope, currently Pope Benedict XVI. Catholicism arrived in what is now the United States during the earliest days of the European colonization of the Americas. Indeed, as early as 1492 and onward, the Spanish Catholic missionaries followed closely on the heels of Columbus.^[1] However, at the time the country was founded only a small fraction of the population were Catholic, but the faith has grown dramatically over the country's history and it is now the largest Christian denomination in the United States today. With over 67 million registered residents professing the faith in 2008, the United States has the fourth largest Catholic population in the world after Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines, respectively.

The 2008 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, a statistical listing of major religious bodies published by National Council of Churches, reports 67,515,016 registered members of the Roman Catholic Church. The next largest Christian group is a Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, which reports only 16,306,246 members.

The Church's leadership body in the United States is the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, made up of the hierarchy of bishops and archbishops of the United States and the U.S. Virgin Islands, although each bishop is independent in his own diocese, answerable only to the Pope.

No primate for Catholics exists in the United States. The Archdiocese of Baltimore, the first diocese established in the country in 1789 with John Carroll as its head, received Prerogative of Place in the 1850s, which confers to its archbishop a subset of the leadership responsibilities granted to primates in other countries. Bishop Carroll's family was very well connected. His cousin, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, one of the richest men in America, was the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independance and first United States senator from Maryland. In 1774, the colonial government commissioned John Carroll, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Chase, and his cousin, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, to seek aid from British Canada (which at the time was predominately French Catholic). The bishop's younger brother, Daniel Carroll, a good friend of James Madison, was one of only five men to sign both the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution of the United States.^[2][3]

[edit] Dioceses

• US Catholic Bishops
• US Catholic Cathedrals
• US Catholic Dioceses

[edit] Statistics

In the United States, there are 195 archdioceses and dioceses:

• 145 Latin Catholic dioceses
• 33 Latin Catholic archdioceses
• 15 Eastern Catholic dioceses
• 2 Eastern Catholic archdioceses

Chicago's Holy Name Cathedral is the mother church of one of the largest Roman Catholic dioceses in the United States.

This gives the Catholic Church the third highest total number of churches in the U.S., behind Southern Baptists and Methodists. However, because the average Catholic parish is significantly larger than the average church from those denominations, there are more than 4 times as many Catholics as Southern Baptists and more than 8 times as many as Methodists (7,931,733).^[4]

The Church has over 41,406 diocesan and religious-order priests in the United States; also over 30,000 lay ministers, 17,000 men who are ordained as permanent deacons in the United States (a permanent deacon is a man, either married or single, who is ordained to the order of deacons, the first of three ranks in ordained ministry.^[5] They assist priests in administrative and pastoral roles), 63,032 sisters, 5,040 brothers, 16 U.S. Cardinals, 424 active and retired U.S. bishops in the United States, and 5,029 seminarians enrolled in the United States. Overall, it employs more than one million employees with an operating budget of nearly 100 billion dollars to run parishes, diocesan primary and secondary schools, nursing homes, retreat centers, diocesan hospitals, and other charitible institutions.^[6]

150,000 Catholic school teachers operate in the United States, teaching 2.7 million students. Some 225 schools of higher education include: Canisius College, Boston College, Fairfield University, Providence College, Seattle University, Catholic University of America, DePaul University, University of Portland, College of Holy Cross, Fordham University, Georgetown University, La Salle University, Loyola University, Marquette University, Saint Louis University, Seton Hall University, University of Notre Dame, University of San Diego, University of San Francisco, University of Santa Clara, Villanova University, etc.

The Church's Catholic health care system, overseeing 625 hospitals with a combined revenue of 30 billion dollars, is also the nation's largest group of nonprofit systems.^[7] According to the Catholic Health Association of the United States, 60 health care systems, on average, admit one in six patients nationwise each year.^[8]

There are 68,115,001 registered Catholics in the United States (22% of the U.S. population) according to the Official Catholic Directory 2009. Estimates from recent years generally range around 20% to 28%. Based on Pew Research Center surveys conducted from January 2006 to September 2006, 25.2% of the American population claim to be followers of the Roman Catholic Church (of a national population of 300 million residents). According to a new survey of 35,556 American residents (released in 2008 by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life), 23.9% of Americans (both registered and unregistered) identify themselves as Roman Catholic (approximately 72 million of a national population of 306 million residents). ^[9] The study also notes that 10% of those people who identify themselves as Protestant in the interview are former Catholics and 8% of those who identity themselves as Catholic are former Protestants.^[10] Catholics in the U.S. are about 6% of the church's total worldwide membership.

