One of the more noteworthy episodes during the late nineteenth-century tenure of Pope Leo XIII was the pope’s response to the so-called “Americanist” controversy in the United States.
Leo XIII wrote two encyclicals addressing issues that implicated the Catholic Church in America. The first, Libertas Praestantissimum (1888), was written to refute a theory of freedom that was contrary to the Christian understanding of liberty. While this encyclical was not written expressly about Americanism, the political theory of freedom criticized in Libertas was minted in the U.S.
The second, Testem Benevolentiae (1899), was written directly to Cardinal James Gibbons, then Archbishop of Baltimore, addressing a controversy that bloomed in France but that had been planted in the U.S.
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