Rome and the Republic: Catholicism and Questions of Loyalty and Identity

Kim Schultz: Welcome to Our Seven Neighbors Season five. We are so excited you are here with us. My name is Kim Schultz, and I'm the Director of Inter-religious Engagement at Chicago Theological Seminary and producer of this podcast. Season five is titled Religion and Resistance in America, hosted by Reza Aslan. Hi, Reza. Thanks for being here.

Reza Aslan: It's a pleasure, Kim.

Kim: Episode four in our series, we're talking Catholicism today.

Reza: Yes, we are. <laugh>

Kim: Today, we're talking to Dr. John McGreevy, author and provost of Notre Dame, and someone who knows a thing or two about the history of Catholicism. In fact, he wrote a book, well, he wrote several books, but one of his books that we're interested in today is called Catholicism and American Freedom. Why is this conversation important to have in our season to you? Why is it necessary?

Reza: Well, for much of American history, Catholicism wasn't viewed as simply another religion. It was seen as fundamentally incompatible with freedom itself. Catholics were accused of divided loyalty, submission to foreign authority, hostility to democracy, and obedience to a hierarchy that Americans believe threatened the very foundations of the republic. So today's guest, Dr. John McGreevy, has spent his career tracing this long conflict. And what his work reveals is that the struggle between Catholicism and America was never merely about theology. It was about competing visions of freedom, about individualism versus community, about who gets to define public morality and about what minority religions must do to become legible to the American mainstream. So today, we're gonna follow that argument across two centuries from Boston classrooms and burning convents to Vatican II and the presidency of John F. Kennedy, and at a moment when even the Pope can become the target of nationalist suspicion, the old question returns, can America truly sustain religious pluralism once religious loyalty appears to compete with political identity?

Kim: So interesting. Great. Let's get into it.

Reza: Dr. John McGreevy, thank you so much for joining us on Our Seven Neighbors. You know, it's funny because sometimes when we talk about the story of American religious freedom and the role of Catholics within it, we sometimes tell the story as though the Catholics were just this immigrant group that was gradually welcomed into the national mainstream. But what I love about your work is that it argues for something much deeper than that, that really for about two centuries or so, Catholicism functioned as America's defining religious other. It was kind of a, a foil, if you will, against which Protestant America was able to clarify its own understanding of things like freedom and democracy and authority, sexuality, even citizenship, all of those things. So I wanna trace that long conflict all the way from like the covenant burnings and the Bible riots to JFK and Vatican II, and even to today, the, these MAGA attacks that we're seeing on, on Pope Leo as some kind of secret globalist.

And I think part of the reason why we wanted to have this conversation is that we wanna ask what the Catholic experience truly reveals about the fragile negotiated nature of American pluralism. So let's start at the very beginning, if you don't mind. One of the tensions that run through the very early founding era of America is that while some founders clearly intended constitutional protections to extend to Catholics, famously Jefferson, you know, made some comment about religious liberty covering Jews and Gentiles and Christians and Muhammadans and Hindus and infidels, et cetera. But at the same time, Catholics remained profoundly suspect in Protestant America. So can you talk us through a little bit about how Catholics were originally intended to be included in the founder's vision of religious pluralism? Were they? Or were they just simply, you know, legally tolerated but excluded from the cultural and, and emotional definition of what counted as truly American?

John McGreevy: Yeah, I'm happy to do that. And, and first of all, just, gosh, it's great to be here and, and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. You're right that in the early days, that is the founding period, two things are going on. One is that Catholics genuinely were welcomed in ways that were a bit unusual in Protestant dominated countries. In, in both North America and in Europe, countries had denominational affiliations. And so the Netherlands was run by Protestants by and large. And Italy, there was no Italy, but lots of small countries in Italy were run by Catholics and the Australia-Hungarian Empire was run by Catholics. And dissenting religions in all of those countries often had very few rights. So Protestants in the Austri-Hungarian Empire could only build their churches on side streets, okay? The same thing was true in the colonial US. You know, in Philadelphia, there's a Catholic church on a side street because they were told, you know, don't, don't put an early church, Old St. Joseph's, on a main thoroughfare.

