While Catholic soldiers always prove an interesting focus for research, the Catholic Church as an entity was uncharacteristically silent from 1861-5. As this article investigates, this may have been due to the Church having a dog(ma) in each side of the fight.

On the eve of the Civil War, as citizens were taking sides, and taking up arms, leading Unionists questioned where the Church stood on the issues of slavery and secession. In May 1861, the Third Provincial Council of Cincinnati attempted to clarify the Catholic position on the crisis. The Council stated that the “spirit of the Catholic Church is eminently conservative and while her ministers rightfully feel a deep and abiding interest in all that concerns the welfare of the country, they do not think it their province to enter the political arena.” It further elaborated on the Catholic “unity of spirit” that recognized “no North, no South, no East, no West.” Yet historian Mark Noll states that the American Catholic position, while not as “fully developed domestically as they were abroad” created a theological challenge to prevailing American beliefs. Catholics challenged the Protestant notions that linked democracy and Christianity, capitalism and Christianity, and the individualism Protestants interpreted from scripture. Noll stated in his book The Civil War as a Theological Crisis that the Catholic position “amounted to a fundamental assessment of prevailing beliefs and practices that American protestants, whose main principles were so closely intertwined with the nation’s dominant ideologies, could not deliver.” Northern theologians could not understand Catholic misgivings about the abolitionist movement, with its willingness to break the law for its goals, and Know Nothing roots, while Southern radicals could not abide the Church’s sympathy for and identification with the plight and suffering of slaves. Furthermore, while Protestant denominations split along sectional lines and theological interpretations of slavery, even to the point of advocating war, the Catholic Church seemed maddeningly united and suspiciously neutral during the secession crisis.

http://www.acton.org/pub/religion-liberty/volume-21-number-4/onward-catholic-soldiers-catholic-church-during-am

Another catch-up Disunion article, this one looking at the contribution of American Jews to the Union Army, specifically through a piece of legislation that initially barred rabbis from the chaplaincy.

One of the interesting asides is that Clement Vallandigham, notorious Copperhead, was a voice of reason in appealing for the change in wording. There are a few Civil War personalities who I’m seeing differently as I learn more about them (or perhaps as I age? Get off my lawn!), and Vallandigham is one of them. I’ll cover this a bit more in-depth tomorrow.

Rabbi Dr. Arnold Fischel arrived at the White House on the morning of Dec. 11, 1861, prepared to act as a one-man lobby for the constitutional rights of Jews. He had traveled alone from New York, on his own dime, bringing several letters of recommendation from prominent Republicans and one from the Board of Delegates of American Israelites, then just three years old and the country’s only national Jewish organization.

One of Abraham Lincoln’s private secretaries told Fischel that there was little chance of a meeting. But the rabbi was persistent, taking his place among hundreds of people hoping to see the president, some of whom had been waiting for three days. To Fischel’s surprise, Lincoln immediately received him with “marked courtesy.” The rabbi stated the reason for his visit: On behalf of the American Jewish community, including several thousand soldiers fighting for the Union, he hoped the president might reconsider a discriminatory law forbidding his people to serve as chaplains.