The catechism for Catholics in the US offers a number of profiles of American Catholics and their contribution to the faith. Many Catholics who arrived as immigrants were rejected and marginalized by the dominant white Protestant culture. This is still the case, but sadly, many people of Irish or Italian descent who were themselves at first suspect & hated for their allegiance to the Church, have quietly absorbed Protesant xenophobia, as well as the Protestant form of nationalism. Before one begins to pray for the deliverance of Protestants from Protestantism, we have to ask God to help us see our bondage to the idolatry that is embedded in our society. We need to put an end to the Protestantism in ourselves, to remove the log from our own eyes before we can do anything for our vocally Protestant neighbors.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the national messianic vision was blunted as Americans came to grips with the reality of the treatment of ethnic groups within our borders and of nations which resisted being drawn into the post-WWII, internationalized version of Manifest Destiny. In the 1980s, that national messianism was re-instated and embraced, and both Democratic presidents have embraced it with the same enthusiasm as the Republican ones.
But from the viewpoint of the Faith, the nationalist mission of America has been to Protestantize the world. Her first imperial wars were against Latino countries in order to deliver them from bondage -- by which they meant bondage to "Romish superstitions". The early imperial presidents were unabashed about their belief in the superiority of anglo-saxon, Protestant 'civilization' to the 'decadent' Catholic civilization of the old world. Those who wave the flag on patriotic holidays fail to recognize that the "Novus ordo seclorum" which is on the great seal means "a new, anti-Church, anti-Catholic" order, one in which democratized (and wealthy) Protestants were to finish the work that England had begun of trying to end the presence of the Church & her influence & authority in the life of humankind.
The newest turn on this has been the attempt to enlist the Medieval stance towards Islam in a Protestant crusade for keeping the US as the central economic and military power. Sadly, many traditional Catholics in France have been misled into supporting America's war in the Middle East and South Asia because they see her imperialist pols as favoring "Western" civilization. "Western" civilization is itself a euphemism for "anglo-protestant" civilization, having no real root in the old order of Christendom. Even though the Church has more freedom to operate in the US than it has elsewhere in Europe, that freedom is a temporary grant, so long as the Church doesn't threaten the oligarchic order which is actually in place.
We want to be child of our land, "patriots", but a Catholic patriotism can have nothing in common with the militarist displays and invocations of America as the "last, best hope on Earth" that have become essential to all presidential speeches since Reagan. Despite the attachment of conservative and neo-conservative Catholics to this new imperialism, America was and is simply Protestantism writ large & active on the world stage. America is not some form of ancient Israel, but America's nationalist mythos requires it to be so, and this attaches American nationalism to its variety in the anti-Christian state called "Israel". Just as the Church, not America, is our true homeland, as the Church and not the civitas of Rome was St. Augustine's, so there is no Israel but the Church, and the artificial country created by international fiat 63 years ago and maintained at America's expense (and the expense of its victims) has no claim to the name except by racial descent. As St. Paul said, all born of Israel are not Israel, but the circumcision of the spirit -- baptism, faith -- are the criteria for owning the name.
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