AMERICAN CATHOLIC SUPPORT FOR THE WAR

Many Catholics supported the war for religious reasons. Just as it did to many Protestants, the struggle also appeared providential to some prominent Catholic voices. Confident that they could see the hand of God in current events, these interpreters consistently saw the Almighty intervening on behalf of the United States. The St. Paul, Minnesota, Northwestern Chronicle, which was owned by Archbishop John Ireland, exemplified this view. The Chronicle was an early advocate of war, frequently criticizing President William McKinley's attempts at diplomacy. The Chronicle connected its support for war to its view that God had appointed the United States to avenge the Maine, the destruction of which it ascribed to Spanish treachery. Using apocalyptic rhetoric, the Chronicle editorialized that in response to the Maine, “God's hand will be heavy upon that sinful nation which has become an abomination of desolation, and the instrument for divine vengeance has been chosen.” Unlike most Catholic publications, the newspaper's enthusiasm for American war making extended to an endorsement of imperialism. Rejecting the founding fathers' isolationist advice as outdated, the Chronicle maintained that U.S. rule would bring “liberty, peace and prosperity” to “benighted nations.” This argument also took on a providentialist cast when the Chronicle asserted in May that “destiny” required the United States to take its rightful place among the world powers. The Paulist Catholic World (NY) also attributed American military success to divine favor in August, crediting “the hand of some superhuman power” for a particularly dramatic naval victory.Footnote ²³

Of course, Catholics also had a more self-interested reason to promote the war. As Gary Gerstle has argued, American wars have often provided opportunities for marginalized groups to become part of the mainstream national culture.Footnote ²⁴ In their case, Catholic periodicals backed the conflict in order to rebut nativists' charges that Catholics were untrustworthy Americans. “The names of Catholic American citizens are plenty on the rolls of volunteers,” the Northwestern Chronicle boasted, “Where now is the patriot of the A.P.A. [American Protective Association] stamp?” Farther east, the Boston Pilot announced in a headline that Catholics were “Volunteering in Large Numbers” and “Proving Their Patriotism.” Likewise, in Philadelphia, Archbishop Patrick John Ryan assured the local press that “The Catholic Church in America is patriotic” and that the Pope was not secretly pro-Spanish.Footnote ²⁵ In the same vein, the Catholic World eulogized a Catholic captain who had died at Santiago, declaring him to be “a true American, a true Catholic, a true man.” Even the antiwar Ave Maria, operated by Holy Cross priests in Notre Dame, Indiana, reported that “Catholics have not been lacking in patriotism” and drew attention to a Toledo, Ohio, newspaper's comment that a Catholic private was “only one of many who are showing some people how to be real Americans.” “Remembering that Toledo used to be a hotbed of A.P.A.-ism,” the Ave Maria observed, “there is much significance in these words.”Footnote ²⁶ Under assault from a Protestant nation still distrustful of “Romanism,” Catholics supported the war in part to prove their loyalty.

Yet the widespread adoption of American providentialism suggests that religion provided an even stronger basis for pro-war sentiment. In San Francisco, Father William D. McKinnon, who would serve as a chaplain in the war, told a group of young men in April that “Patriotism and religion are one and inseparable. It is impossible for one to exist without the other.” On the other side of the country, Bostonians listened to Father Denis O'Callahan celebrate the providential history of the United States in a Fourth of July oration. The events of the past year, O'Callahan maintained, tell “us again how the providential hand of God led our fathers from the land of bondage, from the narrowness and contentions, the prohibitions, civil and ecclesiastical, of the old world.” Surely with Spain and Cuba in mind, O'Callahan reiterated that the Declaration of Independence was “the handwriting on the wall to tyranny everywhere: because it was and is the Magna Charta, not of one nation, but of humanity, and of universal and triumphant democracy.” Keeping perfect time with the providentialist chorus, O'Callahan exclaimed, “Surely there is a providence which shapes man's ends.” In the South, Bishop Anthony Durier of Natchitoches, Louisiana, echoed this notion in a pastoral letter: “By his Monroe Doctrine and his army of free men, Uncle Sam rules from ocean to ocean, from pole to pole, and shapes the destinies of the New World under Divine Providence.”Footnote ²⁷ Where some Catholics such as Baltimore's Archbishop James Gibbons supported the war only reluctantly, others such as O'Callahan and Durier embraced the spiritual significance of American military victories.Footnote ²⁸

