Cardinal Cushing (left), August 21, 1964; Fr. Murray, December 12, 1960

The story of the Catholic Church and democracy begins with condemnation. Through the 19th century, for a variety of reasons, the Church was locked in struggle with many of the ideas associated with what would come to be called “liberal democracy,” ideas well established in the political culture of the United States. Religious pluralism, the separation of church and state, freedom of the press, government based on natural rights—such notions were anathema in Rome, a way of thinking condemned by Pius IX in his 1864 “Syllabus of Errors.” In 1899 when Leo XIII denounced as heresy what he called “Americanism” in his Apostolic Letter Testem Benevolentiae, it seemed the fulfillment of a long-simmering hostility.

Pope Leo’s concern was less with how democratic nations organized themselves than with the way in which the ideology basic to such organization—individual liberty—seemed to be taking root inside the Church. To be sure, Europe also had its democratic movements, and from Marx to Nietzsche there were ample manifestations of the modernism against which the Vatican had set itself. But it was America’s relativists such as William James and pragmatists such as John Dewey—more benign in their social designs than their European counterparts—who seemed especially threatening because, in the New World, ideas of social transformation came wrapped in claims to virtue, even piety.

In the United States, religious identity was defined by personal choice, which meant that private conscience took precedence over institutional authority. The nation paid devoted lip service to a deist God, but that deity was not a creator personally invested in the ongoing act of creation. With their subversion of ecclesial hierarchy—suggesting also rejection of a hierarchy of truth—most Americans were seen by Rome to be practicing a sham Christianity, a prelude to secularism. And now, said Leo XIII, there were American Catholics who, like carriers of infection, wanted to bring this disorder into the Church and assume the “right to hold whatever opinions one pleases upon any subject.”

The condemnation of Americanism at the end of the 19th century certainly did not finish it. American Catholics continued to take religious instruction from their broader culture. But by the early 1940s, a homegrown bastion against Americanism had been erected, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the St. Benedict Center near Harvard University. The chaplain of the center was a Jesuit named Leonard Feeney, whose genius was to settle on a single issue that could be wielded like a sword: Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus (“Outside the Church there is no salvation”). The phrase was first used by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Fr. Feeney’s campaign, embodied in highly publicized sermons that he delivered on Boston Common, seemed to take special aim at Jews, whose rejection of Jesus as Messiah (not to mention the association of certain Jews with political and cultural revolution) made them, in his view, an enemy of Roman Catholicism.

On the question of what is required for salvation, Feeney was right in insisting that his was the traditional, orthodox position. He had popes and Church councils on his side going back a thousand years; moreover, instilling terror of eternal damnation had long been the Church’s most potent mechanism for exercising authority.

Fueling Feeney was his sense that the Americanist disease had taken hold within Catholicism, and not only on the fringes. In 1943, for instance, an encyclical of Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi, had spoken of the Church as a “mystical” body to which others (non-Catholics) could belong “by an unconscious desire and longing.” This seemed an opening to amorphous notions of Church membership (“baptism of desire”) that could only confuse the faithful. Feeney demanded adherence to a rigid boundary separating the saved from the damned. That his rhetoric impressed Americans, including many American Catholics, as uncivil and intolerant only confirmed him in its importance.

So, how does change in catholic doctrine take place? Like this:

One of the Jews who had occasion to hear Feeney preach on Boston Common was a haberdasher by the name of Dick Pearlstein. His store, named for his father Louis (as it still is), was only a few blocks from Feeney’s soapbox. Pearlstein and his brother could not help but hear Feeney’s diatribes as they took their lunchtime strolls. Dick Pearlstein was married to an MTA token taker named Dolly, whose brother Richard, as it happened, was the Archbishop of Boston.

Richard Cushing, son of a blacksmith, was raised on the rough edge of South Boston. Like many of his kind, he crossed the threshold to a wider world at Boston College, from which he graduated in 1917. Cushing was an unpretentious man, famous for donning odd hats at public events, his way of putting people at ease. In Catholic Boston, his position as archbishop made him one of the most powerful people in the city, although within ecclesiastical circles his unpolished style (and his rivalry with New York’s Cardinal Francis Spellman) kept him on the margins. Cushing’s simplicity was embodied in his custom of almost always taking Sunday dinner at his sister Dolly’s house. There, the archbishop and Dick Pearlstein be­came intimate friends.