A poll by The Barna Group in 2004 found Catholic ethnicity to be 60% non-Hispanic white (commonly called Caucasian), 31% Hispanic of any race, 4% Black, and 5% other ethnicity (mostly Filipinos and other Asian Americans, and American Indians). [1]

As of 2008^[update] of 195 dioceses, 5 dioceses are vacant (sede vacante). Another 14 bishops, including two cardinals, are past the retirement age of 75.

[edit] Roman Catholicism by state

[edit] By percentage of Catholics

Plurality of religious preference by state, 2001. Catholicism is also largest denomination in the No Religion plurality states and Hawaii.

[edit] Parochial schools

The Catholic parochial school system developed in the early-to-mid-nineteenth century partly in response to what was seen as anti-Catholic bias in American public schools. Most states passed a constitutional amendment, called "Blaine Amendments, forbidding tax money be used to fund parochial schools.^[12] In 2002, the United States Supreme Court partially vitiated these amendments, in theory, when they ruled that vouchers were constitutional if tax dollars followed a child to a school, even if it were religious. However, no state school system had, by 2009, changed its laws to allow this.^[13]

[edit] Supreme Court

In the early 1980s, there was only one Catholic justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. This changed in the mid 1980s when President Ronald Reagan appointed Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy to the court, both Catholic. President George H. W. Bush appointed Clarence Thomas (a Catholic who at the time of his appointment was attending Episcopalian services, though he has since become an active Catholic) along with David Souter, an Episcopalian. President Bill Clinton appointed two Jewish judges: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. President George W. Bush appointed John Roberts and Samuel Alito, both Catholics. As of 2008^[update], the Supreme Court has a Catholic majority. If Judge Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice, six of the nine justices will be Catholic. Several scholars have suggested reasons for this change: that as Protestantism's dominance in American culture recedes as it has over the last half-century, Catholicism and Judaism have become non-issues in court appointments, and "the nation's concerns about diversity have shifted from religion and geography to gender and race." The fact that Catholics are the largest religious denomination in the US and increasing well-educated, are also factors to be considered. ^[14]

The four Catholic Supreme Court justices nominated in the last decade have become reliable votes for abortion restriction. In Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989), City of Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health (1990), Hodgson v. Minnesota (1990), and Rust v. Sullivan (1991), Scalia and Kennedy upheld the restrictions in question. This is not to say that all Catholics vote a certain way, the majority of Catholic judges have been appointed by Republicans, while Protestant and Jewish judges have been appointed by Democrats, but there is still a great difference between Catholic judges and Protestant judges. While many Protestant judges were pro-choice, only one Catholic judge has ever ruled against abortion restrictions, and that was in one of six cases. This makes for very reliable voting patterns in the Supreme Court, at least when it comes to abortion issues.^[15]

[edit] History

[edit] Colonial era

View across Fifth Avenue of the St. Patrick's Cathedral and Lee Lawrie's colossal bronze statue of Atlas, New York City

Catholicism first came to the territories now forming the United States before the Protestant Reformation with the Spanish explorers and settlers in present-day Florida (1513) and the southwest. The first Christian worship service held in the current United States was a Catholic Mass celebrated in Pensacola, FL.(St. Michael records) The influence of the Alta California missions (1769 and onwards) forms a lasting memorial to part of this heritage.^[16] In the French territories, Catholicism was ushered in with the establishment of colonies and forts in Detroit, St. Louis, Mobile, Biloxi, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans.^[17][18] As early as 1604, the French established a site in Maine on Saint Croix Island, but it was short-lived. Catholicism in the Spanish (East and West Florida) and French (eastern Louisiana/Quebec) colonies was undisturbed under later administration by Britain.

