(American) Catholic Reading Culture

Nineteenth-century Catholic reading culture was distinctly different from that of American Protestants, but it was in no way unified, universal, or unchanging. Moreover, the Vatican's evolving views on reading must be understood first as a response to the so-called Roman Question, which asked whether the pope's temporal powers could and should persist in an age of political liberalism. Gregory XVI's 1844 encyclical Inter Praecipuas and his successor Pius IX's Qui Pluribus (1846) framed lay reading as both a cause and symptom of Enlightenment-based critiques of authority and tradition. Yet, in Nostis et Nobiscum, published in 1849, when he was in exile in Naples with his own temporal authority in question, Pius IX explicitly argued that the printing press could be put to good use by the Church; having been encouraged by the success of Catholic political organization through print in Ireland and Belgium, he even urged priests to write tracts “to build up the faith.”Footnote ³

This apparent openness was short lived, and Pius IX's 1864 encyclical Quanta Cura, and the accompanying “Syllabus of Errors,” condemned Bible societies alongside nationalism, liberalism, and the idea that the Church should adapt itself to modernity.Footnote ⁴ American Protestants saw the Syllabus as clear evidence of the antimodern and antidemocratic tendencies of the Church and, although some American Catholics supported it wholeheartedly, others, like Archbishop Martin Spalding of Baltimore, defended it by arguing that its true target was European radicalism, not “moderate” American liberalism. Spalding's attempt to carve out an American exception was part of an ongoing transatlantic conversation about Catholicism's compatibility with American freedoms, a conversation reflected in Hecker and Brownson's debate over American Catholic reading.Footnote ⁵

At the time of these papal interventions, American Catholics already viewed reading through multiple, competing lenses, and both Catholic clergy and laity had been engaged in American print culture for decades as consumers and producers. Catholic newspapers and magazines connected American Catholics with the concerns of both their American and global Catholic communities.Footnote ⁶ Charleston Bishop John England established U.S. Catholic Miscellany, the first Catholic newspaper in the United States, in 1822.Footnote ⁷ Other prominent national periodicals that followed, like James McMaster's New-York Freeman's Journal and, after 1844, Brownson's Quarterly Review, were most often edited and published by laymen, but as the century wore on, Catholic newspapers increasingly became diocesan mouthpieces.Footnote ⁸ Moreover, the United States had long had Catholic trade publishers, and by 1850 there were at least sixty Catholic publishers in the United States, publishing secular and religious material alike. James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald, a secular penny paper established in 1835, printed scandalous and violent news alongside the previous Sunday's sermons, earning Bennett the condemnation of his archbishop, John Hughes. Meanwhile, Brownson held forth on every topic imaginable in the pages of his Review.Footnote ⁹ American bishops had also called for tract publication and distribution through trade publishers as early as 1829, as did American Protestant leaders. A society operated briefly in Baltimore in the 1840s, but Catholic trade publishers, much like their Protestant counterparts, were hesitant to enter into what was generally a money-losing venture.Footnote ¹⁰

Furthermore, American Catholics also used print to insert themselves into broader national conversations about the relationship between faith, reading, and democracy. Pointing to Vatican censorship, and believing that Catholics were barred from reading the Bible, American Protestants had long argued that Catholics lacked the freedom of individual conscience necessary for true democratic engagement.Footnote ¹¹ From “scandalous” literature like the narratives of Rebecca Reed and Maria Monk, to the counter-Catholic aims outlined by some evangelical publishers, American Catholics knew that the Protestant-dominated press served as an agent of Protestant cultural dominance and virulent nativism, just as successive popes understood how Protestants used the press to criticize the Vatican's temporal and spiritual influence.Footnote ¹² American Catholics, lay and clergy, had already been using print to argue that their faith did not preclude them from reading or from democratic participation.Footnote ¹³ With his magazine and tract society, Hecker attempted to take that argument further—not only could Catholics be American, but American democracy would fulfill its highest purpose when it became fully Catholic.

Isaac Hecker and the Landscape of Print Evangelism

Isaac Hecker's own faith history is an important part of understanding not only his hope for a Catholic America, but why he believed reading would inevitably play such a vital role in converting the nation. Born in 1819 to German immigrants in New York City, he was the youngest child of a devout Methodist mother with a deep affinity for perfectionism, although neither he nor his siblings seem to have attended church or Sunday school with any regularity. Following their father's economic failure and disappearance from their life, Hecker's oldest brother, John, operated a successful bakery and flour mill, and their wealth supported their youngest brother's ventures throughout his life. Hecker left school at thirteen and took on a series of jobs, beginning as a messenger for a newspaper published by the Methodist Book Concern. Later in life, Hecker would draw directly on his experiences with evangelical publishing in articulating a vision for Catholic publishing in America.Footnote ¹⁴

