In 1895, a few years after Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII issued another encyclical, entitled Longinqua oceani (“wide expanse of the ocean”), in which, for the first time, the Holy See directly addressed the American Church as a whole. Longinqua is a friendly, almost cheerful document in which Leo praises the “young and vigorous American nation” for its faithful congregations and, above all, its evident promise of “greatness.” He is at pains to emphasize the intimacy between the United States and the Church, perhaps even overstating the case, considering the anti-Catholicism rampant in the American nativist movement of the time: “For when America was, as yet, but a new-born babe, uttering in its cradle its first feeble cries, the Church took it to her bosom and motherly embrace.” But such hyperbole might have been strategic, since the missive also contains hints of warning, especially against the intrusion into the Church of certain hallmarks of American society: rampant individualism, a preference for novelty, and, above all, an undue reverence for political power as a good in itself.
In the years that followed, the teachings of an American liberal Catholic theologian named Isaac Hecker began to spread in Europe. The founder of the Paulist Fathers, a society of priests that aimed to spread Catholicism in the United States in ways that were responsive to the changing country, Hecker’s ideas emphasized the compatibility of Catholic tradition with modern ideals such as republican government and free intellectual inquiry. John Ireland, the archbishop of Saint Paul, Minnesota and a friendly contemporary of Hecker’s, referred to the broader trend of Catholic modernization as a “glorious crusade” to unite “church and age.” In other countries, however, where secularization was being pursued far more rigorously, the liberalism that Hecker promoted began to feed attacks on the Church as a whole, something neither Hecker himself nor his colleagues had intended.
Leo XIII was concerned with the rumors of rebellion proliferating in Catholic circles; a particularly enthusiastic introduction to the French translation of Hecker’s biography served to focus the pope’s ire on the American situation. In 1899, he sent a letter to James Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore, pointedly condemning what he called “Americanism” as a heresy. In this missive, titled Testem benevolentiae nostrae (“Witness to Our Benevolence”), Leo argues that the American Church has confused “license with liberty,” and replaced the freedom that comes from the recognition of the truth — that is, the teachings of the Catholic Church and specifically the Roman Magisterium — with the freedom to do whatever you want to do.