In the English colonies, Catholicism was later to be seen as a stigma, even though it had been in the beginning of American colonization, from the initial period with John Cabot in 1497. Queen Mary, the Catholic, was also Queen of Chile, but few, if any English relations developed from this, since men such as Hawkins preferred the Spanish Main and others like Frobisher, the Northwest Passage. Elizabeth, in restoring Anglicanism to favor Calvinism, had her lieutenants Drake and Raleigh attempt to found Anglican settlements. English Catholics reintroduced Catholicism with the settling of Avalon and Maryland (1634); these colonies offered a rare example of religious toleration in a fairly intolerant age, particularly amongst other English colonies which frequently exhibited a quite militant Protestantism. (See the Maryland Toleration Act, and note the pre-eminence of the Archdiocese of Baltimore in Catholic circles.) The Duke of York, future king James II of England, was also Catholic and issued the Declaration of Indulgence. Combined between the duke and baron, Catholicism on the proprietary level was highly spread out in 1664, from the Potomac to the Connecticut rivers, with part of Maine and Massachusetts even held by the duke. New York's western land claims were over a vast expanse, which neighboring Protestant colonies feared to be settled by its Catholic proprietor, in contention with their own land charters.

Catholicism, thus became limited to the Middle Colonies, whereas the South was officially Anglican and the North was Calvinist. English colonial religion, was a New World environment for spiritual conditions back in England, as each had then affiliated with their own kind. Whereas Catholicism was once the predominant English affiliation (with some Lollardy), the Reformation disestablished this and caused a split between magisterial and radical reformations which departed from the usual custom. The South, was thus a broad church blend of Catholic and Calvinist, whereas the North was strictly low church Calvinist and each responded to the English Civil War in their own way. The North supported the Cromwellians with troops and the South supported Charles I, who was later considered a martyr. The Catholics in America, although officially discriminated against by their Southern compatriots, were not in any position to favor the Northern Calvinists, who were more extreme in their dislike of Catholicism. The Calvinists laid siege upon Catholic rule in the Middle Colonies, deposing both the Duke of York/King of England and the then Lord Baltimore, but Jacobitism did not thrive afterwards in the colonies, apart from such isolated examples as Flora MacDonald, ironically a Calvinist. The Anglicans cooperated, in order to retain their position of authority in a time when Calvinism became orthodox and accepted, while Catholicism diminished. At the time of the American Revolution, Catholics formed less than 1% of the population of the thirteen colonies, and only one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll, was a Catholic.^[19] One of the reasons Americans rebelled from British rule, was the fact that French Canada was allowed freedom of religion, whereas the English colonies were still expected to toe the line of an official church. This kind of double standard inspired a nationalistic disgust in the colonists, who chose to make their 1st Amendment consist of freedom of religion, speech and press. Irish Catholics (unlike Baltimore and the Earl of Ulster/Duke of York, their English landlords) were mostly barred from settling in the colonies, but eventually came to seek a refuge from their troubled homeland and this is what revived Catholicism in America, although subsequent to independence.

[edit] 19th century

The number of Roman Catholics in the United States increased almost overnight with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the Adams-Onis Treaty (purchasing Florida) in 1819, and, in 1847, with the incorporation of the northern territories of Mexico into the United States (Mexican Cession), at the end of the Mexican American War. ^[20][21]Most of the Catholics in these areas were descendants of the original settlers, dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries.^[22][23] However U.S. Catholics increased most dramatically and significanly in the latter half of the 19th century and the early 20th century due to a massive influx of European immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Germany (especially the south and west), Austria-Hungary, Italy, and the Russian Empire (largely Poles). Substantial numbers of Catholics also came from French Canada during the mid-19th century and settled in New England. Although these ethnic groups tended to live and worship together initially, over time they intermarried so that, a century later, many Catholics are descended from more than one ethnicity.

By 1850 Roman Catholics had become the country’s largest single denomination. Between 1860 and 1890 the population of Roman Catholics in the United States tripled through immigration; by the end of the decade it would reach seven million. This influx would eventually bring increased political power for the Roman Catholic Church and a greater cultural presence, led at the same time to a growing fear of the Catholic "menace."

