El Ignaciano / September 2025

Learning with Father Massa¹, S.J. about Catholic Fundamentalism in America

 Luis M. Salces²

Father Massa's book “Catholic Fundamentalism in America”, published by Oxford University Press in 2025, explores the Fundamentalist religious movement among Catholics in the United States. Fundamentalism as a religious movement emerged among Protestants after WWI and among Catholics after WWII under similar circumstances.

The book provides insights into the development and characteristics of Catholic fundamentalism in America including key leaders and organizations and garnered positive reviews from top scholars such as Massimo Faggioli.

In my opinion, the readers will be very appreciative, as I am, of this book comprehensive review of the evidence to put in context and critique the erroneous assumptions underlining fundamentalism in general and Catholic fundamentalism in particular.

The Fundamentalist Paradigm, “Strangers in their Own Land”

Following Thomas Kuhn’s theories in his book on Scientific Revolutions, Massa argues that paradigm shifts in American society, culture and in Catholic and Protestant theologies help us explain the Fundamentalism movement

The fundamentalist paradigm has five major characteristics: a strong sectarian impulse, an ahistorical understanding of the Catholic past, adoption of political labels, a reactive impulse, and a literal interpretation of the Bible and other religious texts.

• The first characteristic, is literal interpretation of religious texts (the Bible, encyclicals, pope’s documents, etc.). “The Bible means what is says and says what it means.”
• The second characteristic, a-historical understanding of the Catholic past, favoring the past (e.g. Tridentine Catholicism paradigm) and strong opposition to modern ideas (e, g, the new paradigm born in the Second Vatican Council).
• The third characteristic, sectarian impulse, emphasizes separating believers “us” from non-believers “them”. This can lead to the reinforcement of identity based on religious orientation.
• The fourth characteristic, reactive impulse, responds to perceived threats to “traditional catholic values and practices”.
• The fifth characteristic, adoption of political labels more specifically "Liberal" (with a capital L) and more recently “progressive” to characterize their enemies primarily members of the Church hierarchy (American Cardinals Blasé Cupich, Joseph Tobin and Robert McElroy) and Pope Francis. Massa argues this paved the way for the increasing association of conservative Catholics with the Republican Party in the twenty-first century.

 The Beginnings: Father Leonard Feeney and the Benedict Center

The Benedict Center in Cambridge, founded in 1942, was a hub for Catholic fundamentalism under the leadership of Father Leonard Feeney, a Jesuit priest who had been literary editor of the Jesuit weekly, America. The Center was funded to serve the growing number of catholic students attending Harvard University.

Feeney and his followers emphasized the idea that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church, citing a famous phrase from a third century bishop Cyprian of Carthago, "extra eclesiam nulla salus" (outside the church, there is no salvation). This view had a long history and was supported by pre-Vatican II council documents and papal statements.

However, The Second Vatican Council marked a paradigm shift from the church as a “perfect society” to the church as the “People of God in Pilgrimage.” Besides religious changes, there were profound social and cultural changes in America particularly after WWII, as Catholics moved to the suburbs and began to live in proximity to people of other faiths.

Feeney and his followers did battle with Archbishop Cushing of Boston in public around 1949 what was known as “The Boston Heresy Case.” Feeney was eventually excommunicated from the Catholic Church and dismissed from the Jesuit order.

Following Feeney, Father Massa describes the development of six Catholic Fundamentalist movements:

Christ Against Culture

The following three movements promote a model which we characterize as “Christ Against Culture” -to use H. Richard Niebuhr’s famous phrase.

The Catholic Traditionalism Movement (CTM) founded around 1967 in New York by Gommar DePauw, a Belgian priest incardinate in the Dioceses of Baltimore and with a doctorate in Canon Law from Catholic University of America. He served as a Peritus in Rome during the Second Vatican Council and developed serious misgivings about the “reforms instituted by the Council especially the changes associated with the Sacred Liturgy.

Mother Angelica an Italian-American nun who founded and led a very influential Catholic television network, EWTN. In the early 1990s, the Network began producing most of the shows inhouse and the content became increasingly critical of the liberal church in America. In 1997 she publicly argued against a pastoral letter of the Archbishop of Los Angeles that in her opinion denied Catholic teaching on the Real Presence of Christ in the eucharist.

The SSPX an international fraternity of traditional priest founded in 1970 by French Archbishop Lefebvre came to serve at St. Mary a community in Kansas founded by Catholics a proposal attributed to Rod Dreher’s bestseller titled The Benedict Option. (a community composed of only Catholics and isolated from the larger society.)

Christ the Transformer of Culture

The other three fundamentalists movements follow and activist model promoting the creation of a new church and new world which we call “Christ the Transformer of Culture” -in the words of Eric Sammons, a new Christendom.

Warren Carroll the founder of the Christendom College in 1977 with the express purpose to contribute to the building of a Christian society and according to father Massa “their eyes were fixed on the high medieval centuries when the Catholic Church and western civilization constitute a unified historical reality.”

Michael Voris, the founder of ChurchMilitant a graduate of the University of Notre Dame with a degree in communications took upon himself the job of warning the public about the decline of morality in society with especial concern about the dangerous gay subculture in American society and the Catholic Church. Voris also brought a new and more dangerous element to the discussion arguing that “violence must always be an option.”

Crisis magazine was funded in 1982 in the campus of the University of Notre Dame. Eric Sammons, a convert to Catholicism, became the editor of the digital magazine in 2020 the editorial content, took a Protestant fundamentalist turn of the “premillennialist” persuasion.

Conclusion

Father Massa’s book is a very comprehensive and insightful study of Catholic fundamentalism in American, drawing heavily from the ground-breaking studies of Protestant Fundamentalism by George Marsden and others.

In his conclusion father Massa identifies a number of differences between Protestant and Catholic Fundamentalism. “For most of the Catholics studied here, the Church itself, and not the bible was the screen onto which they projected their version of what Marsden termed the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”

Another difference to note is that European theology played a more important role regarding Catholic Fundamentalism because Rome is the center of the Church and the changes introduced by the Second Vatican Council became a major threat for many of the religious movements studied in this book.

¹Father Mark S. Massa S.J. is a Professor of Theology and Director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. He is a prolific writer and his most recent works include: The American Catholic Revolution. How the Sixties Changed the Church Forever (2010), American Catholic History, Second Edition (2017) The Structure of Theological Revolutions, How the Fight Over Birth Control. Transformed American Catholicism (2018) among others.

²Luis M. Salces has a Bachelors’ Degree at Catholic University of America (1967) and a Master and Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University in Illinois (1975). Most of his professional career was spent doing both qualitative and quantitative market research with special emphasis on the Hispanic market in Chicago.