Kinsman's Americanism and Catholicism

This book is one of Kinsman's works that's available on line in downloadable form. Almost exactly a century after its 1926 publication, this is a tough book to parse, in part because the issues that seem to have started Kinsman's train of thought are in some ways now moot. The wave of Catholic immigraton that took place in the post-Civil War period ended in the 1920s, while the decline of Main Line Protestantism that Kinsman anticipated has largely taken place.

However, I think the main force of his argument is still relevant, and even relevant to current circumstances. His concern, from the perspective of his recent conversion and sudden change of life from the peak of Protestant respectability to association with Catholic immigrant hordes, seems to have brought him to the question of how the hordes, and the Church that largely arrived with them, can integrate into Protestant American society. And let's keep in mind that he speaks quite consciously as someone whose family arrived, both literally and figuratively, on the Mayflower.

So he first argues that Catholicism is based on the same natural-law principles as those the founders wrote into the US Constitution. Catholicism carries with it the responsibility for Christians to obey the secular laws and support the secular state; Catholic authorities govern the area of faith and morals exclusively. And as a practical matter, Catholic immigrants have enthusiastically entered American life. But I think Kinsman was focusing even more on the future.

It is true, that Americans of the older stocks are becoming comparatively less numerous and in- fluential; that every year some lines of colonial descent become extinct. It is wholly probable that the descendants of later emigrations will eventually count for more in the country than those of the earlier; that there will be great changes in the proportions of the mixed ingredients of American blood. Yet the Americanism established by men of the earlier periods survives and is likely to survive. (p 13)

To this end, the book moves increasingly to the question of what will replace the 17th and 18th century versions of Protestantism, because, as he said in Salve Mater, these are bound to lose relevance.

The last four hundred years have seen a steady drift away from what is definite in Christianity. The various bodies which broke from the Church in the sixteenth century inaugurated changes which marked not fixed degrees of departure from mediaeval Christianity, but a process of gradual abandonment. This has been steady and continuous, sometimes unconscious, sometimes concealed by pleas for reconstruction and reinterpretation, sometimes deliberately devoid of every disguising pretence. The test-case is that of belief in the Godhead of Christ. There have been all degrees of confusion, hesitation, and explicitness of denial, and always vehement defenders of the truth. Yet the drift away from belief in Jesus as God among all classes of non-Catholics has become more rapid and overpowering, too strong even for the strongest swimmers caught in these side-currents. Abandonment of old Christian beliefs and practices is held to be alone worthy of modern thought; and what started as "justification by faith" is ending as justification of little or no faith at all. (pp 161-162)

The current situation, in which we're operating in a post-Main Line Protestant world, presents a new set of challenges to the Church. I think Kinsman foresaw the impact of Protestant abdication, but he couldn't foresee in any detail the precise conditions that would prevail when it finally became effective.

But I think he did foresee the need for the Church to assert itself as something beyond a cultural artifact that certain immigrants brought with them from the Old World. I think this is a strategy that figures like Bp Barron, whom pre-Conciliarists treat with great suspicion at best, are nevertheless beginning to articulate.

Cleaning Up Frederick Joseph Kinsman's Biographical Record

The photo above is the second of two provided by a visitor of Kinsman from the St Paul's School website. It shows him as a master at St Paul's, which he was up to 1896, when he was ordained an Episcopal priest. Born in 1868, he would have been in his mid-20s at the time of the photo.

A difficulty in tracking down biographical information on Frederick Joseph Kinsman is that both his father and grandfather were named Frederick Kinsman as well. Due to this problem, I erred in an earlier post here in saying that Frederick Joseph was the son of a Cleveland judge. Judge Frederick W Kinsman (1807-1884) was actually Frederick Joseph's grandfather, a prominent citizen of Warren, OH. In 1832, his father-in-law built him a house on "Millionaire's Row" in Warren as a wedding gift. The house is preserved as a historical exhibit. Kinsman's first wife died young, and their children all died in infancy. His second wife was Cornelia Pease Kinsman.

Their children were John Kinsman, Thomas Kinsman, Charles Pease Kinsman, Henry Perkins Kinsman, and Frederick W Kinsman Jr, born in 1841. Frederick Jr presumably grew up in the now-preserved Kinsman house at 303 Mahoning Avenue, Warren, OH, but ownership appears to have passed to another of Frederick Jr's siblings, and the 1880 census says that Frederick Jr's family, which consisted of his wife, Mary Marvin Kinsman, his daughter Cornelia, and his son Frederick Joseph, lived on Washington Ave in Mahoning. Frederick Jr's occupation in that census was listed as "manufacturer".