But the First Amendment to the Constitution was a significant break offering freedom for religious organizations, even though some states like New Hampshire had bans on Catholic officeholders well into the 19th century. So on the one hand, the United States was like other Protestant dominated countries just as Protestants and Jews suffered in Catholic dominated countries. On the other hand, the First Amendment and the idea of religious freedom, even if it was imperfect in reality, did create a different dynamic. And from the very beginning, there were many Catholics saying, "Boy, we're more free here than we are in a lot of other places. We're more free than we are in, in the United Kingdom, in Great Britain, where there were profound and deep anti-Catholic riots in the 1790s." The thing that changes, and this maybe could go into the next part of our conversation, Catholics at that time were a tiny minority, less than 1% of the population of the new country in 1776.

What changes is in the 1840s and 1850s when you have mass Catholic migration.

Reza: Right.

John: And that catalyzes a whole range of new fears.

Reza: And I wanna get to that, but just to slow down on this part for a moment, because I do think that there's something to be said about the fact that, yes, there were these constitutional protections for Catholics, legal protections that they most certainly did not have in other Protestant dominated countries, but there is a distinction between constitutional inclusion and like cultural <laugh> inclusion, right? So even in, at that early stage, Catholics were still seen as different as other, right?

John: Yes, that's exactly right. And even more so at this time than Jews, because Catholics were seen as more threatening than Jews. Catholics had a dual loyalty to the Pope and to the new country. Alexander Hamilton, famously, when they were debating whether or not Catholics should be able to hold office in New York State in the 1780s said, "Well, let's let them hold office because the Pope is pretty, you know, impotent. He's not very powerful anymore. If he were powerful, then we'd have to really rethink this whole question. But for now, we can let them hold office." So there was that suspicion and uneasiness, but you know, the Pope's a long way away. He's not very powerful. And they're a tiny percentage of our population.

Reza: Yeah. And I think one thing that's really fascinating about this distinction and the assumption of Protestant cultural hegemony, if we wanna put it in those terms, is that it does leak into elements of public life. And one thing that I loved is that your book doesn't open with a conversation about a Pope or a bishop or anything. It starts with this 10-year-old Irish Catholic boy, <laugh> right? In a Boston classroom. Can you tell us a story of Thomas Wall and the Elliot School Rebellion in 1859?

John: So that's moving into the new period, right? By the late 1850s, Catholics were probably a majority of the population in Boston. In Boston, and that is terrifying. Boston is the cradle of the American Revolution. John Adams, Sam Adams, John Hancock are all from Boston. And all of a sudden you have this very impoverished, kind of rebellious and raucous Irish Catholic population that is becoming the majority in the city. This is a moment when there are very little, few limits on immigration. And Boston is one of the first stops from the Western part of Ireland, which, you know, has seen a massive post-famine migration. Okay. So as you said, most of the public institutions, and I would say really until the middle of the 20th century in this country had a Protestant ethos. It might be a le - ethos with a light touch, but it was a Protestant ethos.

The public schools in Boston, and this was utterly typical, which had only been founded in the 1830s. So they're a relatively recent institution, the idea of public schools, a noble idea. But those public schools typically had Protestant ministers as that headmaster or school teacher. And they always began the day with readings from the King James Bible. And Catholics led by pretty aggressive Jesuit and other Catholic leaders who had also come from Europe said, "We won't stand for this. We don't want the King James Bible. That's a Protestant Bible. Our wording of the Ten Commandments is different than the wording of the 10 Commandments in the Protestant Bible." And so they orchestrated a protest in this public school in Boston called the Elliot School in the north end of Boston. And the teacher got upset and he caned a kid, really hurt him, you know, hurt his hand for about 20 minutes.

