Quote of the Day (Tocqueville—Part II)

“Most Catholics are poor, and they need all citizens to govern in order to come to government themselves. Catholics are in the minority, and they need all rights to be respected to be assured of the free exercise of theirs. These two causes drive them even without their knowing it toward political doctrines that they would perhaps adopt with less eagerness if they were wealthy
and predominant.

The Catholic clergy of the United States has not tried to struggle against this political tendency; rather, it seeks to justify it. Catholic priests in America have divided the intellectual world into two parts: in one, they have left revealed dogmas, and they submit to them without discussing them; in the other, they have placed political truth, and they think that God has abandoned it to the free inquiries of men. Thus Catholics in the United States are at once the most submissive of the faithful and the most independent of citizens.”—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume One, Part Two, Chapter 9, translated and edited by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop

(Tocqueville’s observation was written before the Irish Potato Famine drove thousands to the U.S., placing before the U.S. an unprecedented dilemma of how to assimilate into the polity so many economically disadvantaged. It also exacerbated latent anti-Catholic feelings in a country largely descended at the time from British Protestants. It took more than a century before John F. Kennedy could overcome that—though the question of the “free exercise” of religion, and its place in the public school, remains as vexed as ever more than 170 years after Tocqueville wrote.)