Sunday, April 19, 2009

Democracy in America & Catholics, Part Three

Truly one of the great books—that readers continue to mine for intelligent analyses of our American way of life, is Democracy in America—by a very perceptive French nobleman, and devout Catholic, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) and here is what he had to say about Catholicism in America, in three parts, this is the final post:

“Most Catholics are poor, and they need all citizens to govern in order to come to government themselves. Catholics are in the minority, and they need all rights to be respected to be assured of the free exercise of theirs. These two causes drive them even without their knowing it toward political doctrines that they would perhaps adopt with less eagerness if they were wealthy and prominent.

“The Catholic clergy of the United States has not tried to struggle against this political tendency; rather, it seeks to justify it. Catholic priests in America have divided the intellectual world into two parts: in one, they have left revealed dogmas, and they submit to them without discussing them; in the other, they have placed political truth, and they think that God has abandoned it to the free inquiries of men. Thus Catholics in the United States are at once the most submissive of the faithful and the most independent of citizens.

“One can say, therefore, that in the United States there is no single religious doctrine that shows itself hostile to democratic and republican institutions. All the clergy there hold to the same language; opinions are in accord with the laws, and there reigns so to speak only a single current in the human mind.”
(Democracy in America, Mansfield/Winthrop translation, pp. 276-277)