We don’t yet know how many U.S. Catholics will make a pilgrimage to Rome during this Holy Year. Eventually, though, an accounting of who went, why they went, and what they did there will provide a snapshot of American Catholic life in this moment—and not just spiritually. Seventy-five years ago, the 1950 Jubilee was a landmark event for U.S. Catholics. An examination of just three of the thousands of Roman journeys undertaken by Americans that year—an official pilgrimage led by the most prominent member of the U.S. hierarchy, a quasi-pilgrimage of journalists and corporate executives, and what might be called an “anti-pilgrimage” made by a fierce critic of the Catholic Church—offers remarkable insights into U.S. Catholicism at the midpoint of the last century.

Many observers commented on the robust American presence among the Roman pilgrims of 1950. Among them was James J. Markham, a seminarian studying at the North American College, who mused that throughout the year, “St. Peter’s Piazza sometimes seemed as American to us as Fifth Avenue.” By Markham’s count, close to 150,000 U.S. Catholics had traveled to Rome for the Jubilee. A safer estimate would be about 111,000 people, which translated to roughly one in every 250 U.S. Catholics.

Rather than join the official pilgrimages registered by the Holy See’s National Committee on the Holy Year, most U.S. pilgrims went on their own, making arrangements through travel agencies. Irritated by this “spirit of independence,” the committee nonetheless recorded 425 formal pilgrimages from the United States. Each of the country’s twenty-three archdioceses and 101 dioceses sponsored at least one pilgrimage, ranging in size from one hundred to two hundred people.

The Holy Year pilgrimage that attracted the most fanfare was much larger than average. Departing New York in February 1950, it included eight hundred people led by the city’s archbishop, Cardinal Francis Spellman. On hand were photographers, reporters, and even filmmakers; one documentary about the trip was narrated by radio (and soon-to-be television) celebrity Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen. The pilgrims cruised across the Atlantic, stopping at Fátima and Malta before docking at Naples, from where they continued on to Rome.

In addition to the papal basilicas and other sacred sites required to obtain the Jubilee’s plenary indulgence, their itinerary featured stops tailored specifically to U.S. Catholics. One stop was the North American College, where Spellman had once studied and now surveyed plans for expansion. Pilgrims also visited the Church of St. Peter and Paul, Spellman’s titular church on the Caelian Hill (where, even today, visitors to the Villa Celimontana can stroll along Viale Cardinale Francesco Spellman). Another destination was the bustling Church of Santa Susanna, an American church in Rome run by the Paulist Fathers that served as a primary hub for U.S. Holy Year activity in the Eternal City. The Paulists arranged papal audiences, dispensed information about religious and historic points of interest, and built temporary altars to accommodate the legions of U.S. pilgrim priests seeking to celebrate their daily Masses. On March 5, 1950, the day Spellman’s group visited, forty Masses were celebrated there.

Beyond prayer and penitence—the traditional attributes of a pilgrimage—coverage of this journey added a distinct keynote of national pride. During the postwar years, U.S. Catholics were confident that America’s emergence as a world superpower had significantly amplified their influence in Rome. One sign that the United States was indeed rising in Vatican esteem was the 1946 consistory, when Pope Pius XII had elevated Spellman and three other U.S. archbishops to the rank of cardinal. According to Anne O’Hare McCormick, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist based in Rome, these promotions had generated whispered conversations about the eventual “Americanization” of the Catholic Church. By 1950, some U.S. Catholics were even speculating that one of their own might soon ascend to the papacy. Farfetched as it was, this prediction signaled a buoyant patriotism that extended to the pilgrimage and infused even its most solemn moments with a spirit of American triumphalism. Accounts of the pilgrims’ private audience with Pope Pius XII, for example, billed the event as an occasion for the pontiff to reunite with his most trusted American ally—Spellman had cultivated a friendship with Eugenio Pacelli since the 1920s—and an opportunity for the pope to thank Americans in person for their assistance during World War II.

After Rome, Spellman and the pilgrims traveled to Florence, Milan, Genoa, Nice, and Cannes. Interviewed by The New York Times as they were about to depart the Riviera, the cardinal declared that they were all leaving Europe with full hearts and “empty pockets.” In this sense, they had met expectations. In 1949, The New York Times had reported that the Italian tourist industry anticipated that the Holy Year would “bring a new type of American traveler to Europe,” with dollars to spend. Catholic travel agents had learned during advance visits to Rome that pilgrims from the United States were expected to boost Europe’s, and especially Italy’s, postwar recovery.

