Differences Between Catholics and Protestants

Source

Dimensions. Nativism, or a policy favoring native inhabitants as opposed to immigrants, gained prominence in the period 1850-1877. Many immigrants to the United States at this time were poor German and Irish Catholics who settled in urban centers. Besides the ethnic and class distinctions between native-born Protestants and newly arrived Catholics the religious differences were also important. In fact, the debate between nativists and newcomers illustrated the tremendous diversity of the American religious experience and had a practical effect on the course of American Catholicism.

Catholic Citizenry. Americans often saw the United States as the opposite of Catholic Europe. In the United States, people were self-governing. They had a certain amount of education and could generally manage their own affairs, and they could elect state and federal officials to direct those projects which benefited the whole community. Americans believed that in Europe people were not self-governing and that church leaders preached that all authority came from above, that God chose some people to be religious rulers and some to be secular rulers and placed the rest in positions where they had only to be obedient to such divinely constituted authority to be considered good, moral persons. Such notions affected American attitudes toward immigrants. Americans worried that newcomers were not adequately prepared for self-government and that they would seek to import their traditional rulers to the United States. Moreover, Americans feared that immigrants had been so accustomed to traditional authority that once they came to a place of relative freedom they would become licentious and rebellious.

The Pope. American Catholic leaders such as Orestes Brownson, Isaac Hecker, Francis P. Kenrick, Martin John Spalding, and John Hughes all argued that papal rule was a historical development which showed God’s providential plan. As a citizen of Italy, Pope Pius IX was subject to Italian law, which could cut into religious freedom and the exercise of the papal office. Only as ruler of independent territory could the Pope have the political freedom to fulfill spiritual duties. In no sense was the Pope a political leader for American Catholics, and in no way was historical development of papal secular rule a model for every single country’s political situation. Thus, American Catholics could be loyal to the United States government and obedient to the Pope also.

Property Rights. In the period 1850-1877 the federal government had no laws regarding how a religious body could hold property; this issue was in state hands. By the 1850s the states had disestablished religion depriving all churches of government support, and, without consulting each other, had passed similar laws permitting religious bodies to hold property. Like any other not-for-profit enterprise, religious groups incorporated and set up boards of trustees. Although this was done entirely to conform with secular law, it had a spiritual dimension. It was a symbol of American religious freedom that the people, through their trustees, owned their religious property. Because Catholicism’s canon law made bishops responsible for their dioceses and pastors responsible for their parishes, these people could not be excluded from boards of trustees. Clergymen, animated either by a sense of responsibility under canon law, or as some charged, by a desire for power, insisted on holding property. Also, few lay trustee corporations had the necessary financial stability. Yet the integration of Catholic needs into the overall system of religious property ownership was relatively simple. Two models prevailed. Some states used a type of trusteeship called corporation sole, in which the bishop was the only trustee for all the diocesan property in the state. Upon entering office, the bishop made out a will naming the successor bishop as inheritor of the trusteeship, to avoid problems of probate. In other states each piece of diocesan property was separately incorporated and each parish had to have a board of trustees. The bishop, his episcopal assistant, and the pastor were always ex officio members of the board; there were also two lay men of the pastor’s choosing.

THE LARGEST DENOMINATIONS, 1860

Temperance. A crusade to curb excessive drinking started in the antebellum period, shedding light on the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. Poor productivity in the workplace and a decrease in morals, as well as religious concerns, caused this movement. Those who searched the Scriptures for advice on contemporary living focused on a verse which appears in Matt. 26:29, Mark 14:25, and Luke 22:18, in which Jesus shares the cup of wine with his disciples at the Last Supper, saying “I tell you I will not drink this fruit of the vine from now until the day when I drink it new with you

in my Father’s reign.” Some Protestants took this so literally that they substituted unfermented grape juice for wine at communion and generally abstained from all alcoholic drinks in anticipation of the Second Coming. For the Methodists, who sought to cultivate personal perfection, alcohol was like smoking or dancing, a forbidden activity. Catholics, meanwhile, distinguished between the mere use and sinful abuse of alcohol, and as a result many Protestants thought they had drinking problems. The abuse of alcohol led to parallel organizations for Catholics and non-Catholics. The non-Catholics had their Washington Society, in which men who formerly drank took a pledge to abstain from further alcohol consumption. Catholics had Father Theobald Matthew, an Irish priest who sponsored such groups as the Pennsylvania Catholic Total Abstinence Society. In general, though, Catholics lagged behind non-Catholics in their support for government action to control drinking. In 1846 towns in New York began to withhold licenses for the sale of liquor. Five years later Maine passed the first statewide prohibition law, and as Catholic immigrants poured into the country, other states followed suit. In 1852 Vermont, Rhode Island, and the Minnesota territorial legislature prohibited liquor sales; Michigan followed suit in 1853 and Connecticut in 1854.