In March 1841, Hecker met Orestes Brownson; an experience of religious transformation in 1842 prompted him to join Brownson at Brook Farm, an experimental Transcendentalist Unitarian commune in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, founded by George and Sophia Ripley. Both men read widely and deeply in a variety of religious traditions, and, although Hecker initially resolved to join the Episcopal Church, over the course of 1843, he and Brownson both moved toward Catholicism. Although Brownson remained a layman for the rest of his life, Hecker joined the Redemptorists, a missionary order of priests. Frustrated with what he saw as the European order's failure to understand the need of American Catholics—including the simple need for native-born, English-speaking priests—he established the Missionary Society of Saint Paul the Apostle, known as the Paulist Fathers, in 1857. The Paulists were evangelists, and Hecker soon looked to combine this missionary zeal with a faith in the power of individuals to read and be converted—a faith that he shared with evangelical Protestants throughout America.Footnote ¹⁵

Hecker also believed the existing literary choices for American Catholics were fragmented and insufficient, and did little to build up the Church in America. He aimed to create something new. Scholars of American print culture have posited a unified, even conservative, nineteenth-century American Catholic press, in contrast with the messy, conflict-ridden world of multidenominational evangelical publishing.Footnote ¹⁶ Yet, much like evangelical publishing, “the Catholic presses” encompassed varied ethnic, regional, political, and doctrinal perspectives and goals. Hecker, surveying this landscape, sought a holistic approach. Although he hoped his new publishing society would produce a variety of reading material—books and almanacs, tracts, a magazine, and even a children's newspaper—it would all be infused with the missionary zeal of the Paulist fathers to unite and strengthen the entire American Catholic community.

Hecker began with a magazine, the Catholic World, which commenced publication in April 1865 with a structure that consciously distinguished it from existing publications edited exclusively by laymen or members of the clergy. The Catholic World was an explicitly cooperative venture that united the laity and clergy but stood independent from diocesan influence. Drawing on his connections from Brook Farm and the New York publishing world, Hecker secured John R. G. Hassard, who had worked with George Ripley on the Tribune, as managing editor, and Lawrence Kehoe, a New York–based Catholic publisher, to manage financial and organizational issues.Footnote ¹⁷

Hecker also sought to distinguish his magazine from other Catholic periodicals in terms of its content. He believed Brownson's Review placed too great an emphasis on historical apologetics and found the political rhetoric of the Freeman's Journal distasteful. In contrast, the Catholic World billed itself as a “monthly eclectic magazine,” publishing fiction, nonfiction, and poetry on Catholicism, science, history, and the arts, all for a national Catholic audience.Footnote ¹⁸ Hecker also hoped it would foster intellectual community among American Catholics, and the creation of an American Catholic canon, demonstrating the freedom and ability of Catholics to participate in a culture of letters seen as central to American democracy.Footnote ¹⁹

Rapid nineteenth-century population growth and geographical expansion meant that most American Protestant denominations had looked to print to supplement settled and itinerant ministers, and, in addition to his more abstract goals, Hecker hoped that an expanded print culture could provide similar support for an overburdened American Catholic infrastructure.Footnote ²⁰ In the antebellum period, most rural American Catholics lived outside of established parishes, and many received the sacraments infrequently from itinerant priests who held masses in borrowed barns and parlors.Footnote ²¹ Urban spaces were not much better off; in 1865, the ratio of priests to parishioners in Manhattan was 1 to 4,861, even with the foundation of seminaries in Europe specifically designed to supply the United States with priests.Footnote ²² Moreover, although Hecker's Paulist Fathers were renowned for their preaching, the practical and financial demands of their fledgling order and its New York parish limited the reach of their evangelization.Footnote ²³

Hecker's problem resembled that faced by the evangelical Protestants he had known as a young man, and he looked to adapt their solution—cheap or free tracts distributed to a mass audience—to the situation of American Catholics.Footnote ²⁴ The Methodist Book Concern, his former employer, had a two-fold mission: shore up the faith of existing Methodists and evangelize the American community at large.Footnote ²⁵ Then, in January 1866, Hecker proposed a new Catholic tract society, the Catholic Publication Society (CPS); he quickly secured the financial and moral support of Archbishop Spalding. Looking to this and other Protestant societies as models, and adjusting their goals to fit the unique place of Catholics in America, Hecker offered a threefold mission for the CPS: to provide spiritual nourishment for existing Catholics, to effect the conversion of America, and to arm American Catholics with evidence to defend themselves against Protestant critics.Footnote ²⁶

Hecker explicitly imitated evangelical societies founded earlier in the century, particularly the American Tract Society (ATS), and tried to avoid the problems these societies had faced, as well as those faced by other Catholic presses. With offices at 126 Nassau Street, the CPS was indeed in a “favorable location” as asserted in promotional materials, right in the heart of the publishing district of New York City.Footnote ²⁷ By seeking individual donations from the clergy and the laity, rather than relying on diocesan support, Hecker hoped to maintain the society's independence, and his choice of location echoed that commitment. He also aimed to raise funds to purchase “the materials required for a complete publication house,” to quickly and cheaply produce tracts in imitation of evangelical publishers.Footnote ²⁸