The connection between the American dollar and the Holy Year was made explicit in another journey from New York to Italy, also in February 1950. In this case, the point of departure was not the city’s harbor but rather LaGuardia Airport. In 1946, when Trans World Airlines (TWA) had inaugurated transatlantic passenger air service, it offered only two flights to Europe a week. Four years later, TWA announced that it was poised to launch “the biggest transatlantic airlift in peacetime history.” Beginning in summer 1950, thanks to twenty newly acquired planes, the airline would run between thirty-four and sixty weekly flights to Europe, including eight to ten daily flights from New York to Rome.

TWA also added a direct flight from New York to Milan to accommodate Holy Year travel, suggesting that Roman pilgrims add a side trip to the northern Italian city, which they characterized as “the Chicago of Italy.” Passengers on TWA’s inaugural New York–Milan flight, which departed New York on February 12, 1950, included the company’s president, its board chair, and members of its public relations department, as well as thirty-seven American editors and journalists, representing publications such as the Los Angeles Times, Time, Life, and The Boston Globe. Rev. Paul Bussard, the editor of Catholic Digest, later described the group’s audience with Pope Pius XII. Though three-quarters of the group was not Catholic, they all carried with them rosaries and medals to be blessed by him. One correspondent was supposedly shocked that the Swiss Guards allowed so many TWA-branded bags into the papal chamber; having covered the White House for four years, he insisted that the Secret Service would never have countenanced such a breach. TWA executives later thanked Bussard for “very cleverly indeed smuggl[ing] TWA into the audience with his Holiness” and expressed how moved they were by the encounter.

In an era of federal regulation, TWA was the only airline authorized to fly directly to Italy, and it seized upon the Holy Year as a golden opportunity. “For the first time in the 600-year history of the Holy Year,” one press release announced, “the commercial airliner will be part of the caravan to Rome.” Modern aviation, it maintained, was primarily responsible for the unprecedented American presence at the 1950 Holy Year, the main factor that distinguished it from all previous iterations. Exhorting Americans to make the most of the opportunity, TWA presented Rome as a gateway to all of Europe, offering vacation packages that added tours of Paris, Dublin, and other European cities.

TWA was obviously thinking less about pilgrims’ souls and more about their cash—the Holy Year with an American capitalist twist. Still, even Catholic advertising echoed TWA’s pitch, emphasizing that air travel made Europe more accessible than ever. European tours were no longer “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunities offered only to a select few. With their rising incomes, more U.S. Catholics had the wherewithal to take European vacations—and the Holy Year provided a Church-sanctioned excuse to do so. In his assessment of U.S. Catholics’ impact on the 1950 Holy Year, Markham noted that while visitors from other European countries outnumbered his compatriots, the overall U.S. financial impact was greater because European pilgrims “probably did not have as much to spend as the American.”

If marketing for the Holy Year subtly enjoined U.S. Catholics to embark on a Holy Year pilgrimage because they were rich, it explicitly encouraged them to go to Rome because they were free. Catholic publications routinely reported that Communist governments were denying passports to would-be pilgrims among their citizens; U.S. Catholics, on the other hand, were entirely at liberty to go to Rome, where, as a New York Times Magazine article put it in January 1950, they could revel in the ultimate and inevitable triumph of Christianity over “the leviathan state.” The following September, seeking “to measure the success of the Holy Year,” the editors of the Catholic Mind cited anecdotal evidence that Italian Communists were renouncing the party in record numbers, some of them allegedly handing their membership cards to Pope Pius XII during one of the many audiences he held for workers’ groups. McCormick noted in one of her dispatches that even the Communists, “who hate the sight of these praying pilgrims,” were forced to admit that “the Holy Year has not failed to attract devotees from the ends of the earth.”

