“The dissolution of the subculture is the context in which the Second Vatican Council, and its understanding of the church-world relation in modernity, was received in the United States.”¹

Part I

1. Who are the evangelical Catholics? An anecdotal sketch

The counterintuitive phrase “evangelical Catholic” entered American Catholic historiography in 1983 when David O’Brien applied it to Isaac Hecker, the nineteenth-century founder of the Paulist Fathers. Hecker’s desire to engage with culture and to “make America Catholic” was, O’Brien argued, a creative response, neither “denomi- national” nor “sectarian,” to the “evangelical imperative” created by the modern political conditions of religious liberty and pluralism. With historian Timothy L. Smith, O’Brien emphasized the “evangelical stress on a changed life” as “perhaps the major source of reform energy in nineteenth-century America.”²

In 1989 O’Brien made “evangelical Catholicism” one of three “styles” of “contemporary public Catholicism.” Hecker and Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day served as O’Brien’s chief examples of the “evangelical Catholic” style. He contrasted it with the civil “republican” style, embodied by the colonial Carrolls and John Courtney Murray, and with the more pugnacious “immigrant” style of Archbishop “Dagger John” Hughes, builder of New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Crossing liberal-conservative boundaries, O’Brien paired charismatic Catholics with Catholic Workers as evangelical Catholics.

O’Brien’s  approach  to  evangelical  Catholicism  was  not uncritical. Evangelicals, he thought, tended to marginalize themselves in public debate while their “sectarian zeal” undervalued the workaday world. A contemporary public Catholicism, he argued, needed all three styles. But, he concluded in 1989, “The force of evangelical Catholicism will undoubtedly grow as the realities of voluntarism assert themselves more fully among Catholics.”³   Fifteen years later, O’Brien’s words sound remarkably prescient.

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