Perhaps the most important connection between the CPS and earlier societies was in a similar animating spirit: an abiding faith in the possibility of humanity—American humanity, particularly—to create good in the world. In its founding documents, the ATS lauded the efforts of Protestants around the world, but emphasized America's unique possibilities:

Hecker similarly saw America as playing a vital role in bringing about the salvation of the world, although he believed it would be through Catholicism. He claimed that “the discoveries made in physical sciences, the inventions of mechanics, are the preparations made, under the direction of Divine Providence for the approaching triumph of Christianity—His Church,” all facilitated by steam power, telegraph wires, and American democracy.Footnote ³⁰

In this postwar moment, Hecker believed Catholicism would fulfill America's unique providential mission and fulfill its democratic promise.Footnote ³¹ The evangelical presses and tract societies that inspired him had been products of an early republican belief in the power of individual human effort to effect the regeneration of the world.Footnote ³² Hecker established the CPS in 1866 precisely because he believed the war had demonstrated the failure of American Protestantism to carry out that mission.Footnote ³³ Through the press, Hecker hoped to demonstrate not only that Catholics could hold and promulgate antebellum American values, but that those values themselves should not perish in the wake of the war.

Despite this optimism, Hecker's publishing ventures struggled, and though some of the difficulties arose out of the unique social location of Catholicism in America, many were shared by evangelical publishers as well. For instance, the CPS frequently appealed in print to the clergy and the laity for donations, or condemned their failure to give, but evangelical societies constantly faced the same struggles.Footnote ³⁴ The Catholic World had a growing subscription list but could not meet its expenses.Footnote ³⁵ An article in the April 1867 issue of the Catholic World trumpeted increased donations, lay involvement, and conversions resulting from CPS tracts, half a million of which had been distributed already, but operating costs quickly outstripped available funds. Catholic World circulation and tract distribution never came close to matching that of comparable secular and Protestant publications.Footnote ³⁶

As for distribution, the CPS tried to follow the ATS's original method, which depended on local lay auxiliaries to target and distribute tracts, to avoid burdening clergy and provide the faithful with “a means of doing good which is level to every capacity.”Footnote ³⁷ In both cases, these local auxiliaries failed to materialize or failed to distribute effectively because evangelical and Catholic reading societies alike had to compete with numerous other charitable outlets for money, time, and energy.Footnote ³⁸ Protestant societies had also tried to enlist ministers, but eventually turned to young divinity students.Footnote ³⁹ The CPS had no such army of young men, and instead hoped itinerant priests could add tract distribution to their regular duties.Footnote ⁴⁰ It struggled to get tracts into the hands of the most monetarily and spiritually “destitute” as a result of the precise issue Hecker hoped tracts would assuage.Footnote ⁴¹

While acknowledging these structural causes, historians have also suggested that the CPS's struggles were rooted in elements that differentiated American Catholics from the Protestant mainstream. David O'Brien points to the inward-focused decrees of the Second Plenary Council, which sought to solidify episcopal control and avoided “even the degree of clerical and lay participation required by ordinary canon law procedures.” He argued that, although American bishops were supportive of efforts to educate and build up existing Catholics, they eschewed conversion efforts using “any method other than the uncompromising assertion of Catholic truth.”Footnote ⁴² Conversion was only one of Hecker's goals in publishing, however, and many American bishops were both concerned with his other two goals and amenable to an expanded Catholic print culture.Footnote ⁴³ They explicitly expressed support for Catholic publishing at the Second Plenary Council at Baltimore in October 1866. Archbishop John Purcell of Cincinnati cautioned Catholics against “the reading of bad novels and books,” but in general, the bishops argued that it was a “duty” of Catholics to buy and read the material being produced for them.Footnote ⁴⁴

Given the struggles faced by the CPS, it seems American Catholics did not agree. In 1871, Archbishop Spalding, who supported the CPS, suggested that perhaps “our Catholics are not a reading people,” and many of his Protestant contemporaries clearly agreed.Footnote ⁴⁵ As a result, other scholars attribute the failure of Hecker's vision to Hecker himself, either as a result of his bourgeois sensibilities or his naiveté about American Catholic (read: working-class, Irish) culture.Footnote ⁴⁶ Although class differences surely mattered, bourgeois Protestant and Catholic missionaries alike struggled to get their target audience to read what they considered the right things. Regardless of their particulars, these explanations offered by contemporaries and historians share one assumption, even if it remains unspoken: The CPS failed because American Catholics were different from other Americans. But reading the debate between Hecker, Brownson, and their associates without beginning from that assumption reveals a much more complex interplay of national and transatlantic ideologies.

