For years, historians have argued that Catholicism in the United
States stood decisively apart from papal politics in European
society. The Church in America, historians insist, forged an
"American Catholicism," a national faith responsive to domestic
concerns, disengaged from the disruptive ideological conflicts of
the Old World. Drawing on previously unexamined documents from
Italian state collections and newly opened Vatican archives, Peter
D'Agostino paints a starkly different portrait. In his narrative,
Catholicism in the United States emerges as a powerful outpost
within an international church that struggled for three generations
to vindicate the temporal claims of the papacy within European
society.
Even as they assimilated into American society, Catholics of all
ethnicities participated in a vital, international culture of
myths, rituals, and symbols that glorified papal Rome and demonized
its liberal, Protestant, and Jewish opponents. From the 1848 attack
on the Papal States that culminated in the creation of the Kingdom
of Italy to the Lateran Treaties in 1929 between Fascist Italy and
the Vatican that established Vatican City, American Catholics
consistently rose up to support their Holy Father. At every turn
American liberals, Protestants, and Jews resisted Catholics, whose
support for the papacy revealed social boundaries that separated
them from their American neighbors.