Catholic Fundamentalism in America
By Mark S. Massa, S.J.
Oxford University Press
240 pages, $28.15
In August 2023, during his apostolic journey to Portugal for World Youth Day — the one where he made his appeal to build a Church for “todos, todos, todos” (everyone, everyone, everyone) — Pope Francis met with a group of fellow Jesuits for an informal conversation, as he usually did on his international trips. During that meeting, he gave perhaps his most comprehensive critique of American Catholicism. He said that in the United States, “the situation is not easy: there is a very strong reactionary attitude. It is organized and shapes the way people belong [to the Church], even emotionally.” He defined that attitude with an Italian neologism — indietrismo, or backward-looking, the exact opposite of the “appropriate evolution in the understanding of matters of faith and morals” that the Gallo-Roman monk Vincent of Lerins advocated in the fifth century. Indietrismo, concluded Francis, can lead to the loss of Catholic tradition and its replacement with ideologies. “In other words, ideology replaces faith, membership of a sector of the Church replaces membership of the Church.”
In a recent podcast interview, Jesuit theologian and author Mark Massa, director of Boston College’s Boisi Center for Religion & American Public Life, recalled that those comments by Francis were what inspired him to write his new book, Catholic Fundamentalism in America (Oxford University Press, 2025). The purpose of the book is to describe different manifestations of the reactionary Catholicism condemned by the Argentine pope and to place them within the larger context of the history of the Christian faith in the US over the past century. In this regard, Catholic Fundamentalism in America is a logical continuation to Massa’s previous books, The Structure of Theological Revolutions (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The American Catholic Revolution: How the Sixties Changed the Church Forever (Oxford University Press 2010)
Fundamentalism has historically been associated with the Evangelical tradition in the US. Its classic historical reconstruction is George Mardsen’s Fundamentalism and American Culture, first published in 1980. According to Mardsen, Protestant Fundamentalism was born in the aftermath of the first World War, driven by militant opposition to the modern world — against both the theological current known as Modernism and the secular changes taking place at that time in the wider culture. The most notorious target of this movement was Darwin’s theory of evolution. Early Fundamentalists were influenced by the revivalist establishment of the 19th century and other related traditions, like pietism, the holiness movements, and millenarianism, among others.
Massa’s book is the first major work to apply the concept of Fundamentalism to Catholicism. Massa defines Fundamentalism in general as the “far-right wing of believers who want to break away from mainstream churches and form a purer, smaller, self-selective group.” These are basically sectarian traits. In fact, what sets Fundamentalists apart from traditional Christian conservatives, Protestant and Catholic alike, is their sectarianism, which is often fueled by an apocalyptic rhetoric.
Catholic Fundamentalists consider themselves to uphold purer beliefs and religious practices than regular Catholics and regard these Catholics as leading the Church to a catastrophic decline. However, as Mircea Eliade wrote in his Encyclopedia of Religion’s entry on Catholicism, sectarianism is the opposite of Catholicism. By emphasizing a sectarian perspective, says Massa, Catholic fundamentalists undermine their own Catholic identity. They “think of themselves as Super Catholics but in fact they are un-catholic and maybe even anti-Catholic.” Massa doesn’t go as far as using the H-word, but one cannot help but imagine other authors — like Jean Guitton in his 1965’s Great Heresies and the Church Councils — wouldn’t have hesitated to do it.
Massa’s definition of Catholic Fundamentalism is relevant to our assessment of a wide range of Catholic trends and personalities of the past century, from the anti-Vatican II traditionalism of a Gommar DePauw or the more popular traditionalism of a Mother Angelica to the academic proponents of post-liberalism, including Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen and Gladden Pappin. In general, this heterogeneous crowd shares some additional characteristics: their harsh criticism of today’s Church includes not only laypeople, clerics, and bishops but the Pope himself, which is rather strange for Catholics claiming to defend orthodoxy. Likewise, most of them openly reject or have serious reservations about Vatican II, which they regard as a departure from the true teachings of the Church. And the fact that many Fundamentalists have oversimplified and distorted views of those teachings doesn’t stop them from disseminating those views across electronic media and the internet with the zeal of fanatical crusaders.