Some anti-immigrant and Nativism movements, like the Know Nothings and the Ku Klux Klan, have also been anti-Catholic. Indeed for most of the history of the United States, Catholics have been persecuted. It was not until the Presidency of John F. Kennedy that Catholics lived in the U.S. free of scrutiny. The Ku Klux Klan-ridden South discriminated against Catholics (as they did the Jews and African Americans) for their commonly Irish, Italian, Polish, German, or Spanish ethnicity. ^[24] Those in the Protestant Midwest and North labeled Catholics as anti-American "Papists", incapable of free thought without the approval of the Pope. In 1850, for example, Franklin Pierce, member of the New Hampshire house, presented resolutions for the removal of restrictions on Catholics from holding office in that state; also the removal of property qualifications for voting. The measures were submitted to the electorate and not surprisingly defeated.^[25] As the nineteenth century wore on animosity waned, most Protestant Americans came to understand that, despite anti-Catholic rhetoric, Roman Catholics were not trying to seize control of the government. Nonetheless, concerns continued into the twentieth century that there was too much "Catholic influence" on the government.

In the latter half of the 19th century, the first attempt at standardizing discipline in the American Church occurred with the convocation of the Plenary Councils of Baltimore. These councils resulted in the Baltimore Catechism and the establishment of the Catholic University of America.

The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels is the head church of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

[edit] 20th century

By the beginning of the 20th century, approximately one-sixth of the population of the United States was Roman Catholic. Modern Roman Catholic immigrants come to the United States from the Philippines, Poland, and Latin America, especially from Mexico. This multiculturalism and diversity has greatly impacted the flavor of Catholicism in the United States. For example, many dioceses serve in both the English language and the Spanish language. Also, when many parishes were set up in the United States, separate churches were built for parishioners from Ireland, Germany, Italy, etc. In Iowa, the development of the Archdiocese of Dubuque, the work of Bishop Loras and the building of St. Raphael's Cathedral illustrate this point.

In the later 20th century "[...] the Catholic Church in the United States became the subject of controversy due to allegations of clerical child abuse of children and adolecents, of episcopal negligence in arresting these crimes, and of numerous civil suits that cost Catholic dioceses hundreds of millions of dollars in damages."^[26] Because of this, higher scrutiny and governance, as well as protective policies and diocesian investigation into seminaries have been enacted to correct these former abuses of power, and safeguard parishioners and the Church from further abuses and scandals. Many see in these reforms (along with Vatican II) signs of a new era of lay initiative and collaboration.^[27]

[edit] American Catholic Venerables and Saints

Some notable American Saints and Venerables include: Kateri Tekakwitha, John Neumann, Isaac Jogues, Frances Xavier Cabrini, Elizabeth Ann Seton, Katharine Drexel, Pierre Toussaint, and Father Damien of Molokai.

[edit] Notable American Catholics

Some notable American Catholics, past and present (baptized and/or buried in a Roman Catholic service) include: Claude McKay, Babe Ruth, Black Elk, P.G.T.Beauregard, Tom Brady, Joe DiMaggio, Lucille Ball, Anton Scalia, Jeb Bush, Dorothy Day, Joseph Biden, Gregory Peck, Junipero Serra, John Cabot, William Buckley, James Cardinal Gibbons, Cokie Roberts, Allen Tate, Kit Carson, Mario Cuomo, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Bing Crosby, John Wayne, Andy Warhol, Harry Connick Jr., Robert Kennedy, Clare Booth Luce, Gary Cooper, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, John Glover Roberts, Andre Dubus, Cesar Chavez, Katherine Anne Porter, and Mortimer Adler.

