Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from an address by Richard Cowden-Guido on the occasion of being awarded the Catholic Journalist of the Year Award by the St. Gerard Guilds of American on October 28, 1984. Reprinted from the November 15, 1984 issue of The Wanderer, with permission.
I do not know quite how to introduce the subject of the kind and affable Archbishop of New York except to say that he has changed history. And I do not mean that he has merely adjusted it in minor ways, such as his refusal to allow the state to impose a homosexualist agenda on the Church, which after all might have been expected, but that the result of his appointment to New York at the beginning of 1984 has changed the course of American history.
Allow me to elaborate. Just as our separated brethren in the Orthodox and Protestant faiths have a vision of truth, but an incomplete vision, so did our Founding Fathers in America have a vision of freedom and equality—but an incomplete vision. For example, when they said that all men are created equal, they did not at that time mean that black men, or for that matter that women, were to be included in such an otherwise noble dictum. Politically, those shortcomings have now been rectified.
Meanwhile, it is also true that when the Constitution spoke about freedom of speech, there was implicit in the Protestant understanding of the time, that this did not mean Catholics could exercise freedom of speech in the same way that other citizens could—and we see by the vitriol and threats directed against John O’Connor and other Catholic bishops this year, that this injustice has yet to be wholly rectified.
Nonetheless. I believe the Archbishop O’Connor has dealt a mortal blow to this historical American principle that Catholics as Catholics must be excluded from the political discourse. The battle, to be sure, is just beginning. But just as Rosa Park’s refusal in 1957 to move to the back of the bus was the spark that would destroy the Jim Crow laws and transform the history of the south, so has the
Archbishop’s refusal to be pushed to the back of the political bus set the stage for the transformation of American history. Like the battle for black freedom, this one will be neither short nor easy—and like that battle, I suspect there may well be some bloodshed before the dust has settled.
Nonetheless, the Rubicon has been crossed: and I believe the result will be that institutions of anti-Catholic bigotry such as the New York Times, which regularly upbraids bishops and other Catholics for exercising their rights as guaranteed by the Constitution, shall soon find such an attitude as damaging to their prestige, as did those who in the 1960s kept crying “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.”
The consequence of this, I think, will be nothing less than the beginning of the Catholic era in American history. This country was founded with a combination of the intellectual currents of the 18th century Enlightenment mingled with the strongly Christian, but wholly Protestant, population. For nearly a century and a half that proved a most formidable combination, and it deserves credit for the great American experiment that was forged in the 19th century. But ultimately, as we now know, that vision could not be sustained. Intellectually, it came to an end in the 1920s. The matter, of course, is complex, but I think it fair to say that the combination of the Scopes trial, the Prohibition amendment, and the Great depression brought an end to the Protestant era in America, though its death throes continued for another three or four decades until it was finally destroyed altogether in the 1960s.
I am speaking here, of course, of the Protestant intellectual tradition, though it would be naive to ignore the devastating effect this has had on the faith of Protestants themselves. The notable exception to this, to be sure, is the Evangelical wing of the Protestant tradition, which managed to survive by adopting the ancient practice of Orthodox Jews, namely, by retreating into faithful enclaves which essentially ignored the intellectual and social currents of the society at large.