The most well-known Catholic proponent of a providentialist reading of the war proved to be the Minneapolis-St. Paul Archbishop John Ireland (1838–1918). Surprisingly, although he was a prominent leader in the Americanist wing of the Catholic Church, Ireland did not immediately advocate a violent response to the destruction of the Maine.Footnote ²⁹ Instead, in the spring of 1898, he traveled to Washington at the request of Pope Leo XIII to attempt to broker a peace settlement between the United States and Spain.Footnote ³⁰ When his negotiation attempts failed, however, Ireland became the most prominent public Catholic champion of the war.Footnote ³¹ In July, for example, Ireland argued that “The ideals of America are in God's designs” and that wars were “one of those mysterious agencies through which Providence works in shaping the destinies of nations.” Immediately after military action began, the archbishop asserted that the war had “a providential purpose” and went so far as to compare the conflict to the medieval Crusades.Footnote ³²

Ireland's providentialism was most clearly on display in an October 1898 address in Chicago. As one of the keynote speakers for the city's “Peace Jubilee,” Ireland found himself addressing over 4,000 guests including President McKinley, cabinet members, and military officials. He began by connecting the “jubilee of peace” with the “jubilee of victory,” and instructed Americans to “be glad and rejoice; for the Lord hath done great things.”Footnote ³³ Although warfare was not to be commended for its own sake, Ireland maintained, “[a] just and necessary war is holy.” Indeed, soldiers who died in such conflicts heroically laid down their lives on the altar of their nation: “The sword in their hands is the emblem of self-sacrifice and of valor: the flag which leads them betokens their country, and bids them pour out in oblation to purest patriotism the life-blood of their hearts.”Footnote ³⁴ Warming to his theme, Ireland noted that the United States was taking its “proper place among the other nations of the earth” and gaining the respect of the rest of the world. “All this does not happen by chance or accident,” the archbishop reminded his audience. Instead, “[a]n all-ruling Providence directs the movements of humanity. What we witness is a momentous dispensation from the Master of men.” Echoing Virgil's tribute to the beginning of the Augustan age (as well as biblical imagery), Ireland announced that “to-day, we proclaim a new order of things.” In words (coincidentally) evocative of John Winthrop's famous sermon, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” Ireland began his peroration by noting that “America, the eyes of the world are upon thee.”Footnote ³⁵ In his public addresses, Ireland rushed to equate American victory with God's favor and providence. In Ireland's mind, nations were simply instruments in the hands of God, and the Almighty was using the war to raise America to its proper place in the world.

For some Catholic supporters of the war, providential interpretations of the conflict led naturally to demonization of the Spanish foe. This took two forms: denying that Spain was a legitimately Catholic country, and wishing for the empire's extermination. The Northwestern Chronicle, for example, argued that it was common knowledge that “the influences which surround and have surrounded and governed Spain are not Catholic, but Masonic.” In fact, Spain was “the most un-Catholic nation on God's earth.” In August, the Catholic World also picked up the charge of Masonry. Although in May the journal had expressed confidence that “Spain is a Catholic country,” by the war's end it had switched positions, denying that Spain was “the real Catholic country she is represented to be.” Instead, the journal asserted that the majority of Spain's “rapacious aristocracy” was composed of Masons whose selfishness had brought on the war. Continuing the condemnation of Spain, Archbishop William Gross of Oregon catalogued Spanish vices (bullfighting, Sabbath breaking, and insubordination to the Pope) before concluding that among the governments of Spain, Italy, and France, “there are no greater enemies of the Catholic church.” As if to prove his point, next to its account of Gross's speech, the Northwestern Chronicle ran a column that described Spain's rebuff of Leo XIII's peace overtures. And in New York, a week after Congress declared war, Father Sylvester Malone used his Sunday homily to denounce the Spanish government. Its policies and “tyrannical reign” were “in direct opposition to the teachings of the Catholic faith”; American Catholics would never show “any sympathy” for such a nation.Footnote ³⁶

Sometimes this condemnation of Spanish Catholicism went hand in hand with a desire for the elimination of the Spanish empire. On April 1, the Northwestern Chronicle editorialized that war “will come, and be short and decisive. The issue will see Spain's flag disappearing forever from the western continent.” A few weeks later the newspaper elaborated on this theme:

In the Chronicle's view, the empire's sins rendered it unfit to exist any longer.