In Europe and Latin America, most of the traits Massa mentions as defining of Catholic Fundamentalism would have been simply described as Integralism or Catholic Integralism. This cultural discrepancy has a very American explanation. In addition to sectarianism, a key feature of Fundamentalism is its “primitivism,” or the desire to reestablish the perfect form of church structure, worship, and teaching found in the distant past. The analogy that Massa provides to illustrate this point is the Puritan’s interpretation of the Acts of the Apostles. “If Acts never mentioned organs, set prayers, kneeling to receive the eucharist, clerical vestments, or bishops, then they were bound by the exact same guidelines fifteen centuries later” (p.12). Thus, the Puritans believed that the only right way to be Christian was to follow this “primitivist” model. This reference to the Puritans is crucial. Fundamentalism is just one of many manifestations of the Puritanism in American culture. This Puritan streak continues to affect the way Americans think, feel, and behave — even if the original religious ideas and beliefs that shaped them have long lost their relevance to most of society. Catholic Fundamentalism, therefore, is the Catholic expression of Puritanism in contemporary American culture.
Like Evangelical Fundamentalism, Catholic Fundamentalism emerged in the aftermath of a world war. As with the Protestant version, however, the war was just the catalyst for cultural changes that had been long in the making. As the descendants of Irish, Italian, German, and Central European Catholic immigrants began to climb the social ladder and move into the nascent suburbs, they found themselves living next door to and sharing communal activities with Protestants of all denominations, secular Jews, and non-believers. Suddenly confronted with America’s pluralistic religious reality, many of these Catholics’ beliefs and practices began to falter. Just a generation prior, they would have never mingled with most Protestants — whom the Church officially regarded as heretics — or with Jews, who were shunned by Gentile America and the target of blatant antisemitism. Although still racially segregated, post-WWII America was a hodgepodge of religious diversity, in which Catholics were just one more element in the mix. At the same time, the strong social and cultural networks built up by generations of ethnic Catholics began to unravel.
These sociological conditions help explain the career of Leonard Feeney, the Jesuit theologian whom Massa identifies as the initiator of Catholic fundamentalism in the United States. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1897, Feeney was a radical example of what in other parts of the world would have been called an Integralist or Integrist Catholic. A professor at Boston College and a fiery orator and polemicist, in 1945 he was named chaplain of Saint Benedict Center, a religious association created a few years earlier to serve Harvard University’s Catholic students.
Feeney’s response to a Catholic reality in flux was an unapologetically static view of Catholicism. First, he reaffirmed the Tridentine model of the Catholic Church as societas perfecta, Latin for “perfect society.” Coined by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine in the years following the Council of Trent (1545–1563), the term alludes to the Catholic Church as a self-sufficient body containing all the means necessary to fulfill its supernatural end: the universal salvation of humankind. Until Vatican II, the term was part of standard magisterial language, but it was Feeney’s radical justification of its use that led to his downfall.
The notion of the Church as a perfect society is associated with the dogma extra ecclessiam nulla salus, “there is no salvation outside the Church.” Origen of Alexandria was probably the first to articulate this dogma in the third century, and it was incorporated into the magisterium by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. But its most well-known formulation is from Boniface VIII’s 1302 bull Unam Sanctam. Feeney embraced this strict formulation as the Church’s immutable foundation. It was no accident that he found this definitive formulation in medieval times. Historians describe the High Middle Ages as the Christendom Era, the period when the Roman Catholic Church was the hegemonic cultural force in the Western world. Upholding Christedom as a model for today’s Catholics was the other side of Feeney’s rejection of the Modern era and its values. But this understanding of Catholicism, says Massa, is inherently ahistorical. It fails to grasp the historical contexts that shape some formulations of the Church’s doctrine at a given time and how these formulations can change when the circumstances have changed. Above all, it fails to understand the impossibility of going back to a frozen moment in time, a supposedly golden age of Catholicism. Massa claims that Feeney and his followers were also the first to apply the labels “progressive” and “Conservatives” to Catholics. Previously, the terms used to define them were “faithful” and “lapsed”, neither of which had a specific political connotation. Thus, Feeny also inaugurated a political and financial alliance with conservative businessmen that continues to fund the Catholic traditionalist movement to this day.
