"The Puritan has passed; the Catholic remains"
About this Quote
A whole theory of American permanence is smuggled into that clean little contrast: the Puritan is a phase, the Catholic a fixture. O'Connell, the politically savvy Archbishop of Boston, isn’t making a neutral demographic observation. He’s staking a claim in a country whose public mythology long treated Anglo-Protestant seriousness as the default setting and Catholicism as the immigrant intruder.
The line works because it turns a cultural stereotype into an expiration notice. "Puritan" isn’t just a religious label here; it’s shorthand for an older moral regime: austerity, suspicion of pleasure, a certain managerial righteousness that once policed the national imagination. By declaring it "passed", O'Connell implies that the Protestant establishment has exhausted its creative force - that its authority was historical, not eternal.
"Catholic remains" lands with different energy. It’s not "Catholic has arrived" (too tentative, too newcomer-ish) but "remains": durable, continuous, institutionally thick. Subtext: Catholicism can outlast the nation’s fashions because it is older than the nation, more global than its provincial anxieties, and better at absorbing difference without dissolving. In early 20th-century Boston - riven by Irish upward mobility, nativist backlash, and Protestant gatekeeping - that’s a power move. It reassures Catholic immigrants that time is on their side, and it needles the old establishment by suggesting their moral monopoly was always temporary.
For a cleric, it’s also propaganda with a pastoral edge: a promise that belonging won’t require self-erasure, only patience.
The line works because it turns a cultural stereotype into an expiration notice. "Puritan" isn’t just a religious label here; it’s shorthand for an older moral regime: austerity, suspicion of pleasure, a certain managerial righteousness that once policed the national imagination. By declaring it "passed", O'Connell implies that the Protestant establishment has exhausted its creative force - that its authority was historical, not eternal.
"Catholic remains" lands with different energy. It’s not "Catholic has arrived" (too tentative, too newcomer-ish) but "remains": durable, continuous, institutionally thick. Subtext: Catholicism can outlast the nation’s fashions because it is older than the nation, more global than its provincial anxieties, and better at absorbing difference without dissolving. In early 20th-century Boston - riven by Irish upward mobility, nativist backlash, and Protestant gatekeeping - that’s a power move. It reassures Catholic immigrants that time is on their side, and it needles the old establishment by suggesting their moral monopoly was always temporary.
For a cleric, it’s also propaganda with a pastoral edge: a promise that belonging won’t require self-erasure, only patience.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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