We know little else of Frederick Jr. At the time of his death, he was 81 years old, and based on the brief reference in Reveries of a Hermit, by the tmie of his death, he was paralyzed, but we know nothing else of his condition or its cause. I found this obituary in the Brooklyn Tablet from January 1922:

I assume this obituary was written and placed by Frederick Joseph's sister, Cornelia, who seems to have been his companion throughout much of his life. She also probably wrote and placed this 1934 obituary for his mother:

Of note is that she died in the Hospice Marcotte in Lewiston, ME which is an elder care facility to which Frederick Joseph and Cornelia moved in 1936. In addition, it mentions that Mrs Kinsman lived in the bishop's residence while Frederick Joseph was Bishop of Delaware. We know that his sister Cornelia also lived there during that period and may have served as his hostess. A visitor has determined from census records that Mrs Kinsman also lived with her son when he was rector of St. Martin's Church, New Bedford, MA, which suggests this living arrangement must have continued throughout much of Kinsman's life.

Whether his father, Frederick Jr, lived with his wife, son, and daughter during this period is unclear, and it's also completely unknown when, and for what reason, he became paralyzed. It's entirely possible that his condition required him to be hospitalized separately from the family.

Frederick Joseph's life is fascinating in some measure due to what we don't know. I note that the experience of blogging on figures like Cardinal Law has in fact caused knowledgeable parties to come forward. I certainly hope this may be the case here.

Frederick Kinsman And Cancel Culture

A visitor found the photo above of Kinsman as a student at St Paul's School in Concord, NH. This is actually a key part of his background, as he makes clear in Salve Mater that the Kinsmans were a pominent Ohio family, There's a Kinsman Road and a Kinsman district in Cleveland. That Frederick would attend St Paul's School, one of the St Grottlesex group, and become an Episcopal bishop are indications of his and his family's high standing in society.

Kinsman's literary product as a Catholic is complex, and with much of it available to me due to the generosity of a visitor, I'm finding it deserves detailed reading and reflection. Reveries of a Hermit is an example. About half of it is the closely reasoned apologetic I've discussed here, but there's a Part II which is about the same length but more difficult to parse. It sets out to be an essay on three saints connected with the ancient city of Ephesus, but in the middle, there's a chapter on Birchmere, Kinsman's estate in Maine, where he lived in seclusion with his parents and sister following his resignation as Bishop of Delaware in 1919.

This chapter gives some biographical insight into how his conversion to Catholicism affected his personal life.

In 1919, a change in religious, or rather ecclesiastical, convictions which had hitherto deternmined my course in life, involved abandonment of occupation and environment which had formed framework and background for life to the age of fifty, and a series of fresh starts for what years might remain. The claims of my family were, in some ways, paramount in determining future courses, chiefly the condition of my father, who was helpless with paralysis. Birchmere was our only, and the only possible, home, and owing to my father's condition, it was evident that he and I at least must live there all the year round. (pp 200-201)

Kinsman's father, who had been a prominent Cleveland judge, passed away in 1921. This is the only reference I've found in some amount of searching to his illness; no obituaries have so far come to light despite the family's prominence. One working hypothesis so far is that the effect of Frederick's conversion and resignation as bishop was far more cataclysmic for the family than any had anticipated, and I would not rule out his father suffering a stroke in consequence.

The evidence in the Birchmere essay suggests that Kinsman was shunned by his former associates and friends, to the extent that we would now call it canceled.

The middle half of my life was a crowded time, full of interests, varied experiences, congenial companions. I was socially inclined, could have intercourse with many people of many kinds, and was most fortunate in those with whom I had close association. The change of 1919 ended this. Henceforth, I was to be separated from all but a few old friends, alienated from many -- though the alienations have lessened with years. (pp 203-204)

Kinsman's 1944 obituary in a St Paul's alumni publication suggests, however gently, that many of his schoolmates felt he lost his mind in 1919. I suspect the degree to which the society in which he swam seems to have regarded his conversion as something like outright betrayal came as a great surprise, both to him and perhaps more to his family, who may have been shunned just as much.

