The Heresy of Compromise

By PETER MANSEAU
Religion Dispatches

The controversy surrounding the Obama administration’s birth-control mandate is not the first time the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops have found themselves enmeshed in a dispute concerning religious liberty. In an earlier flare-up sparked by the friction of Catholic doctrine and constitutional freedoms, however, liberty was not a rallying cry for the bishops—it was a problem.

In a pair of papal encyclicals written at the end of the nineteenth century, Pope Leo XIII expressed ambivalence about the Catholic Church in the United States. Much of what the man sometimes called “the first modern pope” had to say amounted to nodding approval (“That your Republic is progressing and developing by giant strides is patent to all…”), which at times seemed to take credit for the success it praised.

In a rhetorical flourish, the pope even laid claim to the nation’s neonatal survival: “When America was, as yet, but a newborn babe, uttering in its cradle its first feeble cries, the Church took it to her bosom and motherly embrace.”

The opening passages of both encyclicals (Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae and Longinqua Oceani) paint such a rosy picture of the Holy See’s opinion of the United States that it is easy to miss that the documents were written to accuse certain U.S. Catholic bishops of heresy.
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