The Use of Reading

The postwar debate over Catholic reading in America took place in an ideological estuary, a moment when antebellum faith in the individual gave way to a view of society as naturally and properly stratified.Footnote ⁴⁷ In this moment of conservative backlash, John McGreevy argues, American Catholics faced two competing impulses for stability: the Church and the nation-state. The Catholic Church urged its members to place their trust and loyalty in a Rome that had spent recent decades fighting, literally and figuratively, against liberal, secular forces in Europe and for the spiritual and temporal powers of the pope. On the domestic front, Republicans urged loyalty to the imperial nation over all other things, and old critiques of the Catholic Church as a foreign agent were repurposed as a foil to American national sovereignty, rather than Protestant individual conscience.Footnote ⁴⁸

From their church and their country, American Catholics heard calls for renewed devotion to “traditional” social order, a devotion that manifested as resistance to racial, gender, and class mobility rooted in the rights and abilities of the individual. Labor unrest at home and abroad unsettled American elites, who promulgated a new, streamlined version of the republican tradition in which the radical potential of republican liberty and free labor were “whittled down” to equal access to the market and freedom of contract.Footnote ⁴⁹ Moreover, the increasing presence of women in formerly male-dominated fields caused a backlash against female employment and education.Footnote ⁵⁰ These competing yet complementary conservatisms provide context for the debate over Catholic reading that took place in the years following the Civil War.

In 1866, Hecker laid out his rationale for the CPS in an article in the Catholic World, and in a pamphlet, Circular to the Catholic Clergy and People of the United States, concerning the Catholic Publication Society. Two unattributed Catholic World articles further developed these ideas of reading: “Family, Parish and Sunday-School Libraries” (January 1868), the author of which is unknown, and “Catholic Literature and the Catholic Public” (December 1870) by John Hassard, the magazine's managing editor. In advancing the argument that reading was necessary and good for solidifying and growing the faith in America, Hecker and his supporters sounded much like the founders of Protestant societies fifty years earlier, extoling the possibilities of humankind, Catholicism, and postwar America. Despite that optimism, each piece also grappled with whether reading was even acceptable and safe for American Catholics, often using language found in earlier evangelical arguments for reading. Rather than simply arguing that American Catholics could read like American Protestants, however, supporters of the CPS's goals argued that prewar American faith in the individual could be reconciled with postwar anxieties over social disorder.

First, Hecker and his supporters argued that reading was necessary and imperative for American Catholics. Like earlier evangelical societies, they constantly beat a drum against so-called bad books, something echoed a few months later in Purcell's speech in Baltimore. Protestant publishers argued that these bad books, mainly popular fiction, “enfeeble[d] the intellect” and caused “insanity” by emphasizing emotional responses over reason.Footnote ⁵¹ CPS supporters used similar language, calling the press “a huge monster, sending forth from its giant jaws poison, that circulates in the blood of society.”Footnote ⁵² Catholic fears of “bad books” were intimately connected to and shaped by the Catholic minority experience in America. They argued that there was no such thing as secular American fiction, as Protestant cultural dominance meant that even secular reading material misrepresented Catholicism and was imbued with Protestant values. Anti-Catholic sensational literature sold widely, and scholars have convincingly argued that anti-Catholic themes pervaded fiction and nonfiction writing in nineteenth-century America. Writers and everyday Protestants used American Catholicism, or “Romanism,” as Jenny Franchot has called it, to examine and reinscribe the boundaries of white, Protestant, Anglo-American culture.Footnote ⁵³

In response to this culture, supporters argued, the Catholic World and the tracts distributed by the CPS would offer both “intellectual food” and “spiritual food” to counteract the literary poison that flooded the market and tempted Catholic souls.Footnote ⁵⁴ For Catholics, that poison included not only popular fiction but also “[r]eligious tracts from Protestant societies … flying over the country like leaves before the autumn wind.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Hecker was not exaggerating the aims of Protestant reading societies, whose tracts were indeed in plentiful supply and explicitly aimed at Catholics.Footnote ⁵⁶ These tempting Protestant tracts and novels were only effective, he claimed, because immigrant Catholics were often ignorant of certain aspects of their faith, seemingly reinforcing the main American Protestant critique of Catholicism: that its members did not truly understand their faith because “to embrace Catholic doctrine [was] to surrender at discretion all the powers of the mind, and even the evidence of the senses.” Tracts could arm Catholics with the knowledge they needed to respond to Protestant critics, among whom Hecker claimed “true knowledge of the Catholic faith [was] exceedingly rare.” These Protestants “must be undeceived before they can be expected to make any progress in the impartial investigation of [Catholicism],” and educating all Catholics in their faith through tracts was a necessary part of that process.Footnote ⁵⁷

But why could these Catholics not learn about their faith from priests? Carefully avoiding any suggestion that reading could take the place of the sacraments, supporters focused instead on the issue of instruction, arguing that tracts would provide relief to overburdened priests.

