American Catholicism in the Dock

To say that Roman Catholicism in the United States is American in flavor is to border on bland. What would you expect? If the Vatican has tilted Italian throughout its history, how could a church with almost five hundred years of presence in North America and seventy million members in the United States, most native born, not bear the marks of its country's environment? Bishop J. Fulton Sheen may have looked odd on his prime-time television show, Life is Worth Living, with all of his episcopal garb. But neither his appearance nor his allusions to Aquinas and Augustine prevented him from winning two Emmys a decade before Vatican II formally opened the Church to modernity. But for some, the Americanness of the American Church is objectionable since the nation’s combination of lax Protestantism, commercialism, vulgarity, and individualism run contrary to Rome’s ministry and forms of devotion.