Such providentialist rhetoric echoed to an unusual extent the sentiments of the nation's Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite. Two months after the war, Indiana's Republican Senator Albert J. Beveridge (1862–1927) referred to Americans as God's “chosen people” and celebrated the nation's “mission” to the world—a mission that the war with Spain had helped to inaugurate. Some of the country's most important Protestant publications also interpreted the war providentially. Lyman Abbott (1835–1922), successor to Henry Ward Beecher at Brooklyn's fashionable Plymouth Church and editor of the Outlook, thought he saw nothing less than God's hand in American victories: “The prophetic vision which saw God's guardianship in Gideon's warfare or in Israel's emancipation may well believe that Manila and Santiago have emphasized divine approval of America's mission by the preternatural victory of America's arms.” For Abbott, the Almighty guided the United States in a special way. Even President McKinley, himself a devout Methodist, gave the Lord the credit for military achievements, asking Americans to consider how God was “now leading our hosts upon the waters to unscathed triumph, now guiding them in a strange land through the dread shadows of death to success … now bearing them without accident or loss to far distant climes.”Footnote ³⁸ Despite substantial antagonism between Catholics and Protestants, the war provided an occasion for both groups to celebrate God's special guidance of the United States. When they reasoned providentially and spoke about the nature of the nation, enthusiastic Catholic supporters of the war differed hardly at all from their Protestant counterparts.

Thus, whether they realized it or not, Catholics who adopted the rhetoric of providentialism and Manifest Destiny had internalized and passed on some distinctly American assumptions. Although “Americanization” was a multifaceted process, one of its aspects involves what historian Philip Gleason calls “a basic intellectual reorientation.” According to Gleason, outsiders of any kind can become Americanized if they pledge allegiance to the “the abstract ideals of liberty, equality, and republicanism.”Footnote ³⁹ Although that might sound easy enough in theory, in order to do so in 1898, American Catholics needed to erase the stigma of anti-republicanism that had long marked the church. Indeed, recent developments such as the church's opposition to the 1848 European revolutions coupled with the conservative political views of Popes Pius IX and Leo XIII caused Americans to view Catholicism with suspicion.Footnote ⁴⁰ The war afforded Catholics an opportunity to showcase their patriotism to a skeptical nation, but it also revealed the extent to which they had absorbed American intellectual habits. Support for the war entailed more than a temporary embrace of nationalism; O'Callahan's paean to the spread of liberty around the world and Ireland's celebration of the hand of God in American military victories revealed new, American ways of thinking that some Catholics had adopted. American Catholics breathed in the American political and religious assumptions that were in the air, and those assumptions had consequences for the way they viewed the war with Spain.

Indeed, in their pro-war commentary, many Catholics went beyond the support offered by another stigmatized group, African Americans. The most thorough study of the black press's attitude toward the war concludes that “black patriotism during the Spanish-American War was restrained, critical, and often bitter.”Footnote ⁴¹ George Marks's compilation of editorials in African American newspapers during the war yields very few examples of rhetoric that shows the influence of American providentialism or Manifest Destiny, a fact easily explainable by the deplorable conditions that African Americans faced at the turn of the century.Footnote ⁴² Therefore, Catholics' support for the war distinguished them from other marginalized groups interested in showing loyalty; it provided an instance to display the extent to which mainstream American ideas and rhetoric had modified traditional Catholic reservations about the United States.

OPPONENTS OF THE WAR

Historians have long recognized that the Spanish-American War did not garner unanimous support. Even after the explosion of the U.S.S. Maine in February 1898, some Americans resisted the widespread call to arms. Editor E. L. Godkin (1831–1902) of The Nation, for instance, defended the character of the Spanish government and implied that Spain had just as much right to rule Cuba as the United States did Florida. Harvard University historian Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908) went even further. In a June 7 address to the Men's Club of the Prospect Street Congregational Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Norton excoriated the war as “unrighteous” and “the way of barbarism,” going so far as to advise his listeners not to enlist. From the world of humor, Finley Peter Dunne (1867–1936) also joined the antiwar protest. Although Dunne did not consistently oppose the conflict, he used the voice of the fictitious Irish barkeeper Mr. Dooley to satirize such otherwise untouchable war heroes as Admiral George Dewey and Lieutenant Richard Hobson. When Dooley's friend Mr. Hennessey expressed the opinion that “a man ought to stop fightin' whin th' war is ended,” Mr. Dooley replied that Dewey had “started without askin' our lave, an' I don't see what we've got to do with th' way he finishes.”Footnote ⁴³ Although the struggle with Spain proved to be one of the nation's most popular wars, dissenting voices could be heard as well.

