Overview:
From the time of Christopher Columbus, Roman Catholicism had been present in North America. Early Spanish and then French missionaries brought their first taste of Christianity to American Indians, while with the arrival of English Catholic colonists in the seventeenth century, Catholicism entered the English searboard colonies. The religion that was shared by all of these Catholics found holiness in nature as well as in biblical and historical tradition. Through its sacramental vision, Roman Catholicism saw the material world as both the symbol and the reality of divine things. This understanding crystallized in the seven sacraments of the Catholic cultus, but it was visible throughout the Catholic system. At the apex of the system, for Catholics, was Jesus Christ, whose presence they acknowledged in an annual liturgical cycle commemorating events in the gospel accounts of his life, death, and resurrection. Meanwhile, in a moral system that had developed over the years, Catholics lived their commitment to nature and traditional sources they considered revelation, adhering to natural law, scripture, and church teaching. Like Native Americans and Jews, in both cultus and code they tended to blend extraordinary with ordinary religion.
With this heritage behind it, the Catholic church in the United States faced changes brought by its internal ethnicity and the external pluralism of American culture. Spanish, Frech, Native America, and English Catholics were joined, as time pased, by German and Irish Catholics and later by Southern adn Eastern Europeans and by Latino and some African-American and Asian peoples. These groups often strived to maintain the separate boundaries of their respective ethnic identities, and there were sometimes collisions among them. In the situation of growing internal manyness with its attendant tensions, the Irish had come to dominate by the mid-nineteemth century and continued to do so into the late twentieth century. In turn, the pluralism of American culture led to profound changes that swung the Catholic church more and more away from its "Roman" axis. Extraordinary and ordinary religion generally grew more separate, as Catholic boundaries opened out toward American culture. By the late twentieth century, catalyzed through the actions of Vatican Council II, the Roman Catholic church in America had become an American Catholic church that looked increasingly like the churches of mainstream Protestantism in both liberal and conservative versions.
Who were the people who had so influenced the religions of Catholic and
Jewish immigrants? What kind of religion had drawn the many more and more
toward itself with its cultural hegemony? It is time now to look at the
mainstream Protestantism of the United States--first in the form of a liberal
Protestantism that in the late twentieth century, like Catholicism, regarded
itself with anxiety and worried about its spiritual condition.
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