Transatlantic faiths

“Compared with its European sources”, the American religious experience has “a peculiarity, on which Benedict XVI particularly insisted during his recent journey to the USA, and whose essential characteristic seems to be the search for freedom of conscience”, said Cesare Alzati, of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, in his opening address to the 30th European Week promoted by the same university and the Paul VI Ambrosian Foundation at the Villa Cagnola – Gazzada (Varese). This year’s meeting, due to end tomorrow, is devoted to “Europe and its religious expansion in the North American continent”. Analysis is being devoted to such aspects as the Jesuit missions, the spread of Catholicism and Protestantism, the inculturation of Orthodoxy, the Jewish presence and the Islamism of Afro-Americans.“Civil religion”. According to Massimo Rubboli (University of Genoa), “in the USA, alongside the religious faith that is expressed in the various churches”, there exists a so-called “civil religion” that “does not reflect an objective cultural cohesion”, but represents a resource “useful for linking morality with politics and creating a national identity”. According to the historian, elements of various origins, including “archetypes of Jewish messianism”, are fused together in this “civil religion”. Subsequently “civil religion gradually overcame the Judeo-Christian phase to include other faiths and still continues to this day to play a role of cultural and social integration for the various religious traditions”.From victims to protagonists. Even though American aborigines have “passed from the role of victims on the road of European expansion to that of protagonists”, often decisive, “of a dynamic of encounters” whose “theatre of action was the New World”, “the prevalent model” among scholars of colonial expansion remains the traditional one, remarked Luca Codignola (University of Genoa). In the view of the historian, who traced the history of European colonialism in North America down to 1701, “the histories of British, French, Spanish and Portuguese expansion still remain for the most part worlds apart”. “Only four of the seven bishop of Quebec from 1658 to 1784 really operated” for the good of the local Church, observed Bernard Plongeron, of the Institut Catholique de Paris, according to whom Monsignor de Laval – Montmorency (1658-1688) ensured “the survival of the Canadian Church thanks to a strong centralism”. At the beginning of the 18th century Bishop J.B. de Saint-Vallier “fostered the parish as a ‘spiritual family'”. There are “four sins – he added – of the Canadian parishioner: ostentation, blasphemy, drunkenness and lechery”.Mitre and sceptre. According to Peter Doll, an Anglican of the diocese of Oxford, “to understand the life and mission of the Church of England in the colonies of North America in the 18th century, it’s essential to understand the relation between Church and State”, which should be considered, “from both a constitutional and theological point of view, two different aspects of the same reality”. If “colonial religious policy in the 17th century was distinguished by a benign indifference to Protestant dissent”, the period immediately preceding and following the war of independence of 1776, “was characterized by the development of a precise imperial religious policy”. In “Baja California” and in Arizona, “the permanent settlement” of the Catholic mission was established by the Society of Jesus, explained David Piñera Ramírez (Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, Mexico). In the second half of the 17th century the Jesuits “with a small group of ten men succeeded in founding the first of a network of missions”, but they were expelled in 1767. Succeeded by the Franciscans and the Dominicans, “missionary colonization” then went hand in hand with “civil colonization”, which aimed at “incorporating the indigenous peoples in a Western lifestyle”, causing “their sharp demographic decline”. Despite that, “the image of the missionary age that is still preserved in California and in Arizona” is perceived “in a positive way”. Inculturation of Orthodoxy. In the Russian territories beyond the Bering Strait “Russian missionary activity” began “on the Fox Islands (Eastern Aleutians), in which 2472 baptisms could already be counted in 1796”, and in the “Alexander arcipelago”, and “soon spread also to Alaska”, pointed out Ernst Christoph Suttner ( University of Vienna), especially emphasizing the role played by Innokentij Venjaminov who was sent to the Aleutians in 1823: he “prepared translations into the local language of the catechism and various New Testament books”, dedicated himself with great energy to the Orthodox mission and was proclaimed a saint in 1977. What placed in question “the unity of Orthodoxy in the USA” was the influx of many European countries, following the political events of the twentieth century, and of Orthodox Christians who wanted to remain linked to their original Church”. In 1970 “the Russian Orthodox Church recognized as autocephalous the so-called Orthodox Church in America”.