The American Peril: Italian Catholics and the Spanish-American War, 1898

The Spanish-American War of 1898, that brief but eventful war which suddenly led the United States into the limelight of the international stage, brought to the surface the latent image of the United States held by the European elite. The Italian Catholic establishment, in particular, followed with apprehension the rise to world power of this Protestant country. Clerics were suspicious of the American model: the United States appeared to be a dynamic and self-centered society, very difficult to dominate. Their example could exercise a negative influence on the struggles the Holy See was then sustaining in European and especially in Italian politics. Besides the traditional fight against liberalism, positivism and materialism in general, the Vatican was now fiercely opposing the newly-born Italian state, which had violently put an end to the temporal power of the Roman Church. Of course, the harmonious separation in which Church and State were living in the United States, each in its own domain, was disturbing to European conservative Catholics. Moreover, in the United States, a special type of Catholic clergy with strong national bias seemed to flourish. In the last five years of the nineteenth century, two of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclicals were intended to draw the American clergy’s attention to strict obeisance and submission to the Catholic faith as Rome intended. So, when in 1899, a Catholic periodical published a series of articles on "the perils of Americanism", it was not concerned with rising American imperialism, but with the independent attitudes of the Catholic clergy in the United States. Americanism became an issue on which the different components of the Italian Catholic community sharply disagreed: in this respect, the debate on "Americanism" anticipated the following struggle on "Modernism".