To anyone who suggested that Catholics were not interested in instruction, Hecker argued that “the people are eager for it.”Footnote ⁵⁸ To reassure priests who were afraid they might lose relevance and influence to newspapers and tracts, he argued that Catholic reading material would not replace religious instruction, but would simply provide “a rich spiritual treat” for those who had access to the sacraments, and sustaining food to those “destitute” populations that Protestant tract societies also hoped to reach.Footnote ⁵⁹

But was reading acceptable and safe for American Catholics? Echoing their Protestant predecessors, CPS supporters emphasized the separation of printing technology from the products of that technology. Hassard argued that “the press is not only one of the most formidable weapons used against us, but it is also one of the most valuable of the weapons with which we ourselves ought to fight.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Like the ATS, the CPS hoped to harness the technological progress of the nation in service of the Church.Footnote ⁶¹ “Bad books” were a product of the press, but not the only possible product, and it was not sinful for Catholics to write or read as long as the product was Catholic.Footnote ⁶²

In addition to the issues of bad books and ignorant readers, Hecker and his supporters had to confront one other significant issue: the idea that Catholic faith did not support—or even allow—individual, private reading, an argument constantly leveled by Protestant critics in America, and one that seemed to be supported by much of what had come out of Rome in previous decades. Hecker repeatedly emphasized that prominent American bishops like Spalding had given the CPS approbation and financial support. These bishops had not only supported the creation of a tract society but had also written to combat Protestant beliefs that Catholics were not allowed to read the Bible or even read at all.Footnote ⁶³

Pointing to the American Catholic experience could, however, suggest national church differences, a controversial issue within the Church.Footnote ⁶⁴ Hecker and his supporters, therefore, needed to argue that reading was a truly catholic Catholic activity. To that end, they claimed that the CPS's activities were fully sanctioned by the Pope, who, they said, had “given his blessing and encouragement to every reasonable enterprise for putting the types to the service of religion.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Moreover, they argued, the Church had always recognized the power of the press, which was separable from the issue of reading itself. Whereas the ATS explicitly rejected the supposed Reformation-era “Romanist” view of publishing—“we must put down printing or printing will put us down”—supporters of the Catholic press reframed that view to argue that the Church was the first institution to recognize the possibility of the press “as a rapid means of spreading truth and the morality of the Gospel among mankind.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The Circular went so far as to claim “no one can doubt that, if the press had existed in the days of the Apostles, they would zealously have used its power in spreading the truths of the Gospel.”Footnote ⁶⁷

This framing attempted to work around the recent pronouncements in the Syllabus, condemning reading in its role as an adaptation to modernity, by claiming that the Church's admiration for the press's power was not modern, but ancient. By doing so, and by drawing on the idea of the press as a neutral technology, they separated it from other dangerous elements of “modernity” that needed to be rejected by Catholics. Mass literacy and reading were characteristics of a modern age because of advancements in technology, but that sort of modernity need not be feared or resisted. No one would go into battle in the nineteenth century using ancient weapons, and it would be similarly “unreasonable to cling solely to those weapons of spiritual combat which were good enough a century ago, but which to-day are blunt or rusty.” Instead, Catholics must embrace the press “to meet the exigencies of modern circumstances.”Footnote ⁶⁸ After all, the Apostles themselves might have used the press, had it been invented. Science, commerce, and even American secular public education had produced a mass of potential Catholic readers to whom reading was considered a necessity of life, and Catholic publishers should meet that need.

Just as Hecker and his Protestant predecessors separated the technology from the product, they also separated the inability to read complex material from an individual group's inherent worth; a state of ignorance was the result of being “imperfectly educated,” not inherently uneducable. Hecker's faith in reading reflected not only a longer American history of evangelization through reading, but also the more recent broadening of the idea of an informed, literate citizenry into one that encompassed literacy and education for nonvoters. Not all nineteenth-century literacy and education campaigns were well received, as evidenced by antebellum resistance to black education in northern states, but even slave owners had petitioned for exceptions to, and even violated, slave literacy bans in order to give Christian instruction.Footnote ⁶⁹ Hecker and his supporters’ arguments in favor of Catholic reading drew on these antebellum views, figuring American Catholics as American, American reading practices as Catholic, and reading as the way to build a better society out of the wreckage of the war.

