Americanism was a group of related views among American Catholics, denounced as heresies by the Vatican, because they tended to endorse of the separation of church and state and encourage individualistic thinking. European "continental conservative" clerics thought they detected signs of modernism or classical liberalism of the sort the Pope had condemned in the Syllabus of Errors in 1864. They feared that these doctrines were held by and taught by many members of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States in the 1890s. Catholic leaders in the U.S., however, denied that they held these views.