Elizabeth Clark, another American writer living in Rome, assessed the Holy Year quite differently. In her National Book Award–winning Rome and a Villa (1950), Clark, a Protestant, allowed that the Jubilee temporarily took the wind out of Communists’ sails. Overall, though, the event—intended to be “an opening blast in a new Counter-Reformation”—had failed spectacularly, managing only to celebrate an obsolete past. Clark reserved particular scorn for one of the Jubilee’s biggest events, the canonization of St. Maria Goretti in June 1950. Goretti had been stabbed to death at the age of eleven by her older neighbor, who had repeatedly attempted to sexually assault her. In Clark’s view, Goretti’s elevation represented nothing more than a thinly veiled and ultimately doomed attack against “sexual laxity,” and an attempt to shore up an “Italian peasant mentality” that, like the Church itself, was hopelessly out of touch with modern times.

U.S. Catholics, on the other hand, evinced a fervent devotion to Goretti that inspired many of them to time their pilgrimages to overlap with her canonization. One acclaimed American traveler was Maria’s brother Angelo, who had emigrated to New Jersey earlier in the century but returned to join his mother as an honored guest at the ceremony. Goretti was also connected to the United States by virtue of her hometown, Nettuno, the site of the American military cemetery. Travel guides listed the village as an optional excursion for U.S. pilgrims who wanted to pay tribute to fallen soldiers and venerate Goretti in the same trip.

It was thus no surprise that U.S. Catholics reacted with outrage to reports of an act of blasphemy involving the new saint. One of the bestselling books in the United States in 1950 (and beyond) was Paul Blanshard’s American Freedom and Catholic Power. Fashioning himself as the leader of a resistance movement intent on solving America’s “Catholic problem,” Blanshard perceived the Catholic Church as inherently hierarchical, intolerant, and separatist, and considered it to be on par with Communism as a danger to American democracy. In making his arguments against federal funding for Catholic schools or the appointment of a U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, Blanshard claimed to be motivated not by mere religious bigotry, but by a genuine intellectual concern that Catholics’ political influence was undermining the U.S. Constitution. In Catholics’ view, a publicity stunt he pulled suggested otherwise.

Blanshard had spent much of 1950 in Rome, and upon his return, spoke at an event sponsored by Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State (POAU) at Southwestern Baptist Cemetery in Fort Worth, Texas. Copies of American Freedom and Catholic Power were on sale, and it was announced that the author would sign them with a very special fountain pen. Reporting on the event in Extension Magazine, Eugene Snow quoted Blanshard recounting his self-described “unholy” pilgrimage to the Vatican, where he had paid fifty lire to feign an act of veneration to Goretti, using the opportunity to touch his fountain pen to her bones. This shocking act, in Snow’s view, shattered any claim either Blanshard or POAU had to “respectability or even common decency.” In the long run, Blanshard’s tasteless prank exposed “the immoral, unchristian, anti-God nature” of his project, and by calling attention to it U.S. Catholics could convince their fellow citizens of the truth: that Blanshard was nothing more than a zealot who failed to grasp that U.S. Catholics actually championed American democracy as “the most just and beneficent form of government” and “the best guardian for the rights of the individual.”

Optimistic that most Protestants would see through Blanshard’s attempt to pit “American against American,” Snow saw little hope for the man’s redemption—unless the new saint herself intervened: Blanshard’s feeble act of ridicule was no match for Goretti’s spiritual prowess. Snow urged his readers to invoke “this sweet and forgiving saint, who died in innocence, knowing nothing of politics and great affairs of Church and State,” beseeching her to sanctify the attempt at violation. Though the touch of the fountain pen had been “powerless to desecrate her little bones,” Snow suggested that it might, ultimately, “by the grace of God, consecrate the pen.” With Goretti’s intercession, like the saint who shared his Christian name, Paul Blanshard might well be converted from the Church’s most ferocious critic into its most formidable exponent.   

The Blanshard-Goretti episode was an interesting coda to a Jubilee year that offered U.S. Catholics much more than the customary plenary indulgence: a chance to flex their growing power and influence, an excuse to travel to Europe for the first time, an opportunity to fire a salvo in the Cold War, and an opening to defend themselves against allegations that their faith was incompatible with American freedom. At this point, it’s hard to see how 2025 can compete. Of course, U.S. Catholics’ relationship to church and state has changed a great deal since 1950, and it will be fascinating to see how this year’s “pilgrims of hope” will reflect those transformations.