far. Yet the early Americanization of the Church, writes Shaw, included not just (as is commonly said) the idea that American-style separation of church and state supplied a model for adoption by the Church everywhere, but also a subjective, individualistic approach to Church doctrine and discipline widely present among American Catholics now.

That individualism was demonstrated last week when it became known that Pope Francis means to continue the correction and overseeing of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. Reacting to the news, Sr. Mary Ann Hinsdale, a theologian at Boston College, wondered what Francis”himself a member of a religious order” understood of religious in North America where, apparently, the consecrated life is exceptional and lived differently than the religious life in the rest of the world. In fact,it is that sense of exceptionalism that brought the LCWR under scrutiny to begin with.

We saw something similar as the corrections of the English translations of the Mass were adopted over a year ago, when bringing the American Church into prayerful unity with the rest of the Catholic world (where and with your spirit had never been dropped) was an occasion for high drama and sad, heavy sighs among American Catholics in habitual tension with Rome.

There is an irony to all of this, in that often the very same people who decry American exceptionalism as a political conceit seem to embrace that conceit when it comes to American Catholicism. Writes Shaw:

As embodied in powerful churchmen [like Gibbons] . . . the Church in America had a God-given duty