Emergence of The American Catholic Church
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Roman Catholic Church experienced unique difficulties within America. “Unlike all Protestant churches in America, the Roman Catholic church depended for its identity upon keeping doctrinal and administrative unity with a European-based authority." The papacy was cautious of the freedom found in America as it showed similarities to the attitudes behind the French Revolution. The papacy wanted to preserve the hierarchy of the church in America. At this time, Catholics were chiefly located in Pennsylvania and Maryland and were greatly influenced by their Protestant neighbors. They, too, wanted a church that empowered the laity. In 1788 Charles Carroll was elected the first American Bishop. He struggled to balance the desires of the American trustees to adapt and empower the laity and hold church property with the requests of the bishops and hierarchy oversees to preserve the doctrine. This controversy ran from approximately 1780 to 1850. In the end, the power and authority were too differential and the bishops won. This marked the creation of the “American Catholic Church with the laity subordinate to priest and bishop.” This system remained until the mid-20th century.
Read more about this topic: Catholic Church And The Age Of Discovery
Famous quotes containing the words catholic church, emergence of, emergence, american, catholic and/or church:
“Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood.”
—Erica Jong (b. 1942)
“Much more frequent in Hollywood than the emergence of Cinderella is her sudden vanishing. At our party, even in those glowing days, the clock was always striking twelve for someone at the height of greatness; and there was never a prince to fetch her back to the happy scene.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
“The failures of the press have contributed immensely to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public discourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing. We now have a mainstream press whose news agenda is increasingly influenced by this netherworld.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“... his voice and hands,
Within whose warm spring rain of loving care
Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child,
What’s wrong, the deep American voice demands,
And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer
Directing God about this eye, that knee.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“I maintain that I have been a Negro three times—a Negro baby, a Negro girl and a Negro woman. Still, if you have received no clear cut impression of what the Negro in America is like, then you are in the same place with me. There is no The Negro here. Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that it will cover us all, except My people! My people!”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.”
—Pope John Paul II (b. 1920)