This much at least is clear. Peggy Noonan is a wonderful writer. Her columns make you want to sit back in an armchair, meditating tranquilly with a drink at your elbow. They are smooth and contemplative; she makes it look easy. Noonan has an instinct for the epic that infuses everything she writes. She makes virtue feel truly heroic, and vice contemptible. There’s a reason she’s won Pulitzers and held a job at the Wall Street Journal for almost a quarter-century.
When I was first getting started as a public writer, I used to study her columns as a kind of tutorial in punditry. Look at that nimble transition. See how she extends the thread through the piece with that pitch-perfect reference at the end? The woman knows her business. This may, ironically, be her greatest strength and her weakness. She is so adept at projecting moral clarity that the inner skeptic may begin to stir. Are these really profound truths, or castles in the air? Her specialty is the intricacies of human nature and culture, not graphs or statistics. It’s beautiful and very elegant, but in the end it’s up to the reader to decide whether she’s hit the mark or not. Sometimes, I think she’s nailed it. Sometimes not.
Her newest collection is titled A Certain Idea of America, which is Noonan-esque indeed. The topics are wide ranging, of course, with some delving into history; others poking good-natured fun at foolish figures or cultural trends; and still others laboring to distill the political developments of our last chaotic decade. Noonan is always trying to figure out what kind of chapter we’ve been adding to the Great American Story. I share that interest, but nevertheless, her historical columns are generally my favorites, while the political ones are likeliest to rouse my inner skeptic. Even when I agree with her (which is often), they feel premature; I want her to wait a little longer before rushing in to find the Moral of the Story. But that’s not how her job works, of course, and it’s not always how the world works. We demand play-by-play commentary. It’s probably better to get it from Noonan than from most of the other professional opinion-givers.
There is an element of schoolmarm in her, but that’s not a criticism. Sometimes people need a good schoolmarm.
Noonan does have her own view of America, which is all of the following things: noble, uplifting, aspirational, nostalgic, frequently wistful. She believes strongly in both freedom and opportunity, and has a high regard for the common man, whose indomitable spirit and good sense have defined this great nation. I sometimes think she gives the common man a bit too much credit, but it’s certainly a hopeful stance. It should be said that Noonan is frequently disappointed in her countrymen, but even in bad moments she writes as though the common opinion is mostly on her side, and the miscreants, for their part, are capable of more. There is an element of schoolmarm in her, but that’s not a criticism. Sometimes people need a good schoolmarm.
How Catholic is Noonan’s America? She is herself a practicing Catholic, and Mother Church does pop up from time to time in her columns. For instance, she occasionally drops in an observation from a priest or bishop. One lovely column delves into her great-aunt’s profound faith and its impact on her own young life. Another draws lessons from St. John Paul II’s Letter to Women and offers them to the #metoo movement. She reflects on embodiment and beauty as the world watches Notre Dame cathedral burn. It’s clear that Noonan’s faith is a constant source of support and wisdom for her personally.
In America, though, Catholics have always been a minority. Obviously Noonan knows this, as a student and regular observer of American history. Her “Catholic moments” are woven gracefully into a tapestry meant to attract people of all faiths or none, which is what we would expect from someone so deeply committed to freedom, opportunity, and the great American melting pot. There is nevertheless a sense in which a common culture can nevertheless be meaningfully Catholic. I wonder whether Noonan might (quietly) be a perpetuator of that tradition.
Consider a figure who still looms large here in Minnesota, both literally and figuratively: Archbishop John Ireland. He built St. Paul’s magnificent cathedral, which looks down on the city from the highest possible ground, as the good archbishop intended. Ireland was appointed in 1875 as the third bishop (and eventually first archbishop) of the diocese, and was a spirited controversialist throughout his life. But it is beyond doubt that he was both a loyal son of the Church and a true believer in the American dream. He fully believed in America as a city on a hill, “rich in glorious promise,” confidently predicting in 1889 (in an address called “The Mission of Catholics in America”) that “at a no distant day, America will lead the world.” At the same time, he fervently urged Catholics to embrace their own vital role by converting their compatriots on the ground, further enriching the land of hope and promise with the resources of their faith.
It’s clear that Noonan’s faith is a constant source of support and wisdom for her personally.