These well-known anti-imperialists based their antagonism to the war on various factors. Norton feared that the United States had unjustly “hurried into war” against a nation that did not want it.Footnote ⁴⁴ Journalist Oswald Garrison Villard (1872–1949), a consistent pacifist, opposed all wars on principle.Footnote ⁴⁵ To these motivations for antiwar sentiment, Catholic opponents added another: skepticism about the inherent virtues of the American nation.Footnote ⁴⁶ Although the Catholic antiwar faction expressed multiple reasons for its opposition to the war, an unwillingness to view the United States as especially praiseworthy played a central role in its thinking.

To be sure, very few American Catholics actually declared for Spain or tried to subvert the war effort, and those who did were quickly punished. When a visiting priest from “the west” instructed a group of New York Catholics that, if war came, their duty would require them to enlist on the Spanish side, Archbishop Michael Corrigan promptly expelled him from the diocese. Indeed, such incidents rarely occurred in a church whose members were taught to obey the laws of their nation regardless of their personal political feelings. Despite their substantial distance from the American mainstream, even the German-language Katholische Rundschau (San Antonio, Texas), reminded its readers that “America is our fatherland, be it through birth or free choice,” and stated that all Catholics should obey the country's demands.Footnote ⁴⁷ Dissent was only permissible within certain bounds.

Nevertheless, despite their formal loyalty to the United States, some Catholics doubted the war's justice. Indeed, David Doyle has argued in a little-known study that the majority of American Catholics supported the war grudgingly, and only after it had been declared. Although some held out against the war throughout its duration, most fell in line with prevailing national sentiments after Congress declared war on April 27. In Doyle's view, John Ireland and other vocal proponents of the conflict succeeded in gaining headlines but did not represent national Catholic views. Likewise, Dorothy Dohen has emphasized the mixed opinions that even the war's strongest supporters held.Footnote ⁴⁸ While Doyle perhaps overestimates the strength of antiwar opinion, his study does provide a useful entryway to understanding the significant group of Catholics who steadfastly opposed the conflict.

What separated antiwar Catholics from their militant brethren? Catholics opposed the Spanish-American War because of their perception of the nature of the United States. (In some cases, distinctively Catholic convictions about the evils of American Protestantism underpinned their skepticism.) Specifically, antiwar Catholics doubted the unique righteousness of the United States, they did not equate the progress of the Kingdom of God with the good fortunes of the nation, and they refused to demonize Spain. In doing so, they consciously resisted the Americanization process clearly at work in the church.

First, some Catholics opposed the war on the grounds that the United States was not truly a righteous nation and therefore not to be trusted. This group included Arthur Preuss (1871–1934), the editor of the (Catholic) St. Louis Review and the son of Die Amerika editor Edward Preuss (1834–1904). As a serious Lutheran, the elder Preuss had earned doctorates in both philosophy and theology, tutored at the University of Berlin, and launched an attack on the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary in 1865. Three years later, conflicts with the theologically liberal elements in German Lutheranism impelled Preuss to resign his position and emigrate to the United States, where he accepted a position at St. Louis's Concordia Lutheran Seminary. Eventually Preuss came to believe that traditional Lutheran theology was little more than a half-way house between Roman Catholicism and theological modernism, and in 1871 he resigned from Concordia and entered the Catholic Church.Footnote ⁴⁹

Arthur Preuss was his father's son. Beginning in 1894, he used the Review as an organ to attack sectarian Protestantism and the liberal, Americanist developments within Catholicism. Unsurprisingly, he also questioned the righteousness of the United States. Shortly after the war began, he printed a letter to the Review that scoffed at the notion that the United States was the earth's most Christian nation. The letter began by acknowledging that “Even high dignitaries of the Church have ventured the assertion that ours is ‘the most Christian country’ in the world.” In the writer's opinion, however, this notion was ridiculous: although Americans discussed religion incessantly, this phenomenon could be attributed to the “multiplicity of sects with which we are cursed” rather than to genuine religious feeling. Moreover, the absence of prayer, and the “crimes that are daily committed” militated against the notion that the United States was especially righteous. “In the face of facts,” he concluded, “it is but a hollow phrase—with little substance to it—to say that this is the most Christian country.” The Review continued this attack on the uniquely Christian character of the United States in August. Quoting a writer in Scribner's who described the world of business as dishonest, unfair, and unprincipled, Preuss concluded sadly, “We are a nation of ‘business-men,’ and some of us claim, forsooth, that we are ‘a Christian nation.’”Footnote ⁵⁰

