• Home
• New Releases
• Americanism & The Collapse of the Church in the U.S.

•   Description
•   About the Author
•   Endorsements

• Americanism is a term that appears to express nothing more than a devotion to America. In reality, however, it teaches principles and a way of life that pose, and always have posed, a threat to the Church of Rome. Indeed, the threat that it poses to Catholicism may be the most dangerous experienced by her in the past few centuries of revolution.

  Its harmful quality arises from its subtle and effective transformation of the United States into a new religion whose central dogma of “pluralism” cannot be investigated or questioned; a new religion whose creed is said to be purely “practical” and “pragmatic,” but which actually aims at a messianic rebuilding of the entire globe; a new religion that brooks no opposition to its will.

• John C. Rao obtained his doctorate in Modern European History from Oxford University in 1977. He worked in 1978–1979 as Eastern Director of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Bryn Mawr, PA, and was Associate Professor of European History at St. John’s University in New York City from 1979 to 2021. Dr. Rao is also director of the Roman Forum, a Catholic cultural organization founded by the late Professor Dietrich von Hildebrand in 1968. He writes for numerous French, German, Spanish and Italian journals. Perhaps the most important of his works are Americanism and the Collapse of the Church in the United States (Roman Forum Press, 1995), Black Legends and the Light of the World (Remnant Press, 2012), Removing the Blindfold (Angelus Press, 2014), a discussion of Catholics rediscovering their own heritage in the post-French revolutionary era, and A Centenary Meditation on a Quest for “Purification” Gone Mad (Arouca Press, 2019). He has also written a companion volume to his collected works, The Unrepentant Catholic's Cautionary Calendar (Arouca Press, 2022). 

• “John Rao's book can go a long way to enlightening readers, and in particular Catholic readers, to the truth of the matter, tearing away the veil that has covered the faces of most of us. It is a gateway into a rich literature of counter-Americanism, a literature unknown to most Catholics, but as necessary now as it was a hundred years ago, if we wish to think clearly about our own nation and hence, our own lives and the life of Christ's one Church.”

  —Thomas Storck, author of From Christendom to Americanism and Beyond: The Long, Jagged Trail to a Postmodern Void

  “Calling on American Catholics to distance themselves from the ideology of America, Rao invites us to act politically and socially on the basis of a true, orthodox vision of God and His Creation and to raise this nation up on that foundation. This short work is pure gold in the search for a politics in service of wisdom.”

  —Patrick Brennan, J.D., John F. Scarpa Chair in Catholic Legal Studies and Professor of Law, Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law

  “For, in the face of the conservative movement, indebted to Americanist ideology, John Rao has become almost the sole opponent of it.”

  —Miguel Ayuso, Ph.D., Professor of Political Science and Constitutional Law, Comillas Pontifical University in Madrid

You May Also Like