“We cannot but believe,” Ireland writes, “that a singular mission is assigned to America, glorious for itself and beneficent to the whole race, the mission of bringing about a new social and political order, based more than any other upon the common brotherhood of man, and more than any other securing to the multitude of the people social happiness and equality of rights. With our hopes are bound up the hopes of the millions on earth. The Church triumphing in America, Catholic truth will travel on the wings of American influence, and encircle the universe.”
Here’s Noonan, 130 years later (“A Continuing Miracle”, 2019):
We are a people that has experienced something epic together. We were given this brilliant, beautiful thing, this new arrangement, a political invention based on the astounding assumption that we are all equal, that where you start doesn’t dictate where you wind up. We’ve kept it going, father to son, mother to daughter, down the generations, inspired by the excellence, and in spite of the heartbreak. Whatever was happening, depression or war, we held high the meaning and forged forward. We’ve protected the Constitution.
I think, at the very least, that Noonan and Ireland would have gotten along.
A more measured but still powerful vision can be found in the great Jesuit political theorist John Courtney Murray. Murray argued that America was deeply Catholic, and not just because Catholics were a significant and influential minority from the start. The Catholic natural law tradition, he believed, had in fact permeated the American constitutional tradition from the start, even though the founders themselves mostly did not view it as Catholic. The founders were true inheritors of Western tradition, but especially the English common law tradition. This, Murray argued, was fundamentally a Catholic worldview, extending its roots down into a premodern soil and drawing from the wells of medieval custom and patristic wisdom. This is why the American founders, in their sincere effort to apply old wisdom to new political circumstances, “built better than they knew.” It is why:
Catholic participation in the American consensus has been full and free, unreserved and unembarrassed, because the contents of this consensus—the ethical and political principles drawn from the tradition of natural law—approve themselves to the Catholic intelligence and conscience. Where this kind of language is talked, the Catholic joins the conversation with complete ease. It is his language. The ideas expressed are native to his own universe of discourse. Even the accent, being American, suits his tongue. (“E Pluribus Unum” from We Hold These Truths, 1960)
Noonan speaks Catholic with an American accent. It’s hard to think of a better exemplar of the “full and free, unreserved and unembarrassed” participation in the American conversation that Murray so warmly recommended. Her “certain idea” is of an America in which kindness and tenderness still mean something, beauty still moves us, and justice is real but mercy even stronger. It’s one in which we love our stories and traditions, value people above things, and make friends instead of “networking.” We’re allowed to dream, but raw ambition is tempered by decency and civic spirit, so it does not become empty. Friendship transcends division.
A person can believe in that idea without praying any Rosaries. Noonan does not drape it in a stole or a habit. But this is where Ireland and Murray’s central insight becomes relevant: America’s inheritance of Catholic ideas and traditions is robust enough that Catholic citizens can often help America be more authentically herself, working comfortably within the scope of our own faith tradition. We are natives here, even if this has never been known as “a Catholic country.”
Is this too optimistic? Or, if Americans did indeed “hold these truths” at one time, do we still believe them today? These are fair questions. Clearly our republic is deeply torn by disagreements that often seem to extend to the level of “first principles.” Noonan’s view of America may be more aspirational than realistic.
Even if that’s true, though, she still offers a master class in how to draw Americans together in a way that is friendly to Catholic interests and goals. One of her most potent tools here is history. With her usual grace and elegance, she tells relevant stories about Americans living through trials or disagreements similar to our own. One column chronicles the friendship of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. Another tells how Ulysses S. Grant, in the midst of his presidency, was arrested for speeding (in his horse drawn carriage) and cheerfully placed himself under the authority of the law. We learn about John Hersey, the journalist who showed Americans what the bomb really meant for Hiroshima, and about Margaret Chase Smith, the “first senator of either party to stand up to Joe McCarthy.” Noonan understands that we all want to be inheritors of our own nation’s history in some meaningful way. So she tells stories from the past, presenting her vision of a free, constitutional, natural-law-based society, and hoping her compatriots will recognize it and find it lovable.
Catholics can find inspiration in this book. They will especially enjoy it if they keep the words of Ireland and Murray in their minds as they read. Those men made a compelling case that America was, in fact, authentically Catholic. Sometimes it feels like we’re losing that Catholic character, but preserving traditions has never been easy. If a writer like Peggy Noonan can speak American Catholic with such fluency, there must be something left to save.