American Catholics have long been suspected of being more loyal to the Pope than to their own country. Now such suspicions are gone. But Catholics in the U.S. have to combine a commitment to the freedom-loving ideals of American society with fidelity to rigid church doctrine. This has not always been possible.

American Catholics generally like the new Pope Francis. Sixty-two percent of Catholics responded favorably to him. However, when it came to the question “would you like to see Pope Francis change the church’s position on certain issues to better reflect the views of the faithful?”, 49 percent of Catholics surveyed answered in the affirmative.

This is not surprising. According to another recent New York Times poll, American Catholics are at odds with the Vatican on many issues: by a ratio of about 2 to 1, those surveyed favored legalizing same-sex marriage, having female clergy, abolishing celibacy, allowing contraception, abortion and so on – all positions completely unacceptable to the Catholic Church. But this contradiction does not embarrass American Catholics – when asked, “Is it possible to disagree with the pope on issues such as birth control, abortion and divorce and still be good Catholics?” 83 percent of those surveyed answered yes.

The important thing here is to understand the historical context – American Catholics have had to maneuver between two poles – the dogmatic Vatican and a freedom-loving, individualistic American society.

From the very beginning, Catholics faced the extreme hostility of the Protestant majority in the English colonies of America, which later gave birth to the United States. Persecuted in England during the Restoration, the Puritans, on their way to the New World to build a shining city on the Hill, went from being persecuted to being persecuted in North America. In the New England colonies founded by the Pilgrim fathers, a ferocious clerical regime reigned.

John Locke, an eminent 17th-century English political thinker and author of the concept of separation of church and state, denied Catholics equal rights with other Christian denominations. In his “Experience of Religious Tolerance,” he wrote:

• Since neither condescension nor severity can turn the Papists, so long as they remain so, into supporters of your government, for they are hostile to it both in their principles and in their interests, and must therefore regard them as irreconcilable enemies, in whose loyalty you can never be sure, As long as they are obliged to obey blindly the infallible pope, who carries on his belt the keys of their conscience, and can on occasion resolve them from all oaths, promises, and obligations to the sovereign, especially if he is a heretic, and arm them to riot against the government, I think they should not enjoy the benefit of toleration.

Catholics in America have come a long way toward equality before the law and, just as importantly, in public opinion. The first Catholic church in the New World was not consecrated until 1784, before which Catholics prayed in home chapels. The number of Catholics then was about 30,000. All states except Pennsylvania and Delaware banned Catholics from holding public office. New Hampshire was the last to do so, in 1877. After the purchase of Louisiana in 1803, the U.S. Catholic community grew considerably. Throughout the nineteenth century it grew thanks to mass immigration from Ireland, Italy, and the Kingdom of Poland, but the immigrants were people of low social status and so was the status of their faith.

During the same years, the Catholic Church, in order to shield its flock from the influence of American Protestantism, organized parallel social institutions in America – hospitals, newspapers, colleges, and parochial schools. The attempt to maintain separation, however, did not work – assimilation took place, American Catholics became part of society and shared its individualistic ideas and aspirations for freedom. Our Radio Liberty colleague Brian Whitmore, who grew up Catholic, told us that – ironically – it was at Jesuit St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia that he began to wonder “why are we right?” – and as a result he stopped attending church and being a churchgoing believer.

The liberty of American Catholics can be judged by the fact that in 1899 Pope Leo the 13th even issued a special encyclical against the heresy called “Americanism”. Here is an excerpt from it: “…there are opinions that in order to more easily attract those who differ in their views from her, the Church should give her teaching a form more consonant with the spirit of the times, and to soften somewhat her ancient severity, to make some concessions. Many think that such concessions must be made, not only to the way of life, but even to the doctrines which are the depository of the faith… It does not take many words to prove the falsity of these ideas… The Vatican Council declared, “The doctrine of faith given by God is not a philosophical invention to be perfected by human ingenuity, but a sacred gift to be faithfully kept…”

That is to say, since the beginning of the twentieth century, Catholics in America have also been under the suspicion of the Vatican, without finally shaking off the suspicions of American society.