The visitor who sent me a copy of his Americanism and Catholicism (1924) expressed some puzzlement about Kinsman's direction in that book. I've been through it once, and I need to reread it. I think it's an attempt on his part to think through what seems to have been an unexpectedly angry reaction to his conversion -- an Episcopal bishop in the early 20th century was an unquestionable pillar of respectable American Protestant society, and for him to renounce that position in favor of Irish, Italian, and Slavic immigrants would have amounted to betrayal of their core values.

It's worth noting that the next Episcopalian bishop to resign and convert to Catholicism was Jeffrey Steenson, almost a century later. The impact of Steenson's resignation was imperceptible; it wasn't news outside the speicalized Anglican and Catholic press. I think this is largely because, as Kinsman himself predicted, Main Line Protestantism in the US has run its course, and its cause has merged with more general Agnosticism. To cease to be a Protestant is simply no longer an act of betrayal, which it was in Kinsman's time.

But this is not to say that the Establishment no longer exists, that it no longer has great power, and that it no longer takes vicious revenge on those it perceives as betrayers.

A Peek Into Ivy League Quotas

There's been a certain amount of background noise over recent generations, especially from commentators like Alan Dershowitz, that quotas persist in ivy League and similar elite schools, and although the schools insist that Jewish quotas are a thing of the past, quotas of all sorts have grown and become steadily more intricate. There may no longer be Jewish quotas per se, but admissions criteria that de-prioritize applicants from affluent suburbs have a similar effect, and these persist.

The first impression I had, just days after arriving at Dartmouth, was that some of my clasmates were in effect flying coach, while others flew first class. This was at complete variance with the public narrative current at least in the 1950s and early 60s that the elite schools were highly selective based on grades, test scores, and extracurriculars, and those selected were the best and the brightest.

This view was reflected in David Brooks's remarkably silly 2000 book, Bobos in Paradise, where he explained that the College Boards had completely changed the educational system after World War II, allowing a true meritocracy to emerge. Well, just for example, Brooks himself had got into Chicago, how could things be otherwise? So why were so many of my new Ivy League schoolmates so vapid, and why were so many, like me in their late teens, already alcoholic and drug dependent?

Within weeks, I'd come to the conclusion that the admissions office had made a terrible mistake by admitting me, and I had several discussions with the Dean of Freshmen about this. I never got a satisfactory explanation, but he convinced me to stay the course. Well, at least I graduated, and I mostly stayed out of trouble.

I was astonished to see this story a few days ago, in The Atlantic of all places:

Less than 2 percent of the nation’s students attend so-called independent schools. But 24 percent of Yale’s class of 2024 attended an independent school. At Princeton, that figure is 25 percent. At Brown and Dartmouth, it is higher still: 29 percent.

The numbers are even more astonishing when you consider that they’re not distributed evenly across the country’s more than 1,600 independent schools but are concentrated in the most exclusive ones—and these are our focus here. In the past five years, Dalton has sent about a third of its graduates to the Ivy League. Ditto the Spence School. Harvard-Westlake, in Los Angeles, sent 45 kids to Harvard alone. Noble and Greenough School, in Massachusetts, did even better: 50 kids went on to Harvard.

There's nothing new about this social condition -- it was pointed out by Ferdinand Lundberg in the 1930s, and it was recognized at least tacitly well before then -- that the real determinant of where you stand socially is not where you went to college, but where you went to private secondary school. The surprise here is that somehow, the Ivies have released the actual percentages of slots in their entering classes that are reserved specifically for the St Grottlesex schools.

Recognize that, although roughly a quarter of the slots in each class across the Ivies are reserved specifically for St Grottlesex, there are other quotas, such as legacies irrespective of private wchool, the children of megadonors, the children of prominent media figures and politicians, and so forth. Tucker Carlson asked rhetorically how Chris Cuomo got into Yale, but he already knew the answer. My puzzlement as an Ivy freshman was based on the same question, but nobody told me the answer back then.

The quality of applicants to elite schools is heavily diluted by what we definitely know now is a privileged cohort from St Grottlesex, around a quarter, but the other reserved slots add an unknown additional proportion. I recall reading an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in the 1970s that said yes, the elite schools were now practicing affirmative action, but those quotas were over and above the still-existing set-asides for the traditional privileged groups. The losers would be the talented applicants who weren't in one or another privileged class -- Jews, Asians, middle-class whites.

