The History of Catholic America
America's Bicentennial

Catholics observed America's bicentennial year, 1976, with liturgical celebration, studies in church history, and a nationwide reflection on justice that culminated in 1977 in a five-year program of study and action to better realize social justice in our nation and world.

Meanwhile, over one million pilgrims traveled to the historic city of Philadelphia in August, 1976, for the forty-first Eucharistic Congress, a worldwide spiritual assembly that gave the faithful of all lands deeper understanding of the diversity of culture and the unity of the Holy Spirit.

Seven congress-sponsored conferences expressed the wisdom and experience of prelates and lay people who excelled in the cause of social justice.

During the gathering, forty-five different liturgies featured national dress, customs, and languages of the multi-ethnic participants in the Congress.

The planners of the Eucharistic Congress had cautioned that no event was to have an air of "triumphalism" about it. Those who attended the Congress and experienced the dedication of the great crowds, sensed a spiritual uplift and unity among the participants that overshadowed petty, personal concerns.

Beneath the United States seal and the words "To Defend the Right," stand the founders of the defense of our country: Commodore John Barry - American Navy; Count Casimir Pulaski - Cavalry; and Major General Thaddeus Kosciusco - Artillery. (Kosciusco carries the plan of West Point.)

In October 1976, over thirteen hundred delegates attended a national conference in Detroit, entitled "A Call To Action" and proposed over 180 specific recommendations of Church policy in eight subject areas: justice in the Church, personhood, neighborhood, the family, work, nationhood, humankind, ethnicity and race. It was the broadest of consultations between bishops and laity ever undertaken in the American church, involving over 800,000 Catholics in parish, diocesan, and regional conferences during the 1975 Holy Year.

These recommendations offered new approaches to social goals to which the Catholic Church had long been committed, such as the elimination of racial discrimination and poverty, the guaranteeing of rights to the unborn, the commitment of the parish church to its neighborhood, and the support of family life. Other recommendations reflected newer concerns, within and outside the Church, such as the expansion of women's ministries, the necessity of evaluating our entire economic system, the quality and morality of the public schools; and the need for more effective adult religious education programs.

Some of the recommendations remain untenable in the light of Church teaching, concluded the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in their response to A Call To Action. But as a result of the consultation, the Bishops now feel more acutely their responsibility to clearly and effectively express Church teaching. The pastoral agenda for the Church is unfolding and the proposals of A Call To Action have been heard and weighed. Some were accepted and others declined, but the voice that the consultation gave to the joys, hopes, and griefs of the people of our age stands out as a strong statement in support of the vitality with which shared responsibility infuses the Church.

America rejoiced at receiving its third saint on June 19, 1977, when John Neumann, immigrant, Redemptorist priest, and Bishop of Philadelphia, was canonized. This was truly a gift to our country from the Church, for John Neumann's quiet, steadfast virtue in everything that he did calls out for emulation to all who know his story.

With the election of Pope John Paul II, the Polish Pope, in October 1978, a wholly new direction was given to the Church in the United States. Not unfamiliar with the American scene, having attended the Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia in 1979 and lectured at Harvard and other U.S. universities as a cardinal philosopher, he made his second overseas visit, this time to the American church in 1987 via a stopover in Ireland. His message, though benevolent, had a hard core of spiritual realism, demanding of American Catholics a high ideal of Christian commitment opposed to secularism and consumerism. His tone shocked many of the millions who flocked to worship with him in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Iowa, and St. Louis.

In his second visit in 1987, covering mainly the southern states, he exhibited a more sympathetic approach to the problems of the church in America.

Many conservative Americans were dismayed by John Paul's 1987 Encyclical, Sollicitudo rei socialis - concern for the social question - in which the Polish pontiff spoke of the two blocs, Soviet communism and American capitalism, as equally guilty in their effects on the world's financial system, and therefore responsible for most of the hunger, penury, joblessness, and human misery in the third world. His call for a thorough revision of the globe's economy was met with almost derision on the part of arch-conservative Catholics. Anti-nuclear protestors demonstrated against military establishments, large-scale gatherings of anti-abortion Catholics in the nation's capital encouraged semi-violent intrusions on abortion clinics, and groups of charismatic Catholics sprang up in most parishes across the nation.

In meetings of the Conference of U.S. Bishops, great emphasis was placed on pressing needs: to cultivate the spiritual welfare of ethnic groups, particularly the Hispanics, to demonstrate the Church's concern for the victims of AIDS, to promote vocations to the priesthood and religious life, and thus solve the growing problem of priestless parishes.

In the early 1980s, the Bishops' Conference inaugurated a vast enquiry on the morality of war and nuclear weapons and a similar investigation of the country's economic system. These enquiries, involving experts of every persuasion, resulted in two insightful Pastoral Letters whose content are still to be diligently pursued. Currently the bishops are studying the place of women in the Church, a volatile topic considering the polarization of feminist opinion within the nation.

Despite fell warnings that the secularized atmosphere of American society has an overall negative impact on U.S. Catholics, the priest-sociologist Andrew Greeley maintains that at least fifty percent of American Catholics attend church each Sunday and that less than five percent of Catholic couples who still practice their religion live together before marriage.

Despite the losses to the Church occasioned by the 1968 Encyclical prohibiting artificial birth control and the prevalence of a guilt complex among many Catholics taught by overly-zealous nuns and priests in Catholic schools, there is a great resurgence of committed Catholics, particularly in suburban areas throughout the nation. As Greeley concludes, "Catholics remain in the church because they like to be Catholics."