This complex series of arguments suggests how many audiences—lay, clerical, and non-Catholic—needed to be persuaded that reading was modern yet completely in line with Catholic tradition. But it also reflected Hecker's own view of theology and history, which shaped his willingness to work with the “exigencies of the time.” In his attempt to reconcile Catholicism and romanticism, Hecker argued that each age had its own characteristics, and that the Holy Spirit worked through individuals, specific nations and races, and the Church itself to bring each age “to fulfillment.” He saw experiments like Brook Farm and new philosophies like Transcendentalism as indications of that yearning and believed that in bringing together the “characteristic gifts” of all the races in a democratic framework, the Holy Spirit in America would be allowed “to build up the Body of Christ and to direct history toward the realization of the providential plan.” As such, the trappings of modernity in America were not to be feared, but understood, whether they were technologies or liberties.Footnote ⁷⁰

This language mirrors that used by the founders of the ATS, but the CPS's insistence on tailoring reading material to particular classes seems to suggest a significant departure from the spirit of perfection that drove Hecker's early republican models. The ATS's founders held to an older theory of reading in which meaning was conveyed directly from text to reader. Given their belief that a “well-prepared heart” would inevitably receive the “true” meaning of a text, like hot wax under a seal, they urged individuals to progress from tracts to books, to better enable the operation of the Holy Spirit “by the labor of the human intellect.” They were more concerned with cursory reading of religious texts, which they believed allowed the implantation of bad ideas, and with creative reading of popular literature.Footnote ⁷¹

American Catholic leaders who encouraged reading saw no divide, believing that all people read all material creatively. As a result, they admitted, there was danger in providing reading material, even religious material, to the “great mass of unstable minds.”

This appears, on its face, a significant divergence from early republican optimism, and as much as it might seem to reflect the concerns of the Syllabus, it also mirrors contemporary American concerns over the education of women and freed people in the postwar years. Yet in drawing a distinction between the person and their “imperfect” education, in framing the problem as one of nurture rather than nature, CPS leaders sought to bridge the optimism of the ATS's foundational moment and the pessimism and fear of the postwar moment. Hecker argued that the dangers of creative reading could be managed, and must be, for “[in] hunger, people eat what they have, not what they would like to have.”Footnote ⁷³

Americans craved reading material, so it was up to the CPS, with the support of the clergy and the laity, to provide Americans with simplified, condensed, effective, and appropriate reading materials. To that end, the CPS would produce material “to engage the attention, affect the hearts, and suit the wants of all classes,” just like Protestant societies, both because that material could be effective, and because Catholics of all classes were being “called upon to render an account of the faith.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Tracts were not only good, they were necessary to relieve those who were “overtasked in ministering” in parishes, hospitals, and prisons. In fulfilling this necessary mission, Hecker and the Paulists believed they could also take advantage of the “general disposition” of all Americans at the moment “to examine and inquire into the doctrines and practices of the Catholic Church,” gaining converts, reducing prejudice against existing Catholics, and building a better society in the aftermath of civil war.Footnote ⁷⁵

The Abuse of Reading

Where Hecker saw a chance for the power of the press to effect social and spiritual change in the years after the war, his friend and fellow writer Orestes Brownson was far more skeptical about the possibilities of reading, and far less circumspect about addressing the dangers he saw in this postbellum world. His July, 1866, piece in the Catholic World, “The Use and Abuse of Reading,” used an essay by P. Toulemont in the Jesuit magazine Études as a springboard for discussing not only the dangers of Catholic reading, but the dangers facing American society at large. He was skeptical of the possibilities of Catholic reading, arguing that it would only hasten the disordering and downfall of Western society that Protestantism had enabled. Brownson's fear of reading gave full expression to the anxieties of the mid-1860s, when discussions about science and evolution, labor activism, and suffrage for women and black Americans threatened to unsettle longstanding American social order.Footnote ⁷⁶

Brownson began by lauding the American free press, arguing that it was “needed to defend the right, to advance the true, to maintain order, morality, intelligence, civilization, and cannot be given up for the sake of escaping the evils which flow from its abuse.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Like Hecker, he viewed the press as a neutral technology, easily used by humans for good and evil purposes, and argued against “bad books.” Yet, whereas Hecker and others argued that flooding the country with “good books” could make a difference, Brownson offered a view of reading that echoed the encyclicals of Gregory XVI and the Syllabus of Errors. Although he supported American press freedoms because he believed they protected minorities like American Catholics, he also supported ecclesiastical censorship. To encourage American Catholics to read in the absence of a strong hierarchy that could effectively facilitate that censorship was a recipe for spiritual and social disaster.Footnote ⁷⁸

The root causes of Brownson's fear of widespread and unrestricted reading were not uniquely Catholic, however, and in fact placed him well within the mainstream of American thought at the time. He opposed Hecker's plan, which had only been unveiled a few months before “The Use and Abuse of Reading” appeared, because he believed most members of society, Catholic or not, lacked the ability to read safely. If one looked at the “lower social stratum[,] … the middle classes who embody the great majority of Christian readers,” one found a “mental culture” that was “very defective.” American Catholics of this class, he believed, were ignorant of even the most basic doctrines of their faith.Footnote ⁷⁹