This is one reason why non-entities like Jen Psaki rise to prominence, and for that matter why people whose pedigrees are less than pure but who rise via some measure of actual talent, like Donald Trump, are hated by the privileged Ivy Leaguers. But this aso circles back to the peculiar story of Frederick Kinsman, which I'll resume tomorrow.

Anglo-Catholic Fastidiousness

The remarks I quoted from Frederick Kinsman yesterday on Anglo-Catholics, that among them "there was much exercise of private judgment, both in a chronic fastidiousnesss which spent its energy in pointing how everyone else was more or less wrong" go a long way for me in explaining what's happened in the North American ordinariate. A visitor comments,

The “chronic fastidiousness” of which Kinsman speaks is a defining characteristic of the ordinariate. No doubt it is more difficult in the Catholic church to flout constituted authorities, at least where they have taken a position, but the mindset that “we have it right, and everyone else is wrong” is everywhere, and the “everyone” often means other ordinariate communities, not just benighted “Novus Ordo” parishes.

After over four hundred comments on a video of the mass at St Timothy, Sykesville which revealed their use of women servers and guitar accompaniment, the administrator of the Anglican ordinariate Facebook page closed comments. While some comments were supportive, or at least counselled charity, most were cruelly negative and dismissive. Another post about how Bp Lopes was “using covid” to crack down on Anglo-Papalist liturgical practices like the prayers at the foot of the altar drew at least fifty mostly critical comments.

It's worth noting as well that some, though not all, ordinariate clergy have been able to run a racket whereby they at best simply maintain their popularity with their parishes, and at worst exploit them financially, by fostering that attitude that everyone else has it wrong. It appears that Houston has gradually been bringing these men to heel, but this raises the question of how the ordinariate can succeed if it's been at least partly relying on the fastidious faction up to now.

My own experience with the failed attempt of the St Mary of the Angels Hollywood Anglican parish to go into the ordinariate bears directly on the tendency of Anglo-Catholics to be in permanent protest. It's worth noting that Cardinal Mahony, in rejecting the parish's application to become Catholic under the Pastoral Provision, directly raised the question of how the parish could expect to be Catholic if it refused to obey its Episcopalian authorities.

In other words, it sounds as though there was plenty of insight into Anglo-Catholicism already within the Catholic Church that should have counseled prudence prior to the implementation of either the Pastoral Provision or Anglicanorum coetibus. At the same time, there seems to be a growing recognition in the Church that factions like those represented by Fr Zuhlsdorf are promoting pre-Conciliarist fastidiousness that also needs to be curbed.

This recent video by Bp Barron suggests what the current direction of the Church is regarding the pre-Conciliarist faction. In it, he makes the point that this sort of fastidiousness over Vatican II is basically Protestant.

Kinsman On Anglicanism

The section of Reveries of a Hermit most relevant to my purpose is the chapter on Anglicanism. He traces its origin to exclusively secular and political concerns:

Change of religion in Englnd did not arise from a desire for revision such as Luther's, or for rediscovery such as Calvin's. It was the result of the policies of Tudor sovereigns. Four of these successively imposed on their subjects such religious establishment as seemed to them expedient. Henry VIII substituted Royal for Papal supremacy: Edward VI inaugurated changes aiming at English copying of Swiss models: Queen Mary, using Royal Supremacy to replace Papal, brought back Catholicism as far as she could: Queen Elizabeth adopted a series of compromises, intended to reduce to a minimum religious differences within her realm, and her policies have ever since largely prevailed in the English-speaknig world. (pp 122-123)

I simply don't know what's taught now in Eng Lit, but up to the 1970s, this was regarded as a Good Thing, following the Whig Interpretation. Kinsman discusses Elizabeth at greater length:

Elizabeth was a very clever woman, quite capable of insight into theological and ecclesiastical questions: and it is often assumed that she had clear principles. Yet it is probable that all her actions were determined by policy only, by considerations which, for the moment, seemed likely to increase her personal popularity and strengthen her hold on the throne.

. . . Elizabeth wished to please everybody. At her accession, she was twenty-five, accomplished, fascinating. She had Tudor will and effective coquetry. No understanding of her is possible, if there be failure to recognize this latter endowment, and that her statesmanship largely consisted of unique ability to manage men and keep them guessing. She was ready to promise anybody anything, whether she could keep promises or not. When she had to preserve silence, she could give an impression of being in secret sympathy. Her religious policy was an example of her general method.