And that led to a big national debate. Are our public schools Protestant or are they neutral? Or how do we think about religion in public institutions? And it also prompted Catholics to put renewed energy into founding their own schools saying, "You know what? These public schools, they may claim to be neutral, but they're not. Ministers are doing the teaching. Some of the textbooks are kind of Protestant inflected. The history books talk about how awful Catholic emperors were. We're gonna build our own institutions." Now, I think they wanted to build their own institutions anyway. So there was a little bit of looking for a fight on the Catholic side, but it was an example of how difficult it is, boy, do we see this today, to build genuinely, genuinely inclusive and even neutral public institutions in religiously diverse countries.

Reza: What's great about that episode is that it really does reveal the ways in which Protestant assumptions, cultural assumptions, religious assumptions were built directly into these, you know, supposedly neutral civic public institutions like the public school. But I think even then, the larger question, or m- maybe the better way to put it is the central accusation against Catholics wasn't so much theological, right? Right. I mean, uh, there were obviously some aspects to that, but it was primarily political. And it was this charge that we hear even to this day of dual loyalty, right? That becomes the, the core anti-Catholic argument in American life. What's striking to me <laugh> isn't so much where that concept comes from. It's very clear where it comes from, regardless of how powerful the Pope may or may not be. But what's striking to me is how reusable that accusation becomes, right, throughout this early history, right?

It's always a simple thing to return to, right? That Catholics answer to Rome. Why is the fear of divided allegiance such a persistent feature, not just really of anti-Catholic sentiment in America, but just frankly of American religious history in general?

John: Yeah. Uh, it's a great question. I think in the 19th century, remember, we, we sometimes say it's the birth of the nation state, the modern nation state. And it's in Germany, it's in Italy. It's in the United States after the Civil War. It becomes a much more modern nation state. And the idea is that the nation state should have a comprehensive claim on your loyalties.

John: You know, it is the primary thing. You're willing to give your life for the nation state. And you may have other things in your life that are important, but the nation state should be a comprehensive claim and a, and a primary claim. And it's simply true that Catholics never acknowledged that in the 19th century. Well, of course the nation state's important, but Catholics would often say, "But I have an equally important loyalty to my church. And maybe that's even the fundamental loyalty because that's what determines whether or not I get into heaven." So that dual loyalty claim takes on more potency in an era of heightened nationalism, I think. And so, I mean, like even today, it's interesting, right? We see it in multiple venues. We hear people say some American Jews are allegedly more loyal to Israel than they are to the United States. Muslims are more loyal to some kind of global Islam.

Reza: Yeah. Yeah.

John: Yes than they are to the United States. And you don't hear so much about Catholics being disloyal now, but even this tension with Leo the 14th and President Trump reflects President Trump's, I think, almost i- immature. Why isn't the Pope falling into line, you know, uh, with what I think should be done and not recognizing he's part of a bigger, different tradition than the American nation state. That's one slice of where that comes from. But the other thing I would add is let's be fair to those Catholic critics of the 19th century. The other thing they were worried about, not just a dual loyalty, was could Catholics be good small D democratic citizens?

Reza: Mm-hmm.

John: You know, there was always an assumption that American democracy, sure, it came from the Enlightenment and Thomas Jefferson and all that, but it also came from democracy as practiced in local congregations where in a Protestant congregation, you might elect your pastor and you would choose your pastor. And there were democratic rules within those congregations that got translated to towns. And those people looked at Catholics and said, "Well, they're just being told what to do. " Right. You know, the priest just tells them what to do and the priest is appointed by the bishop and the bishop is appointed by the Pope. It's not complicated in that view to say, "Are these Catholics really being trained for democratic citizenship when in this very important part of their life, they don't seem to have many rights?" And boy, that argument was powerful in the mid 19th century up in, in the decade before the Civil War.

