AMERICANISM

by H.L. Mencken The reputation of the journalist and essayist H.L. Mencken has seen its ups and downs over the years since his death in 1956. His importance as an early and influential student of the variety of the English language peculiar to America is not seriously questioned, however. His book The American Language was published in 1919 and was in its third edition when he was commissioned to write on the subject for the Thirteenth Edition of the Encyclopdia Britannica (1926). americanism in Roman Catholic church history, a certain set of doctrinal proposals concerning the adaptation of the church to modern civilization that was reprobated by Pope Leo XIII in his apostolic letter Testem Benevolentiae of Jan. 22, 1899. The letter was written in response to a controversy in France following the publication there in 1897 of a translation of a biography of Isaac Thomas Hecker, founder of the missionary Paulist Fathers. The views attributed to Hecker included minimizing certain traditional doctrines likely to be obstacles to conversion.