Even in 1958, in “A Protestant View of American Catholicism,” three religious figures, John Bennett, Stanley Lowell and William Clancy, wrote of two profound problems with Catholicism: “One is the dogmatic intolerance that is part of the Roman Catholic Church… The other basic problem is the serious conflict between an authoritarian, centralized hierarchical church and an open, pluralistic, democratic society.”

The suspicion of American society was overcome two years later by John F. Kennedy, a Catholic of Irish descent who won the 1960 presidential election.

In September 1960, during his campaign, Kennedy spoke in Houston to members of the Protestant Pastors Association of America:

“While religious questions are the obligatory and necessary subject of this convention, I want to emphasize from the outset that in the election of 1960 we are confronted with much more important problems. These include the expansion of communism, which now nests just 90 miles off the coast of Florida; these are the hungry children I saw in West Virginia; these are the elderly unable to pay the doctor; these are the families forced to abandon their farms. There are so many slums and so few schools in America that it is no longer about the moon or space. These are the real issues that must decide the outcome of the campaign. These are not religious issues, because war, hunger, ignorance and despair know no religious barriers.”

The speech itself was a major milestone – it could be considered Kennedy’s response to those longstanding accusations of John Locke against Catholics.

“Because I am a Catholic, and a Catholic has never yet been elected president, the real issues of this campaign have been overshadowed. And so it seems necessary to me to state again: which God I believe in matters only to me, and it should matter to everyone else what kind of America I believe in.

I believe in an America where church and state are separate, completely separate. Where neither a Catholic prelate tells a Catholic president how to act, nor does a Protestant priest dictate to his parishioners who they should vote for. I believe in an America where no church or ecclesiastical institution is funded by the state and enjoys no political privileges. I believe in an America where no one can be denied employment because of their faith, different from the faith of the president who appoints to office, or the faith of the people who vote if the office is elective.

I believe in an America where no official asks for or accepts advice concerning his office, either from the pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other church body. Where no religious organization seeks directly or indirectly to impose its will on the people or on politicians, and where religious freedom is so immutable that actions against any church are regarded as a threat to all other churches.

Today, Catholics hold key positions in the Democratic Party and the Barack Obama administration: Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry, Democrat leader in the lower house of Congress Nancy Pelosi, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Health Kathleen Sebelius, Presidential National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon, recent CIA director and then Defense Secretary Leon Panetta are all Catholic. And, of course, none of America’s top officials look back to the Holy See in the line of duty. Here is a vivid example: the Russian spy Robert Hannsen and the FBI director who caught him, Louis Free, are not only both Catholics, but both were members of Opus Dei and were members of the same church.

So the relationship between American Catholics and society can be considered fully regulated, but the same cannot be said for their relationship with the Vatican.

There is a kind of free religious market in America, where, as the sociologist Claude Fisher writes, religions, whose membership is usually determined by birth and environment, face a competition of religions based on individual choice. In this competition, the Catholic Church, even liberalized in the second half of the twentieth century, is not always successful.

Fisher cites a study showing that in the past decade about 30 percent of people over 30 who grew up as Catholics no longer consider themselves members of that church. (In the 1970s, the figure was 13 percent.)

This is also due to the sex scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church in recent years, but also to the divergence between American voluntarism and the dogmatism of Catholicism.

Lowe’s and the ruin of the church

78 percent of Catholics asked in the aforementioned study for the New York Times, “When faced with a difficult moral choice, would you rather follow the teachings of the pope or your conscience,” chose “your conscience. This, however, does not mean, as American Catholics see it, a break from the church-as we have seen, they believe it is possible to disagree with the church and remain “good Catholics. How they manage to reconcile such views is evident in the same survey: many participants said that the Catholic Church and its American bishops do not understand the needs of the flock. However, according to most, parish priests do understand these needs. That is, for the flock, the church is not so hierarchical as to be more important to the grassroots, horizontal level. This is probably the influence of the American social order.

In November 1997 Archbishop Francis George of Chicago made a startling statement: U.S. citizens are culturally Calvinist, even those who practice the Catholic faith. American society, he added, is the secular counterpart of the faith, based on personal interpretation of scripture and personal experience with God.

The isolationism of American Catholics sometimes takes funny forms. During the election of a new pope, in a report from the Vatican, Archbishop Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York was asked whether the conclave would be long or fast. He replied that it would be quick: “I miss New York. And I’m running out of socks!”.