Sabbath Observance. Protestant and Catholic conflict over the Sabbath was obscured by conflict within Protestantism. Traditionally, Protestants had observed Sunday as the Sabbath in honor of their belief that Jesus had risen from the dead on the Sunday after the Crucifixion. During the 1830s one group argued that what God really intended was for believers to follow Scripture strictly, which would mean moving the Sabbath back to Saturday; this group became known as Seventh-Day Adventists. (They took the name “Adventists” because they expected Christ’s imminent return.) Among more-mainstream Protestants, the oldest American denominations, such as the Congregational-ists and Presbyterians, centered their Sunday Sabbath observance on churchgoing and preaching. Even those who were not full members of the church were expected to come and sit in a pew on Sunday morning. Protestants tried to make the pews comfortable by enclosing them in structures like modern jury boxes to shield the attendees’ feet from drafts and by putting plush cushions on the seats. For some, there was also an afternoon service. Work was forbidden, and, given the amount of time people were expected to be in church, it was logistically difficult. Liberal Protestants, who argued that one could receive godly instruction in manifold ways, modified this order of worship. They had no objection to attending church, but they included more activities, prayers (Congregationalists had one at the beginning and one at the end of the sermon), music played on instruments (some Congregationalists limited themselves to the voices of the attendees), and rituals. Lutheran services had their share of prayers and sermons, but they also had rituals carried over from Europe, especially singing in four-part harmony accompanied by organ music. After the service, the family might go out to a beer garden, where even the children and their mother imbibed a little and where the singing continued, albeit with more-secular songs. The main point of contention for nativists was not that the Catholics had even more ritual and even more music, but that Catholics did not explicitly prohibit all work on the Sabbath. Catholics responded that, indeed, they did not, and they turned this Protestant criticism to their advantage, claiming that God did not intend that workers sacrifice opportunities to earn a living. As long as they attended mass (which could be held as early as 5:30 A.M.) on Sunday, they could go to work.

The Sexual Order. The ability of an adult to choose or forego marriage was another difference between Protestants and Catholics. For Protestants, it seemed evident that God intended people to live in families, with specific roles for women as wives and mothers. Celibacy not only seemed contrary to the will of God, it seemed futile in the face of human sexual attraction. The early nineteenth century also saw an outpouring of sensational novels such as Rebecca Reed’s Six Montòs in a Convent (1835) and Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal (1836). In these books innocent young women entered convents under the impression that there they would seek the will of God. What they supposedly found was a kind of brothel in which the sisters were reserved for the pleasure of the ostensibly celibate clergy. Any children born of these unions were quickly baptized, to ensure salvation of their souls, and then just as quickly murdered and buried in the basement, so that their bodies would not betray the secret of convent sexual activity. The stories were exaggerated, but many nativists sincerely believed that convents contravened the natural order of things. When they achieved political power, they attempted to do something about it.

Convent Inspection Laws. Politicians supported by the nativist American Party swept the Massachusetts state legislature elections in the fall of 1854. The nativist-dominated legislature convened in January 1855. The next month one town petitioned it to look into charges that young women were being held in convents against their will, perhaps for nefarious purposes. By March a convent inspection committee was touring the state, showing up at Catholic institutions and examining the premises, looking into closets to see if any reluctant nuns were being hidden away until the inspectors left. The activities of the committee provoked even non-Catholics, who sometimes sent daughters to convent-run schools for a portion of their education. The committee hurt its own cause by its behavior during its leisure hours on its inspection tour; the bills it submitted to the state legislature for reimbursement included many incurred at bars and saloons and one charged by a woman with a record of prostitution. By late 1855 the committee was in disgrace, as was the party that supported them. In fact, most of the American Party candidates failed at state reelection attempts in the fall of 1855.

Homes or Orphanages? The care of children was a contentious issue for Catholics and Protestants. States organized orphanages and foundling asylums, but both Catholics and Protestants objected to these—Catholics because they feared Protestant teaching dominated and Protestants because they feared there was not enough of their teaching, and that the children would be better educated and have more successful lives if they were raised in conventional family settings in small towns or on farms. To this end, private agencies such as the New York Children’s Aid Society accepted children who were orphaned or whose poor parents relinquished control over them and placed the children for adoption in western communities. Catholics regarded this practice as child stealing. Because there were not enough Catholic families to adopt orphaned children, and because some children were not orphans but could not be cared for at home, Catholics erected orphanages to tend to their young under the auspices of nuns and priests.

Abolition. Pope Gregory XVI condemned the international slave trade in 1839, but the papacy never voiced concerns over domestic slave traffic or slavery itself in America. Without guidance from their leaders, American

Catholics emulated the surrounding society. It is also noteworthy that people active in the antislavery movement mixed with those active in the nativist movement, and such association with nativism was enough to condemn antislavery in American Catholic minds. The result was that Catholics, who kept abreast of Protestants in reforms such as temperance, were among the most conservative when it came to the issues that divided the country before and during the Civil War.

Labor Reform. Nor were Catholics in the forefront of the discussion of the proper ethical treatment of wage laborers that began in the late 1860s. The bulk of Catholics were working-class people, but they did not consider themselves bound to that socioeconomic station. Like Protestants, some of them moved into the ranks of entrepreneurs and professionals, and so there could be no one Catholic teaching on economic life that suited all members. Catholic leaders also questioned the techniques of the labor movement. The Molly Maguires in the Pennsylvania coal region in the 1870s and the workers who started the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad strike in 1877 used violent tactics. They thought that their employers controlled the political and court systems and could not be hurt through economic tactics such as boycotts. In addition, when employers brought in substitute workers, or scabs, workers had to fight to protect their jobs. Whatever their justification, Catholic bishops saw laborers as fomenting violence against acceptably constituted authority. Furthermore, unions such as the Knights of Labor required members to take oaths of secrecy, promising not to reveal organizational confidences. While they initially took very cautious stands on these issues, American bishops were motivated to try to understand why the labor movement acted as it did and to see if these actions could be seen as acceptable to Catholic moral teaching. By the late 1870s the Catholic Church became a source of thoughtful analysis on the class and labor issues of the day.

Sources

Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan, 1938);

Patrick Carey, People, Priests, and Prelates: Ecclesiastical Democracy and the Tensions of Trusteeism (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987);

Norman H. Clark, Deliver Us from Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition (New York &c London: Norton, 1976).