It was powerful in the 1870s. It was even powerful during the Cold War in the 1940s and 1950s when people said, "Can Catholics really prepare their parishioners for democratic citizenship?"

Reza: Yeah. Of course, it's important to note that this kind of anti-Catholic sentiment wasn't just a matter of attitude or prejudice. It, it's actually public policy or at least it did become public policy. Can you talk about the main ways that anti-Catholicism becomes embedded in law and in governance around this time in the, in the middle of the 19th century?

John: You know, the hot debates are around education, you know, primarily. And so the, probably the big one with the longest standing consequence is that everywhere nation states are forming in the 19th century and everywhere, one of the main jobs of nation states is to provide schools and to educate future citizens. Well, who's gonna do that education? In the United States, it was determined we will not give any public money to religious education. And so no public money more or less, there's some exceptions to this generalization. But more or less, no public money went to Catholic schools, which were the predominant alternative to public schools. Right.

There were small Lutheran school systems too and small Jewish school systems, but nothing comparatively as large as the Catholics. A lot of anti-Catholic rhetoric came along with the idea that our public institutions have to be neutral because there was a fear of any public funding of Catholic schools. It's worth noting that that same debate turns out completely differently in Canada where it becomes a matter of course to fund Catholic schools through public dollars. It could, turns out completely differently in Germany where it becomes a matter of course to fund Catholic and Protestant schools with public dollars. But in the United States, the idea of neutral public schools because Catholics were perceived as a threat really takes over in the 19th century. And that settlement, the idea that public money would not go to religious schools is now under threat with the Supreme Court very sympathetic to Catholic schools for the first time since the mid 19th century.

I mean, it, you could imagine a world in which there was a Supreme Court ruling that said, no, public funding for education will go to parents as opposed to particular schools and they can use it at any school they want as long as that school credibly teaches math and English and that sort of thing. So I would say the biggest debates about Catholic influence on public institutions came in the public schools. Similarly, religious colleges and universities and so lots of different forms of education. But that's the main vehicle.

Reza: Right. But I think it's also important to note that part of the push for Catholics to create this kind of parallel school system comes from the fact that they felt understandably that the public school system wasn't non-sectarian at all. It wasn't neutral. It was actually kind of a central battleground for anti-Catholic legislation in a way, right?

John: Yeah. I mean, uh, not so much legislation, but ethos. Ethos. I mean, it was there. Like I said, the typical public school in Massachusetts in the 1850s, the headmaster is a minister. There are King James Bible readings. All the history books, so to speak, paint Catholics at the villains. I mean, it was easy to see that as not a neutral institution. And a reason why, even though it was an extraordinary expense in labor and money, the reason why we need to set up an alternative system. Now, even at its peak, probably no more than about 55 or 60% of Catholic young people attended Catholic schools. But that system was massive. Yeah. It was the largest privately funded school system in the world. And it came about because of, yeah, suspicion of the Protestant ethos of supposedly neutral public schools.

Reza: Yeah. This may seem like a bit of a left turn, but you write so well about it and it's such an interesting topic that I was really unaware of. But what was the deal about this kind of 19th century Protestant fear about nuns and covenants? <laugh> It seemed as though there was just this Protestant obsession with the very concept of convents. Can you talk us a little bit about that fear, what it represents, why it was there and what it represents about the way in which Protestant America saw Catholics?

John: Yeah, you know, and it was all over the world. And, uh, yeah. Protestant dominated countries. And, uh, I think two things. One is that it's hard for us to imagine now, but in the 19th century, marriage, heterosexual marriage was absolutely at the core of how most people understood society. And to be normal was to be married. That was what your goal now, some unfortunate people might not find the right partner. Okay, people understood that. And you could be a bachelor or a spinster to use potentially offensive terms.

Reza: Mm-hmm.

John: But marriage was the norm. Okay. For people to choose celibacy and for women to choose celibacy and live together with a group of other women actually seemed pretty threatening.