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• Christianity in the United States
• Catholicism and American politics

[edit] Additional reading

• Abell, Aaron. American Catholicism and Social Action: A Search for Social Justice, 1865-1950 (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1960).
• Bales, Susan Ridgley. When I Was a Child: Children's Interpretations of First Communion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2005).
• Carroll, Michael P. American Catholics in the Protestant Imagination: Rethinking the Academic Study of Religion (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
• Christiano, Kevin. "The Catholic Church and Recent Immigrants to the United States: A Review of Research," in Helen Rose Ebaugh, ed., Vatican II and American Catholicism: Twenty-five Years Later (Greenwich, Ct.: JAI Press, 1991).
• D'Antonio, William V., James D. Davidson, Dean R. Hoge, and Katherine Meyer. American Catholics: Gender, Generation, and Commitment (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor Visitor Publishing Press, 2001).
• Deck, Allan Figueroa, S.J. The Second Wave: Hispanic Ministry and the Evangelization of Cultures (New York: Paulist, 1989).
• Dolan, Jay P. The Immigrant Church: New York Irish and German Catholics, 1815-1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).
• Donovan, Grace. "Immigrant Nuns: Their Participation in the Process of Americanization," in Catholic Historical Review 77, 1991, 194-208.
• Ellis, John Tracy. Documents of American Catholic History 2nd ed. (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Co., 1956).
• Ellis, J.T. American Catholicism 2nd ed.(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).
• Fialka, John J. Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America (New York: St. Martin Press, 2003).
• Finke, Roger. "An Orderly Return to Tradition: Explaining Membership Growth in Catholic Religious Orders," in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion , 36, 1997, 218-230.
• Fogarty, Gerald P., S.J. Commonwealth Catholicism: A History of the Catholic Church in Virginia, ISBN 978-0268022648.
• Galloway, Patricia K., ed., La Salle and His Legacy: Frenchmen and Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1982).
• Garraghan, Gilbert J. The Jesuits of the Middle United States Vol. II (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1984).
• Greeley, Andrew. "The Demography of American Catholics, 1965-1990" in The Sociology of Andrew Greeley (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994).
• Godfrey, Donal. Gays and Grays: The Story of the Gay Community at Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church (Lanham, Md: Lexington, 2007).
• Greer, Allan. Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
• Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995). Interesting note on Afro-Creole Catholic culture.
• Horgan, Paul. Lamy of Santa Fe (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1975).
• John, Elizabeth A. H. Storms Brewed in Other Men's Worlds: Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest: 1540-1795 2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996).
• Jonas, Thomas J. The Divided Mind: American Catholic Evangelists in the 1890's (New York: Garland Press, 1988).
• Jones, Arthur. Pierre Toussaint (New York: Doubleday, 2003).
• Maynard, Theodore The Story of American Catholicism, Volumes I and II (New York: Macmillan Company, 1960).
• McDermott, Scott. Charles Carroll of Carrollton--Faithful Revolutionary ISBN 1889334685.
• McKevitt, Gerald. Brokers of Culture: Italian Jesuits in the American West, 1848-1919 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
• McMullen, Joanne Halleran and Jon Parrish Peede, eds. Inside the Church of Flannery O'Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the Sacred in Her Fiction (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2007).
• Milanich, Jerald T. "Francisan Missions and Native Peoples in Spanish Florida," in Hudson and Tesser, eds., Forgotten Centuries (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 276-303.
• O'Malley, John, SJ. The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
• Poyo, Gerald E. Cuban Catholics in the United States, 1960-1980: Exile and Integration (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Univeristy Press, 2007).
• Sanders, James W. The Education of an urban Minority: Catholics in Chicago, 1833-1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
• Schroth, Raymond A. The American Jesuits: A History (New York: New York University Press, 2007).
• Schultze, George E. Strangers in a Foreign Land: The Organizing of Catholic Latinos in the United States (Lanham, Md:Lexington, 2007).
• Shannon, James P. Catholic Colonization on the Western Frontier (New haven: Yale University Press, 1957).
• Walch, Timothy. Parish School: American Catholic Parochial Education from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1996).
• Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Spainish missionaries present.
• Wood, Peter H. "La Salle: Discovery of a Lost Explorer," American Historical Review LXXXIX, April, 1984, 294-323.

[edit] External links

• Global Catholic Statistics: 1905 and Today by Albert J. Fritsch, SJ, PhD
• Largest religious groups in the United States

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