Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Volume 28)

The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics

by Jenny Franchot

The mixture of hostility and fascination with which native-born Protestants viewed the "foreign" practices of the "immigrant" church is the focus of Jenny Franchot's cultural, literary, and religious history of Protestant attitudes toward Roman Catholicism in nineteenth-century America.

Franchot analyzes the effects of religious attitudes on historical ideas about America's origins and destiny. She then focuses on the popular tales of convent incarceration, with their Protestant "maidens" and lecherous, tyrannical Church superiors. Religious captivity narratives, like those of Indian captivity, were part of the ethnically, theologically, and sexually charged discourse of Protestant nativism.

Discussions of Stowe, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Lowell—writers who sympathized with "Romanism" and used its imaginative properties in their fiction—further demonstrate the profound influence of religious forces on American national character.

Genres: Religion, Catholic

500 pages, Paperback

First published March 3, 1994

Reviews

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jenny Franchot’s Roads to Rome is not a study of Catholic people or the Roman Catholic Church itself. Rather, it is an analysis of anti-Catholicism and what it meant to 19th century Protestant thought. Franchot, a professor of English, examines literature – novels, historical epics, captivity narratives, etc – to illustrate the complex and contradictory nature of the Protestant (primarily New England Protestant) perception of Catholicism in antebellum America. It is a mistake, she argues, to think of this anti-Catholicism as merely paranoia, or as identical to European or Puritan anti-Catholicism. What had been merely antipathy in colonial times grew by the 19th century into antipathy mixed with fascination. Catholicism came to be less of a real institution for Protestants, and more of a “series of proliferating traits.” Catholicism was seen as everything feminine, superstitious, and seductive, while Protestantism was seen as masculine and rational, but kind of fading and stagnant.
Anti-Catholicism was much more flexible than we might imagine it could be, and changing ideas about Indians and women were expressed through anti-Catholic rhetoric. Historians like Parkman or Prescott, when writing their romantic histories, tended to portray the Indians as already “popish” or “Jesuitical” before the Jesuits even showed up to convert them. In Prescott’s history of the conquest of Mexico, the Aztecs are portrayed as aligned with “sensualism, ritualism and mystery,” exactly like Catholics. Furthermore, as Americans struggled to navigate the changing role of women in the new republic, and the cults of domesticity and republican motherhood gained ascendancy, convent exposés began to sell extremely well. Convents were imagined to be a perversion of the Protestant family, in which nuns became sex slaves to priests, and any offspring of these unions were smothered and cast into pits. Women confessing their innermost sexual sins to men - in private - was seen as horribly scandalous. Inflammatory convent captivity tracts helped to justify actions like the 1834 burning of a convent by a mob in Charleston, Mass.
As you can tell, there is some fascinating material here, but as one reviewer pointed out, sometimes the “theoretical frame overwhelms.” Cripes, this is hard to plow through. All I could think while I was reading it was thank God I decided to be a history grad student and not an english or literature grad student. The convoluted, impenetrable textual analysis here just ends up being a slog.

[Susie Meister]

This book argues that anti-Catholcism operated as an imaginative category of discourse through which antebellum American writers of popular and elite fictional and historical texts indirectly voiced the tensions and limitations of mainstream Protestant culture. Catholicism was a powerful rhetorical and political force during the antebellum decades. Franchot focuses on how fear, attraction and refusal can hide beneath social psychological terms. The author describes how Catholics were a threat to Protestants through labor, spiritual alternative, and political conspiracy. Franchot explains how the period after the Revolution and Jonathan Edwards' death were stressful due to disestablishment, voluntarism, sectarianism, and secularization. Catholicism helped define New World Protestantism during the antebellum decades. Among the discussions include America's preoccupation with travel which brought them back to Europe where they found Catholic relics alluring and troubling. They were also troubled by the celibacy of priests and tended to think of Catholicism as feminine as a result. Protestants were disturbed by Catholic interest in bones and their burial of the dead on church property. Franchot describes how literature perpetuated Catholic myths among Protestants and blurred the lines between fact and fiction