Feeney’s interpretation of the extra ecclessiam nulla salus dogma challenged the Church’s magisterium, leading to the so-called Boston heresy case. The case was closed in 1953 by the Holy See with Feeney’s excommunication. That the pope who excommunicated him was Pius XII — hardly the champion of theological reform — leaves little doubt about Feeney’s departure from orthodoxy. Nevertheless, Feeneyism became the blueprint for the future developments of Catholic Fundamentalism.
These developments are grouped by the author in the two final parts of the book, entitled “Christ Against Culture” and “Christ the Transformer of Culture”. As Michael Sean Winters noted in his review of the book, this division follows the categorization that H. Richard Niebuhr makes in Christ and Culture. The first group includes the Belgian-American priest Gommar DePauw; Mother Angelica, the founder of EWTN; and the Society of Saint Pius X’s traditionalist community at St. Marys, Kansas. The second group includes Christendom College, Church Militant and Crisis Magazine and its editor-in-chief, Eric Sammons. There are some obvious differences among the members of these groups. DePauw, who died in 2005, and the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) are notorious examples of schismatic Catholics who rejected Vatican II. Mother Angelica, the founder of EWTN, was a traditionalist Catholic with — according to Massa — ill-informed theological views, but she never crossed the line DePauw or Marcel Lefebvre, the SSPX founder, crossed. On the other hand, EWTN employs some hosts and commentators who during Francis’s pontificate flirted rather outrageously with schism. The final section of the book examines the presence of Catholic Fundamentalism in academia and on the internet, arguably the frontline of the public debate about the future of Catholicism and the Church.
As I mentioned above, a Latin American or European observer would consider these figures to be extreme examples of Catholic integralists. In Massa’s account, however, the term integralism is restricted to the intellectual high-end of Fundamentalism, including the aforementioned professorial advocates of postliberalism. The difference between integralism in the European-Latin American sense and the US variant is that the former primarily describes the enemies of theological modernism within the Church, whereas the latter describes the supremacy of a state that endorses Catholicism as the “true” religion over all forms of political or religious dissent. This view is inspired by Theodosius, who took Constantine’s identification of the Roman Empire as a Christian empire a step further and declare Christianity its official religion, banning all others. This Constantinian-Theodosian interpretation of a Catholic state is the exact opposite of the medieval popes’ view of the relationship between the spiritual and the secular powers, but this historical discrepancy doesn’t seem to bother its contemporary supporters.
National Catholicism, says Massa, can be a form of Fundamentalism. However, it is not inherently religious, but rather a form of white racism—the nostalgia for a time when white people controlled all aspects of American life.
Despite their sprawling presence on social media and the blogosphere, Catholic Fundamentalists are a minority among American Catholics. Nevertheless, their outsized overrepresentation in the virtual world makes them a formidable contender in the global discussion for the future of the Catholic Church. This is something Pope Francis knew all too well, and surely his successor is aware of it, too.
The book Catholic Fundamentalism in America by Mark S. Massa, S.J., is published by Oxford University Press, runs 240 pages, and is priced at $28.15. To purchase: Publisher website, Amazon link.
Image: Fr. Leonard Feeney in an undated photo. (Creative Commons)
Claudio Iván Remeseira is an Argentine journalist based in New York.
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