Reza Aslan : Yeah,

John: Suspicious. What are they up to? <laugh> Similarly, priests choosing celibacy, saying, "I'm never gonna be married. And I'm t - in fact, taking a vow of obedience, never to be married, seemed pretty far outside that norm. And then priests too were threatening because they were perceived to manipulate Catholic women in the confessional, manipulate them psychologically. They were even, even sexually. So that combination, both the priests and nuns wearing distinctive clothing, the nuns living by themselves without any male control really, was threatening to the idea of heterosexual marriage and a kind of patriarchal vision of the family where the father ran the family, which was the norm in the 19th century. And nuns were breaking every bit of that norm. And therefore I think seemed threatening in ways that are hard for us to recapture at this moment.

Reza: So much so that there was occasional acts of violence, right? And vandalism and even burnings of convents, things like that.

John: A very famous one in Boston, 1834. And, and there were a handful of others, you know, attacks on nuns in the 1840s, '50s, '60s, and '70s. It fades away that kind of violence as nuns become more accepted, I think, in American life. And the number of nuns grows. The other thing that's happening in the 19th century, there is an explosion in the number of women choosing religious life, choosing to live in convents. I don't have the numbers at the tip of my tongue, but it's an eight or nine-fold increase.

Reza: Why do you think that was?

John: You know, people study this and try and figure that out. I think quietly... So these were young women making this choice. And you have to imagine 17, 18-year-old, 19-year-old women saying, "You know what? I'm gonna go live in a convent. I'm probably gonna be a teacher. I'm gonna live with these other..." Or a nurse. Those are the usual roles. I think those women grew up... Well, two things. First, it was culturally very validated within the Catholic community. Like, this was a great thing to see a daughter go off and be a nun. That was a wonderful, wonderful thing. And then second, I think for the women themselves, they did not have a romantic view of heterosexual marriage where the husband was the controlling figure where you might have six or seven children. And that was a tough life. And the life of teaching and being with other women and doing idealistic work in a different setting, I think appealed to many young women in ways that, again, are a little bit difficult to recapture.

Reza: You were talking a little bit about the slow measure of acceptance that Catholics start to achieve, certainly by, you know, the 20th century. And, and this of course leads us to the 1960s and the election of JFK. This is, uh, you know, we're at a place here where Catholicism has moved from the convent burnings that <laugh> you just mentioned to the threshold of the presidency and yet it's very clear that that suspicion of Catholicism hasn't disappeared at all. I don't wanna get too deeply involved into that election. So much has been written about it. But what I am interested is what Catholics in America had to actually surrender theologically, culturally to make the election of JFK possible.

John: Yeah. That's, that's such a good question. And I think, you know, in some ways rather a lot in that the church had to become more American. More Protestant? I would say more Protestant before the Second Backing Council. Oh. I wouldn't say much Protestant, but I would say more American in the sense that using modern media, some of the more exotic devotional practices kind of get pruned off a little bit, although I wouldn't exaggerate that. And then I, for a historian like myself, the experience of World War II, which, you know, John Kennedy, of course, fought in bravely. The experience of World War II, that common experience of defending the United States against foreign armies that almost, you know, or something like 80% of American men of a certain age shared was an unbelievably bonding nationalist and patriotic experience.

Coming out of that, Catholics certainly felt themselves as full Americans. The one group where there were some doubts about that were among American intellectuals. And so there's a bestselling book in 1949 called American Freedom and Catholic Power that really says, "How can we trust these Catholics? They don't prepare people well for democracy." It was written by a Protestant. But he said, "I'm not writing as a Protestant, I'm writing as an American. But in the popular culture, if you think about Bing Crosby and, and all, all these other things, Catholics are being accepted after World War II." So they gave up some things, uh, I think, but in part, it was just their common participation in the experience of the war. 1928, Al Smith runs for president as a Catholic Democratic candidate. And it's pretty clear he loses because he's a Catholic. He loses states that he would've otherwise won because he was a Catholic as, in the American South.