When Cushing heard from Dick of Feeney’s anti-Jewish diatribes, he took them as an insult to his own family.

He ordered Feeney to stop preaching his message of damnation for non-Catholics. Feeney refused, citing Church tradition. In support of the archbishop, the Jesuits transferred Feeney 40 miles away to Holy Cross College, in Worcester, but Feeney disobeyed and remained at St. Benedict’s. Cushing forced the issue in 1953, excommunicating Feeney. “Outside the Church there is no salvation” was not to be preached in Boston.

Despite an unbroken contrary insistence running from Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century to Pius IX in the 19th, the Vatican upheld Cushing’s excommunication of Feeney (although it dodged the doctrinal issue and cited the priest “for grave disobedience toward Church authority”). I was 10 years old at the time, living in Alexandria, Virginia, and the Feeney dispute, widely noted in Catholic America, was my introduction to theology. For a time, the nuns and priests of St. Mary’s parish spoke of nothing else. Finally, I said to my mother, “‘No salvation outside the Church’—I thought that’s what we believed.”

“It was,” she said.

“What do we believe now?”

“Live and let live,” she answered, with complete simplicity. My mother was an Americanist.

So, in fact, was Cushing. Reversing the usual order, he had moved from an ethical insight to a theological conclusion. His starting point had been not revelation but his own experience (“I love Dick Pearlstein, therefore God must love him, too”). He came to his position because of the interreligious elbow-rubbing that is endemic to America.

There are echoes in this story of Galileo, and of the Church’s conflict with what would eventually be known as the Enlighten­ment. Galileo, too, prized experience over ideology, observation over theory. If the earth moves, he asserted, then the Psalms, which say it does not move, cannot be read as literally true.

The Enlightenment question—how do I know that I exist—found an Enlightenment answer: not because God tells me but because I experience myself asking the question (“I think, therefore I am”). This primacy of the self as the center of experience and knowledge emerged, soon enough, as the ground of democracy, a poli­­ty that recognizes each self as ultimate (“all men are created equal”).

Pluralism—the jostling together of like and unlike—is the essence of the American system. When persons of differing values and convictions enter into social intimacy, whether through the neighborhood, the workplace, or—as in Cushing’s case—mixed marriage, their absolute assumptions come to exist in a different light. One person’s truth claim will yet permit another’s. This dynamic is essential to America, and it is why fundamentalist ideologues, such as Osama bin Laden, hate us.

A pivotal Catholic who grasped this American phenomenon and its meaning for the Church (and on whom Cushing depended for advice) was the Jesuit theologian, writer, and academic John Courtney Murray. Indeed, the progression of Murray’s own life tracked closely the Church’s changing understanding of church-state relations and religious pluralism. Before World War II, Murray had argued for “no salvation outside the Church.” But the trauma of the war, together with its revolutionary social consequences (including a new spirit of interreligious cooperation modeled on the collaboration of military chaplains, and the G.I. Bill of Rights that brought U.S. Catholics more fully into the national mainstream) altered him. He grasped that America’s constitutional democracy was not the selfish solipsism or condition of radical subjectivity that the Vatican warned of but rather a form of regulated mutuality that enabled the whole community to thrive.

The individual’s primacy, in his view, could be defined in terms of conscience. In a polity that exists to protect freedom of conscience, state power must be removed from the sponsorship or advocacy of any particular religion. Authentic religion, in Murray’s opinion, required separation of church and state. Implying that Catholicism could take instruction from Thomas Jefferson, Murray titled his most famous work We Hold These Truths (1960).

Around the time that Fr. Feeney was being excommunicated by Archbishop Cushing, Fr. Murray was being silenced by the Vatican. Unlike Feeney (whose disobedience qualified him, despite himself, as a crypto-Americanist), Murray obeyed. The cloud of disapproval over both Feeney and Murray, who represented opposite impulses, shows that the Church was in a powerful argument with itself. The argument was brought to climactic resolution at the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), when at long last the Catholic Church began to make its peace with the democratic idea.

