Americanism (Catholic Church)

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Americanism was a political and religious outlook attributed to some American Catholics around the turn of the 20th century and denounced by the Holy See. It allegedly sought to adapt Catholic doctrine to American culture and democratic values, emphasizing active virtues, individualism, and personal conscience over traditional, "passive" virtues like obedience and contemplation. In the 1890s, European "continental conservative" clerics detected signs of modernism or classical liberalism, which Pope Pius IX had condemned in the Syllabus of Errors in 1864, among the beliefs and teachings of many members of the American Catholic hierarchy, who denied the charges. Pope Leo XIII wrote against these ideas in a letter to Cardinal James Gibbons, published as Testem benevolentiae nostrae. The long-term result was that the Irish Catholics who largely controlled the Catholic Church in the United States increasingly demonstrated loyalty to the pope, and suppressed traces of liberal thought in Catholic...

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