1960, John F. Kennedy's Catholicism is probably an advantage. He wins overwhelmingly the Catholic vote. He loses some votes too, and he's, and it's still a little bit controversial, but it's an advantage. Whereas for Smith, it was a complete disadvantage. And I think the difference is the growing acceptance of Catholics after the war.

Reza: I was joking a little earlier when I said they became more Protestant, but it does remind me of this comment that a professor of mine once said. He said that no matter what religion you are, if you're American, you're more or less Protestant. And I think what he meant, <laugh> what he meant by that is not so much theologically speaking, but this relationship between like personal faith and public religiosity, right? And in many ways, that is the kind of price of mainstream acceptance that I think a lot of Catholics had to pay consciously or not, which is the idea that, look, y- y - to be truly American, your religion has to remain personal.

John: Yeah.

Reza: Rather than say, you know, publicly authoritative and, and this is in many ways the major turning point of the acceptance of Catholicism in America. But of course at the same time, one of the, the most important things that your work insists on is that it's not just that Catholicism adapts to America, it's that it begins to reshape American ideas of freedom. Can you talk a little bit about some of the major thinkers who begin to challenge the dominant American emphasis on things like individual autonomy?

John: There's a lot of people we could talk about, but you're right. I think Catholics always brought a more communal dimension to discussions of what is a good public life like, what is a well-watered society? I think in the 19th century that made Catholics disappointingly reluctant to favor the emancipation of slaves, right? Because they were so focused on communal issues. But it also made Catholics very early on discussing the effects of industrialization on families in the late 19th century. I think in some ways, uh, just to use a very contemporary example, what people tell us is in that two or three weeks, Pope Leo is gonna release his first encyclical.

And it's gonna be artificial intelligence on what does AI mean for human dignity and for our ability to live well with each other. I do think Catholics have a communal vocabulary and way about thinking about the dignity of the human person that goes beyond a casual individualism. I should be able to do more or less whatever I want. That's my civil liberty. And I'm hoping that will help shape the conversation around AI, that we will have a richer, more thoughtful conversation about what I, AI will do to human communities, human learning, all sorts of different things. So I do like the idea and I think it is demonstrated that Catholics can at times bring a richer set of conceptions outside of the American political framework to allow us to grapple with really tough issues.

Reza: Yeah. A moment ago, you brought up Vatican II and obviously there's so much to be said about such a profound moment in modern Catholic history. The thing that I'm really interested about the Vatican II experience is that here you have a church that I think, you know, was correctly accused of being sort of inherently hostile to the idea of religious liberty. Mm-hmm. And post Vatican II, it now becomes one of the great defenders of religious liberty. And I'm curious, this is clearly a, a very, I don't know, nationalistic pro - American view of this turning point, but how much of that transformation do you think emerged from the Catholic encounter with American democracy, American religious pluralism? Or is that just being too, you know, too pro - American of a view?

John: No, not at all. I mean, a, a good bit of it emerged from the American experience, not the whole thing, I think it's fair to say. But a good bit of it, you know, the, the key actor here was a guy named John Courtney Murray, an American Jesuit who official church teaching up until the Second Baton Council was that in an ideal world, Catholicism would be the religion of the state. We think Catholicism is true. Why would we not therefore want the state to promote Catholicism to marginalize minority religions? 'Cause we think Catholicism is true. And yes, every person in the privacy of their own home can believe what he or she wants, but the state should be out there promoting the true religion. And Murray said, "Well, look at the American experience. Catholicism has flourished here despite the fact that the state does not promote Catholicism.

In fact, it's flourished in part because it's generated voluntary support for the church. That's even more remarkable absent state support.