Another antiwar Catholic publication, The Globe, reiterated these sorts of sentiments. Published in New York by a Catholic convert, William Henry Thorne (1839–1907), the Globe provided consistent, colorful criticism of the United States. In December 1898, one of its writers, quoting Luke 18:11, mocked those who were concerned about cruelties in Cuba but neglected to lament the legacy of slavery and the mistreatment of Native Americans in the United States. Also challenging its readers to question the character of the nation was the Ave Maria, a newspaper edited by the Holy Cross priest Daniel E. Hudson (1849–1934). Raised in a cross-confessional family (his father was a Methodist and his mother a Catholic), Hudson became a zealous Catholic who had no time for Protestant notions of American exceptionalism. On June 25, a hostile “anonymous correspondent” attempted to bait the Ave Maria into condemning Spain by asking, “What do you think of Spanish ladies attending bull-fights? Does this indicate high civilization? Did you ever know Americans to be guilty of such atrocities as the Spaniards have committed in Cuba?” In response, the newspaper did not miss a beat: “Bull-fights are not to our liking,” it admitted, but neither were American “prize-fights nor football matches.” Spanish women, moreover, were wrong to attend the bullfights, but American women were wrong to “wear in their head-gear feathers and wings which they have often been informed are torn from living birds.” As for atrocities, Hudson poignantly pointed to the lack of racial justice in America:

Unlike nearly all of their contemporaries, The Ave Maria, Globe, and Review objected to characterizations of the United States as an especially Christian nation.

These antiwar publications did not compartmentalize their views concerning the sins of the nation, but applied them specifically to the war. In July, Review correspondent George T. Angell lamented the outrageous dishonesty of American newspapers. Predicting that the lies the newspapers had told about the Spanish-American War would eventually fill several volumes, Angell concluded sarcastically, “If our war (as has been represented) is a ‘holy war,’ it is a terrible pity that it has given rise to so much lying.” In other words, Angell could doubt the justice of the war because he distrusted the virtuousness of the American press. Additionally, the Ave Maria opposed the war in part because it did not believe the testimony of Redfield Proctor (1831–1908), the senator whose investigative mission in Cuba had been the source of Americans' knowledge of alleged Spanish atrocities there. The Ave Maria had “not the slightest” respect for Proctor's findings, it maintained, because the senator “went to Cuba in the yacht of a yellow journal. His hands were tied: he had to see what little he saw through the goggles of the proprietor. It was a decidedly undignified thing for a United States Senator to do.”Footnote ⁵² In questioning the righteousness of their own nation and its leaders, the writers of the Review and the Ave Maria resisted the popular tendency to view the United States as especially godly. These reflections, in turn, influenced their opposition to the war.

In addition to criticizing the righteousness of the United States, antiwar Catholics also opposed the conflict because they refused to see the church and the nation as interchangeable categories.Footnote ⁵³ This temptation was very great, especially when American military victories appeared providential, as they did to John Ireland and like-minded Catholics. But to the Ave Maria, American victories did not justify the war. When the New York Observer expressed pious outrage that the Spanish had attacked American soldiers on a Sunday morning and attributed the subsequent American victory to Spanish sacrilege, the Ave Maria commented that “this would make a lovely story for a certain sort of Sunday-school paper, if it were dressed up a little.” Making clear that he did not condone Sunday morning attacks either, editor Daniel Hudson nevertheless noted that “There is danger … that the little Ingersolls produced by such religion as the Observer professes will ask themselves why the crews of the American ships didn't keep on with their devotions instead of immediately pursuing the wicked Spaniards and breaking the Sabbath.” The Indiana Catholic Record (Indianapolis) also mocked the idea that military success signaled divine favor. If this was true, the Record argued, then “Bonaparte was very much approved, for no commander ever gained so many victories.”Footnote ⁵⁴ With their sardonic commentary, the Ave Maria and Indiana Catholic Record showed rare boldness among American religious periodicals in resisting a providential reading of American military victories.