. . . [T]he Prayer Book had varying details intended to satisfy people with varying views. Everything to which no one objected was authoritatively imposed: in regard to disputed matters, there was no definite decision. . . . The history of Anglicanism is best understood when it is seen that it was always intended to afford basis for three types of thought; that its history has been determined by the interplay of these; and that the distinctive thing about it has been the exercise of the witching wiles of Elizabeth.

. . . There have always been in the Anglican Communion three parties or "schools of thought," each convinced that its interpretation of Anglicanism is right and bound ultimately to prevail. These three types are the Anglo-Catholic, the Anglo-Protestant, and the Anglo-Liberal, "High Church," "Low Church," and "Broad Church."

It is often assumed that Anglo-Catholicism had its origin iin the Oxford Movement a century ago. This, however, was not an innovation, but a revival. From the time of "the Elizabethan Settlement" -- which settled by leaving unsettled -- there have always been Anglicans with Catholic tendencies.

. . . Their watchword was always "Catholic," and their aim the support of Catholic doctrines and practices. Yet, in the party, there was much exercise of private judgment, both in a chronic fastidiousnesss which spent its energy in pointing how everyone else was more or less wrong -- the superciliousness of schism -- and in a wilfulness to follow individual whims. The spirit of Catholicism is obedience. "The Church is all right: and we shalll be, if we submit ourselves and let it form us." Too often the position of Anglo-Catholics has been: "Our Church is all wrong, and we must set it right. It is matter of conscience to show our disapproval by flaunting its constituted authorities, and doing exactly as we please."

. . . Yet, looked at from a purely Anglican environment, Anglo-Catholics have a case. Anglican history and formulas make it clear that, if, in the Church of England, any wish to imagine themselves Catholics, it is intended that they may do so. (pp 127-138)

I went through Anglican confirmation in a Broad Church Episcopalian parish, and what's remarkable to me is that the interpretation the priests gave us of Anglicanism in that class was extremely close to the first several paragraphs of the excerpt from Kinsman here. All of this was not a bug but a feature, and up to recent times, this has been part of the public, and often academic, view of Anglicanism. But there's much more here than I can comment on effectively in this post, so I'll talk more about it in future posts.

Frederick Kinsman On Agnosticism

I found Frederick Kinsman's Reveries of a Hermit enormously stimulating, and as I said the other day, its title is misleading. His main argument is that the varieties of Protestantism are all actually versions of agnosticism:

The aim of these lectures is to compare and relate three points of view from which the Christian religion is regarded. The first looks on it as something based on unreliable legends, and therefore negligible, except as myth expressive of picturesque fantasies. The second professes to hold its essentials but is ever ready to relegate component parts into the category of non-essentials, is eclectic; and the successive stages of its history are chracterized by rejections rather than by retentions. The third regards it as the one great fact in human history, to be retained intact and given dominant place in human life. Common names for these points of view are, the Agnostic, the Protestant, and the Catholic.

. . . One main purpose of the investigation here undertaken is to point that the three points of view are reducible to two. In practical consequences as well as in many presuppositions, Protestant view-points tend to become identical with Agnostic. There is truth in the broad generalization that there are two attitudes of mind in regard to religion, the Catholic and the non-Catholic, if this be modified by the recognition that many individual non-Catholics start with the Catholic point of view, and make many of its presuppositions, though not making full deductions from these. Hilaire Belloc has somewhere said, "We have in Europe today, among those who make mind, two moulds of intelligence, one a philolsophy, the other a mood. The first, the philosophy, is Catholic doctrine; the second, the mood, is Modern Thought, and covers all that is opposed to the faith." (pp 10-11)

He breaks Protestantism down into three parts, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Anglicanism, and from a career spent in part as a professor of Church history, he has remarkable insights to offer on all three. What he says on Anglicanism bears directly, I think, on reasons for the failure of Anglicanorum coetibus, which I'll cover tmorrow, in one or possibly more posts.

Although he was appointed professor of Church history at Catholic University following his conversion, I don't know at this point if this was just some type of honorary position, or if he ever taught there. He was clearly of independent means and didn't need the money, while he spent most of his time after resigning as bishop in seclusion in Maine, so I simply don't know if he would have wished to commute to Washington to teach there.

As far as I'm aware, there was no course available to me as either an undergraduate or graduate student that would have covered Church history as Kinsman saw it. I do assume that any course he taught at CU would probably have been quite similar to the material in Reveries of a Hermit.