When John England came from Ireland to America, the Roman Catholic Church here began to change into a distinctly American institution.

Monday, April 03, 2000

When John England came from Ireland to America, the Roman Catholic Church here began to change into a distinctly American institution. The church, in an important sense, is not as Roman and not so catholic as anti-Catholics fear. Both American Catholics and America are the better for this, and Bishop England led the way. Despite the cultural provincialism and monarchial politics of its past and such elements still found elsewhere, the Roman Catholic Church in America operates with increasing internal democracy and participates in national life democratically.

Although John England studied law for two years and never forgot the value of law, he prepared for the priesthood at the College of Carlow. As a young Irish priest, he protested British rule in Ireland as the American colonists had succeeded in doing shortly before his Cork birth in 1786. As the aristocratic prelates were trying to calm Irish nationalist anger, they found Father England to be a disturbing agitator against England. They reassigned him to an obscure rural village where they thought he would be out of the way and out of their hair. They are likely to have thought to make life the more difficult for him, because the village was largely Protestant. However, the parish priest came to understand Protestants and found he could actually live with them. This, his superiors judged, showed him to be "an irreconcilable democrat."

They told him to "go to hell," in effect, and sent him to America. To get him to go without further agitation, they presented him with a good-news/bad-news proposition: You get to be a bishop, but in South Carolina. Of all American cities, Charleston was the most English. The Episcopal Church, the American version of the Church of England, was virtually the established church at the time. There was a sprinkling of Baptists (if Baptists can be said to be a sprinkling) and Huguenots.

So in 1820, Bishop John England arrived in Charleston to his see that covered both Carolinas and Georgia with "5,000 scattered Catholics, five missionary priests, and a few nondescript buildings."

He rejected the Romanish French priests in favor of the Irish-born and founded a seminary to train American-born priests. Unlike the bishops in the east as well as Europe, he wrote a diocesan constitution and involved lay people in parish governance. The French Archbishop Ambrose Marechal of Baltimore considered him a dangerous revolutionary and overly American. By the time of his death in 1842, Bishop England had built a prospering diocese with healthy parishes. He made a significant contribution to Charleston’s religious pluralism, and the city is still proud of its designation as "the holy city." More, he strongly influenced Roman Catholic churches throughout the young nation toward American democracy.

Many old world priests even now look down on American Catholics as not at all Roman and not very catholic. American dioceses are still ruled by bishops, but they have learned to listen to their priests in a very American way. I see parish pastors actively cooperating with parish councils and becoming increasingly transparent before their people. However respectfully Catholic public officials listen to the moral instruction of their priests, they exercises office as American citizens elected by all peoples.

The initial example and outstanding leader was Bishop John England in Charleston. Now my concern is not that an official is Catholic, but how good a Catholic.

Wallace Alcorn’s column appears Mondays