The Ave Maria's opposition to providentialism also appeared in its response to a suggestion of the Presbyterian Board of Missions that God had allowed the war in order to Christianize the Philippines. “We cannot ignore the fact,” the Presbyterians had maintained, “that God has given into the hands of American Christians the Philippine Islands, opened a wide door to their populations, and has by the very guns of our battleships summoned us to go up and possess the land.” Hudson criticized this self-assured attitude by drawing attention to American Protestant failings in other lands: “When Hawaii was opened up to the Protestant missionaries, they also went up and possessed the land, thereby robbing a poor ‘widow woman’ of her ancestral lands and throne. Since that time any chance reference to ‘missionaries’ sons' provokes a sneer from the ungodly and calls a blush to the cheek of every decent Protestant.” Filipinos would remember the defeat of Manila as a “restful holiday,” he predicted, compared to the moral and doctrinal evils that Protestant missionaries would bring there.Footnote ⁵⁵ In this case, specifically Catholic convictions prompted the Ave Maria to resist the urge to identify secular military victories with the progress of the sacred Kingdom of God.

The St. Louis Review likewise took a stand against the war based in part on its skepticism that God uniquely guided and blessed America. A few weeks into the war, the Review's editors learned that St. Patrick's Cathedral had installed a gigantic American flag—“the largest in the city”—between the church's two spires as a demonstration of its patriotism. In a signed article, chief editor Arthur Preuss deplored this display as “ostentatious and bombastic.” Regular readers of the Review would not have been surprised. Four weeks before, Preuss had reprinted an editorial from the New York (Methodist) Christian Advocate disapproving of the placement of flags in church sanctuaries. The Advocate had written that “Nothing should be exhibited in a church except what relates directly to the worship of Almighty God as superior to every human institution, to the human race itself and to the universe.” Indicating its sympathy for this view, the Review noted that this position “might be profitably pondered” by Catholics eagerly aligning their patriotism and their faith. The Review argued that patriotism should “be restricted in its methods of expression” and criticized a telegram sent by a group of young women to President McKinley before the war, which simply stated, “To h—with diplomacy!”Footnote ⁵⁶ Antiwar Catholics' refusal to equate patriotism with Christianity and their reluctance to combine the sacred and secular demonstrated an unconventional theology that contributed in no small measure to their opposition to the Spanish-American War.

Third, some Catholics opposed the war because they refused to demonize the Spanish. In particular, the Ave Maria and the St. Louis Review both demonstrated sympathy for Spain and avoided lampooning the Spanish as diabolical and un-Catholic. On July 23, for example, the Ave Maria referred to the respect that Spain's Admiral Pascual Cervera had gained among Americans by observing that “The Spaniards … may well feel proud of representatives who could make such an impression on their foes as Admiral Cervera and his officers have made. Gentlemen know one another by instinct and brave men recognize their kind.” In fact, it continued, “the American people are just beginning to learn the true character of the enemy they are fighting,” adding ominously, “and that of the insurgents in Cuba whose cause they espoused.” In contrast to the Northwestern Chronicle's negative judgment, the Ave Maria saw the Spanish as a noble foe. Similarly, in the Review's opinion, the United States had no right to claim any sort of moral superiority over its European opponent. In response to criticism of Spanish Catholicism, the Review argued that “So long as ‘yellow journalism’ flourishes among us and the theatre is a hotbed of corruption in the city, town, and village, we have no reason to turn up our noses at the Dons.”Footnote ⁵⁷

In fact, the Review implied, the Spanish were more righteous than the Americans. In the closest the newspaper ever came to siding with the enemy, the May 12 edition reprinted excerpts from an editorial appearing in the Catholic Western Watchman (St. Louis), which portrayed the Spanish as innocent victims of American aggression:

The Globe's William Henry Thorne likewise left no doubts concerning where he thought the blame for the war lay. In one of his harshest critiques of the United States, Thorne declared: “I look upon this war as an impudent crime brought about by American greed and ignorance; and if John Ireland and [other supporters of the war] … would only study the American as he is in actual history … they might be better prelates and more sensible men.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Clearly, in this view, Spain had a better plea than the United States before the divine tribunal.