Hecker agreed that many Catholics lacked a full understanding of their faith but argued this was primarily the result of circumstance. Brownson, echoing American scientists, educators, and politicians, posited an immutable hierarchy of mental ability. There were but two unchangeable classes of people: those with high intellectual acuity, an elite group of which Brownson and Hecker were members, and the vast middle and lower classes, the members of which could barely be trusted to hold a book the right way. Brownson used the language of gender to differentiate these classes, contrasting vigorous, masculine, intellectual ability with enfeebled, feminine, mental weakness.Footnote ⁸⁰ For him, only the highest classes of men had the “masculine intellectual discipline” that enabled careful and close reading; to give members of the lower classes access to material they lacked the capacity to master was simply reckless.Footnote ⁸¹ Here, Brownson's thoughts echoed those of American Protestants who expressed concern that “the effects of books … were not uniform across class, racial, and ethnic lines,” leading some to suggest that in the case of certain groups, like enslaved African Americans, it might be safer if they read nothing at all.Footnote ⁸²

Supporters of Catholic reading argued that “[s]mall works of fiction and anecdote … could be used to ‘sugar-coat the pill so as to make its bitterness less sensible’ for these less-educated readers.”Footnote ⁸³ Brownson said that approach was not only unhelpful, it was dangerous.

Lest people respond with Hecker's idea that repeated impressments of good literature upon the mind could prevent temptation, Brownson explicitly stated that “chastity of thought, innocence of heart, purity of imagination, cannot be preserved by a diligent reader even of the better class of the light literature of the day.” Moreover, American Catholics were unable and unwilling to read anything better: “Folios and octavos frighten them, and they can hardly abide a duodecimo.” In sum, the prospects for American Catholic reading were limited, and should be limited, as so much damage had already been done to the minds it might reach.Footnote ⁸⁴

Despite arguing that many classes of literature were unacceptable or unreadable, Brownson still maintained that reading material must be produced for the Catholic public. Reviews and journals, like the ones he edited and contributed to, were “the best compromise,” but Brownson acknowledged they did not meet the general public's taste. That the general public was disinclined to choose the religious reading that was best for them presented no significant barrier, in Brownson's estimation; he believed Catholics should buy religious reading materials out of obligation.

Rather than recognize any innate yearning for God—long a point of contention between himself and Hecker—or any capacity for self-growth, Brownson argued that Catholics could and would buy and read Catholic materials because they were a uniquely and admirably duty-bound group.Footnote ⁸⁶

Earlier in his career, he had agreed with Hecker that American Catholics held unique potential because of the American willingness to obey true authority. At this point, his outlook on the possibilities of American acceptance of Catholicism was grim, and paralleled his views on the rights of African Americans and women; many individuals simply could not, and should not, be trusted to make correct decisions or even to recognize true authority on their own.Footnote ⁸⁷ Playing to the tastes of such people had produced “the sensation novels, the humanitarian, rationalistic, and immoral books, magazines, and journals, which, as thick as the frogs of Egypt, now infest the country.”Footnote ⁸⁸ If reading materials could be strictly controlled by Church censorship, however, creative reading could be avoided among American Catholics. Reading could have some “use” to the Church, but only if it was protected from “abuse” by those without the intellectual capacity to read complex material and avoid the temptation of low material.

Brownson's views on reading reflected his agreement with portions of the Syllabus, and presaged his fuller rejection of the dream of a Catholic America in the wake of the First Vatican Council.Footnote ⁸⁹ However, they also reflected his commitment to American republican forms that he believed could only be sustained as long as particular social hierarchies remained intact.Footnote ⁹⁰ Although Brownson quoted at length from Toulemont's thoughts on the erosion of church and state authority, nowhere did his essay argue against American notions of the free press or male suffrage. His anxieties about reading's “enfeebling” effects and the “humanitarian sentimentality which marks the age and the country” were not mere metaphors, but rather a call to arms for the men of America. In fact, he charged his audience, “as men, as citizens, as Christians, and as Catholics,” to address the flood of bad literature that threatened both “religion and civilization.”Footnote ⁹¹ Rather than directly channeling European concerns over waning Catholic political and social influence, Brownson's anxieties over reading reflected broader concerns over the role and power of white men in American society.Footnote ⁹²