And if you really believe in the dignity of the individual human being, maybe that individual human being has to make an open choice about their religious affiliation. And that was more or less, I'm simplifying, the argument accepted at the Second Batten Council. And if you had predicted that that argument would be accepted by the world's bishops in 1940 when the church is signing agreements with Franco, Spain and Latin American countries where it says it's gonna be the state religion, that would've been inconceivable. But I think the war, even the Cold War, really shaped ideas about the importance of individual religious freedom, because that was one thing obviously the Nazis and the Japanese were not sympathetic too. And the idea that was one of the things that we fought for in World War II, the ability to choose your own religion and therefore, and see that as part of human dignity, that ends up being the doctrine of the church at the Second Baton Council.

So it's not at all an exaggeration to say that the American experience and American thinkers helped shape that change at Vatican II.

Reza: So then here we are where you have a, a religion that was once treated as fundamentally - Yeah. Incompatible with democracy. Now becomes not just deeply woven into American life, but that experience of, of American democracy then shifts the way that the global church starts to think. And I don't know, it does tell us something profound about the idea of, of pluralism itself. Th- th- this is a great way to kind of end our conversation. What does that history that we've talked about reveal about how American pluralism actually functions, right? Not as an abstract principle, not as a, you know, a, a, a founding document, but actually in terms of like the lived civic struggle of religious minorities in the US.

John: Yeah, that's such a nice... Your, your summary was excellent there that it, the, the profound irony in that the Catholic church becomes so woven into American life and flourishes such that it shapes the doctrine and experience of the global church. Again, that's a profound irony and new experience. You know, what does it tell us about American pluralism? I think the main thing, this is a very historian's thing to say, is that the terms are always shifting.

We think they're locked in place with the Bill of Rights or with the Civil War or with the Cold War. But the terms of American pluralism, how we think about the relationship between particular religious communities or ethnic communities, but any particularistic community and the nation state, those terms are always evolving. And that example that you just gave of Catholics being scorned outsiders, but then woven into American life and then in turn shaping the global church, that's an example of the terms changing. And if you were alive between 1940 and 1970, you saw them change right in front of your eyes.

Reza: Right.

John: And we see them change now on different issues. I think that the terms of the relationship between American Jews, Israel and the American nation state, they're changing in front of our eyes right now. And I don't think it's clear how that's gonna turn out, but it's changing. I do think the fact that the Pope is an American from Chicago, but also a Peruvian who lived a chunk of his life in Peru and then lived a chunk of his life in Rome, that will change the terms of American pluralism too. You know, if I make a small prediction, everybody should listen to what the Pope says. He's gonna give a speech on July 3rd, just before the 250th anniversary from a small island off of the Italian coast to the American people. That will be interesting.

Reza: Yeah.

John: When someday he comes to the United States and he visits Chicago and they get a million people on Grant Park, that will be interesting. And that will be a shifting of the terms of American pluralism too.

Reza: I don't know if you felt the same, but the idea that I would see an American Pope in my lifetime never occurred to me. Never occurred to me.

John: True to me. I was, uh, I, you know, I, I studied this stuff for a living. Completely stunned. And, uh <laugh> Out of nowhere. I mean, honestly. But you know, it's funny because it does say something about where we are right now. Obviously we're in a, a place in which an American is the head of the Catholic church. Extraordinary. We're in a place, as we brightly said, that Catholicism is viewed as deeply integrated into the American religious fabric. You know, we're at a place in which the idea that a, a Catholic running for president would never occurred to... And I mean, I'm sure there are, there are pockets that'll still, you know - Yeah. Regurgitate the same tired anti-Catholic, you know, nonsense. But for the most part, mainstream America wouldn't even think twice about it. And yet, as you well know, we're in a time in which we are seeing a resurgence of this muscular Christian nationalism that is deeply embedded in the so - called MAGA movement. And that group suddenly has a bet noir <laugh> and it's this Pope.