Cardinal Cushing (Boston’s Archbishop had been named to the College of Cardinals by his soul brother John XXIII in 1958) made three notable “interventions,” or major speeches, at the Second Vatican Council, and each reflected his Americanist spirit. The first was a plea early on for translations of the proceedings, which were being conducted in Latin, a motion that the conservative organizers defeated. The second was a statement in support of the Council’s declaration on the Jews, Nostra Aetate. Thinking no doubt of his brother-in-law, Cushing said, “The Jews are the blood brothers of Christ.” And the third was a defense of religious liberty during debate on the declaration Dignitatis Humanae (“On the Dignity of the Human Person”). “The Catholic Church,” Cushing said, “should become the champion of liberty, of human liberty, and of civil liberty, especially in the matter of religion.”

For Cushing, a confrontation that began with Leonard Feeney on Boston Common was brought to a kind of completion at Vatican II, with the affirmation at last, in Dignitatis Humanae (1965), of religious freedom as a right possessed by all. But perhaps the most dramatic shift in Catholic meaning at the Council was an unofficial one—a move away from the ancient and overriding emphasis on salvation and damnation. As quickly as Latin disappeared from the liturgy, the dread of hell disappeared from the center of Catholic preoccupation. In the spirit of John XXIII and in a return to the spirit of the gospels, the Council implicitly replaced a damning God with a loving one.

Nothing symbolizes the reversals that occurred at the Council more powerfully than the fact that the silenced John Courtney Murray was brought to Rome to serve as principal author of Dignitatis Humanae. The primacy of conscience, the necessity of religious pluralism, the dignity of the human person, the obligation of government to protect these values, and the corollary of separation of church and state—all of these propositions were solemnly accepted by the fathers of the Council.

The long journey away from Testem Benevolentiae, however, was not quite completed. What the Council fathers did not fully comprehend was that it is impossible to affirm basic principles of religious freedom for persons generally without those principles also applying to Catholics particularly. It was one thing for Church authority to honor the foundational ideas of democracy outside the Church; it re­mained another for the hierarchy to see how those ideas could apply inside the Church.

Even so, Catholic attitudes toward authority have changed, inevitably. While acknowledging their obligation to take authoritative teaching seriously, Catholics have admitted the idea that each individual has the right and duty to arrive at moral choices on his or her own terms. This shift is apparent in the way that Catholics have responded to Rome’s reiteration of its condemnation of birth control, in Humanae Vitae (1968).

The democratic ideal that took root and then flourished in America has, across recent decades, been implanted in cultures and countries that once defined themselves against it. This is true in a special way in the Roman Catholic Church, where loyal Catholics find their faith reinforced, not undercut, by American democratic principles. For example, we know from our sacred texts that “no one has ever seen God” (1 John 4:12). This holy ignorance is fully honored in the ethos of religious pluralism. Recognition of the universal impossibility of direct knowledge of God leads to modesty about one’s own doctrinal claims, and to respect for the religious impulses of others—the same modesty and respect that are the ground of democracy.

Catholics in America have learned to see their beliefs in a broader context. Inexorably too, the Catholic Church has gone from defining itself, with Leo XIII, as a “perfect society” to defining itself, with the Second Vatican Council (in its 1964 dogmatic constitution Lumen Gentium), as a “pilgrim people.”

The revision has been most dramatic in the Church’s rediscovery of the Jesus of the gospels. It would be anachronistic, certainly, to find anything like a democratic polity in the life and preaching of Jesus. But the relevance of the example of Jesus for the ongoing—and democratic—renewal of the Church is impossible to dismiss. Jesus was never coercive, he never compelled. He chose service over lordship. He affirmed the dignity of every person he met. He treated women as equals. He saw the indwelling Spirit in each individual. And he proposed respectful mutuality as the reliable sign of God’s presence in the world.

The Catholic Church, I believe, is on the way to more fully embodying all of what it sees in Jesus.

“No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God abides in us, and God’s love is perfect in us.”

James Carroll is a columnist for the Boston Globe. His books include An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us (1996), which received a National Book Award, Toward a New Catholic Church: The Promise of Reform (2002), and, most recently, House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power (2006). His essay is drawn from a talk delivered in Gasson 100 on November 2, 2006, sponsored by the Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry and the Church in the 21st Century Center.