Tea Party Catholic by Samuel Gregg

Author:Samuel Gregg
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780824520090
Publisher: The Crossroad Publishing Company
Published: 2013-01-05T07:00:00+00:00

Religion and Liberty

These and similar questions were of intense interest to Alexis de Tocqueville during his visit to America in the early 1830s. Though Tocqueville struggled for most of his adult life with the claims of the Catholic Faith, he could not help but be fascinated by how his fellow Catholics fared in the United States. Tocqueville’s France was, after all, a society in which Catholicism had long been intimately involved in politics. And while the Church in France had fought many political and legal battles with the monarchy during the age of absolutism, Catholicism in late-eighteenth century France emerged as perhaps the strongest bulwark of opposition to the French Revolution and its invocation of liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Tocqueville was deeply conscious that the Catholic Church in France and other countries had endured savage persecution at the hands of France’s revolutionaries. The Constitution civile du clergé passed by France’s National Assembly on July 12, 1790 represented an attempt to control the Church’s inner life that went far beyond anything attempted by the Bourbons. As if overnight, the Civil Constitution created a basis for mass resistance to the Revolution on the part of devout French Catholics. Catholics in France also found it hard to forgive, let along forget, the mass killing of Catholic bishops, priests, and religious by revolutionaries who professed to be promoting liberty, not to mention the thousands of Catholics slaughtered in the Vendée region in what some have described as a genocidal effort to exterminate opposition to the Revolution.

Given this background, it is understandable Tocqueville was so surprised to find that Catholic clergy and laity in America numbered among the strongest defenders of America’s commitment to religious liberty. “In France,” he wrote, “I had seen the spirits of religion and of freedom marching in opposite directions. In America I found them intimately linked together in joint reign over the same land.”16 When Tocqueville asked one American Catholic priest (who made no effort to disguise his antipathy toward Protestantism) for his opinion on whether the civil power should lend its support to religion in the sense of European-like establishment arrangements, Tocqueville was taken aback to hear the priest say:

I am profoundly convinced it is harmful. I know that the majority of Catholic priests in Europe have a contrary belief; I understand their point of view. They distrust the spirit of liberty whose first efforts have been directed against them. Having, besides, always lived under the sway of monarchical institutions which protected them, they are naturally led to regret that protection. They are therefore victims of an inevitable error. If they could live in this country, they would not be long in changing their opinions. . . .17

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