As a result, Brownson also leveled sharp criticism at women themselves, who, he had elsewhere stated, endangered society with their public writing and speaking.Footnote ⁹³ He explicitly stated that women's interference in the public sphere and the Church itself was a primary cause of contemporary social problems.Footnote ⁹⁴ Claiming “old-world notions,” Brownson reverenced “the true woman, moving in and contented with her appropriate sphere and cheerfully performing the important and noble duties that Providence has attached to it,” and recoiled in horror from the woman who, “forgetting her sex, and throwing aside the veil of modesty, ascends with brazen face the platform, and spouts at political meetings, at reform clubs, or in lecture rooms.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Brownson's problem was not with women, per se, or even women writers; his daughter, Sarah, was a published writer, including in the Catholic World.Footnote ⁹⁶ Instead, he feared women who he believed embodied corrupted, lower-class ideas of womanhood.Footnote ⁹⁷ In an 1873 issue of his own Review, Brownson lamented the state of “Religious Novels, and Woman Versus Man,” praising the only acceptable female novelist he knew, Lady Georgiana Fullerton, who succeeded as a writer, in Brownson's estimation, because “she rarely requires her readers to associate with vicious, vulgar, or disagreeable people.” Whereas Fullerton had “superior religious and intellectual culture and refinement,” other novelists, like the American convert Mary Agnes Tincker, who goes unnamed in the review, seem to have lacked the status to compensate for the failure of being female, and so their presence in the world of print was dangerous.Footnote ⁹⁸

The women whose writing he criticized may never have spoken at political meetings, but their participation in the public sphere through the power of the press was just as dangerous. This feminized literature produced an “aversion to all manly effort or individual exertion without which robust and masculine virtue is impossible.” Brownson argued that American literature was “both corrupt and corrupting”—corrupt because it was feminine, corrupting because it feminized—and male reason and agency were not strong enough to resist its vitiating effects on its readers: “Can a man touch pitch and not be defiled?” Nor was it enough for American Catholics to avoid this feminine, feminizing material, because American Protestants who encountered it “drag us … after them.” All of civilization depended on the development of “a robust and manly literature” that would also prevent lower social orders from engaging in thinking beyond their capacity.Footnote ⁹⁹

In expressing concern over the feminization of American society, Brownson joined a chorus of contemporary American commentators; his Catholicism simply provided him additional frameworks for understanding the problem and additional solutions to it. Postbellum America saw a swift backlash against the successes of individual women and women's activism, especially the suffrage movement.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ When women grew to dominate elementary education by the end of the nineteenth century, male teachers began to argue that they were weak role models and would feminize society. The increasing availability of higher education for women in the last quarter of the century led to arguments about how women's reproductive systems would be damaged by mental exertion; because they and their wombs were responsible for continuing society, they couldn't be allowed to endanger it, especially with race suicide looming.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Brownson, however, believed that the American secular–Protestant state had already acceded to the demands of these dangerous women. Where Protestant and secular critics used public and private institutions to push back against this feminization, Brownson sought refuge in the Catholic Church, which he saw as the only bulwark against decline. If the state would not take steps to stem women's influence, the Church would.

American Catholic Culture Is American Culture

Brownson's concerns not only put him in good company with his American contemporaries, but also demonstrated the distance between his and Hecker's worldviews in the wake of the Civil War. In their letters, Hecker agreed with Brownson's outrage over women's suffrage proposals, if not quite as vehemently. In the administration of his publishing ventures, however, Hecker actively encouraged and depended on the intellectual labor of women, including Mary Agnes Tincker, who wrote and translated for the Catholic World at Hecker's encouragement.Footnote ¹⁰² Unlike Brownson, who saw women's increased participation in the Church as dangerous, Hecker argued privately in 1868 that American Catholics needed “a body of women who will in their way aim at doing what the Paulists are striving to do,” and he sought a female lay leader, “prepared by the Holy Ghost for this work,” to manage the operation.Footnote ¹⁰³ On an individual basis, he discussed his plans with women friends, and offered reading recommendations for potential converts they identified.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In encouraging women's lay leadership, as well as encouraging women to read their path to conversion and write following their conversion, Hecker expressed his continued faith in the yearning of each individual soul for God and the ability of reading to play a crucial role in the growth of Catholicism in America.

In his postbellum push for American Catholic reading, Isaac Hecker—the champion of American and Catholic compatibility—was momentarily out of step with changing American values. His ultramontane counterpart, Brownson, looking to protect and elevate white masculinity and resist the empowerment of “lesser” people, spoke American concerns in a Catholic accent. In the decades between the Civil War and Hecker's death in 1888, the Catholic World shored up its argument that Catholics could be Americans by moving away from Hecker's antebellum faith in the individual toward the Gilded Age values Brownson deployed in defense of the Church, becoming more American by becoming more conservative.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

To frame this debate over reading solely as part of an American Catholic effort to reconcile two competing cultures is to ignore the significant ideological resonance between these overlapping cultures, the divisions within each culture, and the way both cultures changed over the course of the nineteenth century. Instead, the disagreement over reading serves as a reminder that American Catholics were consumers and producers of American culture, even when they deployed that culture to argue for the separation of Catholics from American culture. Scholars would do well to include American Catholics more fully in their assessments of American culture, without the tacit assumption of disqualifying “difference.” Doing so will not only lead to a more complete understanding of American Catholicism, but also to a richer understanding of the American past more broadly.