The Ave Maria and the Review also defended Spain by criticizing interpretations of the war that attributed Spain's decline to its Catholicism. Although the Review's immediate target was a German Protestant newspaper (the Evangelischer Kirklicher Anzeiger) that had made this charge, its analysis also served as a rebuttal to similar assertions from Americans. The Review depicted Spain's golden age as the Middle Ages, when “Spain was permeated most thoroughly by the spirit of the Catholic Church.” Military defeats and a rising “anti-Catholic spirit” had gradually opened the door for “Liberalism” and had sapped the nation's strength, but neither of these unfortunate events was the fault of the church. In narrating Spain's long religious decline, the Review portrayed the nation as a victim rather than as a villain. Moreover, the Review refused to find an easy connection between American Protestantism, providential blessing, and financial prosperity. Instead, it argued, “If the United States be more powerful than Spain, that is a matter which is explained, not by religious differences, but by the simple fact that they possess infinitely greater resources.”Footnote ⁵⁹

The Ave Maria also demonstrated this sort of unconventional thinking in its analysis of Spanish character and culture. When a writer in the Atlantic Monthly ascribed Spain's weakness to its “pride, conservatism, and clericalism,” the Ave Maria shot back that Spain had “exhausted herself by a century of ceaseless conquest in the New World” (actions that, in nineteenth-century fashion, the Ave Maria regarded as praiseworthy). To acknowledge this was simply “to give her justice.” Similarly, in response to Protestant criticisms that “Spain is degenerate because she is Catholic,” the Ave Maria reprinted an editorial from the Springfield Republican (Massachusetts) that acknowledged that Catholic Spain was struggling, but argued that Catholic Mexico was flourishing. Accordingly, the Ave Maria provocatively argued, “Material prosperity or adversity depends on other causes than religion, and in no case can it be interpreted as the visible sign of God's pleasure or displeasure.” Then, in a pointed biblical reference, the editors turned the tables on those who blamed Spain for its current impoverished condition: “The only promise of temporal prosperity recorded in the Bible was made, not by Christ, but by Satan on the pinnacle of the temple. Pointing to the kingdoms of the earth, he said: ‘All these I will give thee if, falling down, thou wilt adore me.’”Footnote ⁶⁰ Unlike the pro-war writers, Catholics who opposed the conflict routinely went out of their way to defend Spain, often at the expense of the United States. The attitudes of the Review and Ave Maria toward the American nation, in turn, motivated opposition to the war.

The antiwar writings of the Ave Maria and Review illuminate an alternative to the distinctly American rhetoric and assumptions of the pro-war Catholics. Unlike John Ireland, the Northwestern Chronicle, and other pro-war voices, antiwar Catholics resisted a providentialist reading of the war in which American victory and expansion were the natural results of divine favor. Although only some Catholics took this tack, their perspective illustrates that an alternative to thorough Americanization existed in the late nineteenth century. If they could not fully escape the influences and ideas of American culture, antiwar Catholics challenged accepted American patterns of thinking and clung to a greater sense of the transnational nature of the church.

Indeed, in their opposition to the war, the Review, Globe, and Ave Maria were more closely in tune with the views of Catholics in other countries than were the war's American supporters. Bertrand Wilberforce, a Dominican in Great Britain, who saw as early as April 29 that Spain was doomed to defeat, lamented the “diabolical explosives” endemic to modern warfare, and expressed most concern for the “so many going into eternity in the heat & rage of battle.” Another priest, stationed in New Zealand, sympathized with “Poor Spain” and wrote that “Every Catholic must grieve for her misfortunes.” The international Jesuit publication Civiltà Cattolica even noted that Brazilian Catholics thought that American aggression in Cuba was unjustified.Footnote ⁶¹ Examining the views of non-American Catholics strengthens the conclusion that much of the American Catholic support for war was connected to acceptance of distinctly American assumptions.

Ultimately, the debate in the American Catholic church was only partly about the war itself. Relatively few of the editorials on either side of the question gave sustained treatment to military ethics, just war theory, or the actual conditions in Cuba. Instead, American armed conflict provided the impetus for a larger discussion of the church's relationship to the American nation-state as a whole. To some extent the results were predictable. Noted theological “Americanists” such as John Ireland lined up on the pro-war side, while opponents of Americanism like Arthur Preuss protested the conflict. Yet some surprising alliances developed as well. Bernard McQuaid had once referred to the “impulsiveness and rashness of the Archbishop of St. Paul” and denigrated his policies as “extreme,” but McQuaid's conservative sentiments did not prevent him from aligning with Ireland in declaring the war a righteous one.Footnote ⁶² Likewise, even someone as progressive as Ireland harbored private doubts about the war's validity. The extent to which an actual state of war affected people's attitudes toward the United States must be better understood for a more complete grasp of the war of 1898.