And it's not about theology. Mm-hmm. It's the fact that... And it's not even... I mentioned this earlier. It's not even that, oh, he's a globalist or he's, you know, too concerned with, you know, leftist issues. 'Cause you heard that about Francis.

Reza: Sure. Yeah.

John McGreevy : It's that he is not loyal to America. Mm-hmm. That if he were truly loyal to America, he would be against, you know, quote unquote, unchecked immigration or whatever the case may, the, the war in Iran. Or he would of course be on America's side. And so holy cow, we're hearing the same things we heard 200 years ago that the sort of the loyalty test now applies to the Pope, not just to American Catholics. So I'm curious, like, what does this actually say about where we are moving as a society when it comes to, you know, where we've come when it, with regard to, to the anti-Catholic, uh, sentiments in the US? The worse. <laugh> Yeah.

I mean, I don't think it'll get worse. I mean, famous last words. But I mean, one marker is just an intense polarization within our society, right? Sure. If any other president had said the things about Leo the 14th that President Trump has said, there would've been an uproar. I imagine, imagine if President Obama had, had had a bad day and, and just really went after the Pope. People would've gone nuts.

Reza: Yeah.

John: And yet President Trump's most enthusiastic supporters, in my mind at least, kind of nodded, try and nod it away. Well, it's the Pope's problem. And that is a remarkable thing. And it ju - I think it just speaks to the deep polarization within Christianity in the United States, but also just more broadly in American society. It is no one would've imagined that obviously President Trump would be the most powerful American in the world and, and there are other powerful Americans, but Leo the XVI is one of the most powerful Americans in the world and he's the Pope. And the two really have different visions of how the world should work. And I think we're gonna see this play out now over the next two or three years in various ways. Immigration is obviously an issue, but also just war theory and the war in Iran and, and there will be others, I suspect.

And it's gonna be interesting to watch. And again, nobody would've seen it coming even a year ago.

Reza: We often end, uh, a lot of our conversations with this similar question, which is that if the Catholic American religious experience has been a part of the larger American religious experience from the very beginning, how would we then tell the story of religious pluralism in America from the Catholic perspective?

John: Another good question. I think one story would be the claim to be neutral, which is an important part of the American religious narrative that we didn't choose among other competing religions is actually a very Protestant claim. It is not a claim compatible with the Catholic view of the world of the 18th and 19th and, and really most of the 20th century. So neutrality itself came to be established on sort of Protestant terms. And then I think at least in the late 1960s at once, the Second Vatican Council meant a pretty significant accommodation of Catholicism with modernity. And within the United States, that was the last gasp of the, what I would call the Protestant ruling ethos. The, the idea that American Protestants would run the country's universities and newspapers and museums and cultural institutions, mainline Protestants. And that went away after the '60s and '70s.

And so now we have a much more combative world. It is a world of evangelical Protestants and Catholics and, and newly assertive Jews and, and Muslims. And that's the world we're in where there's not as much of a dominant group. And maybe that's a better world, but then there are days when you sort of yearn for the, the Protestant ruling class of the 50s and 60s, which has got a stronger sense of sacrifice for the country and for common good than sometimes we have in our public discussions today.

Reza: Dr. John McGreevy, this was such a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for joining us on Our Seven Neighbors.

John: What a pleasure and an honor.

Reza: Thank you for your great work.

Kim: And that does it. Another episode of Our Seven Neighbors Season five. Special thanks to Dr. John McGreevy from Notre Dame for joining Reza in conversation. More about Dr. McGreevy and all of our guests can be found at our7neighbors.com. Check it out. Thanks for joining us and tune in again for our next episode featuring Dr. Pamela Nadel in conversation with Reza about how antisemitism is a structural feature of Western society. I'm looking forward to it. Special thanks to our host, Reza Aslan, for leading these powerful conversations. And also to Hazel Gomez, our podcast researcher. Thanks, Hazel. Learn more about the podcast at our7neighbors.com. Until then, take care and take care of each other. See you next time.