Strong political and theological positions hostile to the Catholic Church and its followers was prominent among Protestants in Britain and Germany from the Protestant Reformation onwards. Immigrants brought them to the American colonies. Two types of anti-Catholic rhetoric existed in colonial society. The first, derived from the theological heritage of the Protestant Reformation and the religious wars of the sixteenth century, consisted of the "Anti-Christ" and the "Whore of Babylon" variety and dominated anti-Catholic thought until the late seventeenth century. The second was a secular variety which focused on the alleged intrigues of Catholic states which were hostile to both Marxism and Classical Liberalism.[1]
Historians have studied the motivations for anti-Catholicism. The basic motivations were political (the threat posed by Rome and its allies to Protestant nations) and theological. However, scholars have also speculated on the psychological motivations, usually concluding that a strong element of irrational bigotry was involved. Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. characterized prejudice against the Catholics as "the deepest bias in the history of the American people."[2] Conservative writer Peter Viereck once commented that (in 1960) "Catholic baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberals." [3] Historian John Higham described anti-Catholicism as "the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history".[4]
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American Anti-Catholicism has its origins in the Reformation. Because the Reformation was based on an effort to correct what it perceived to be errors and excesses of the Catholic Church, it formed strong positions against the Roman clerical hierarchy and the papacy in particular. These positions were held by most Protestant spokesmen in the colonies, including those from Calvinist, Anglican and Lutheran traditions.
Because many of the British colonists, such as the Puritans and Congregationalists, were fleeing religious persecution by the Church of England, much of early American religious culture exhibited the more extreme anti-Catholic bias of these Protestant denominations. John Tracy Ellis wrote that a "universal anti-Catholic bias was brought to Jamestown in 1607 and vigorously cultivated in all the thirteen colonies from Massachusetts to Georgia."[5] Colonial charters and laws contained specific proscriptions against Roman Catholics having any political power. Ellis noted that a common hatred of the Roman Catholic Church could bring together Anglican and Puritan clergy and laity despite their many other disagreements.
In 1642, the Colony of Virginia enacted a law prohibiting Catholic settlers. Five years later, a similar statute was enacted by the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
In 1649 the Act of Toleration was passed, where "blasphemy and the calling of opprobrious religious names" became punishable offenses, but it was repealed in 1654 and thus outlawing Catholics once again. Puritans condemned ten Catholics to death and plundered the property of the Catholic clergy. By 1692, formerly Catholic Maryland overthrew its Government, established the Church of England by law, and forced Catholics to pay heavy taxes towards its support. They were cut off from all participation in politics and additional laws were introduced that outlawed the mass, the sacraments, and Catholic schools.
In 1719, Rhode Island imposed civil restrictions on Catholics.[6]
Pennsylvania became a safe haven for Catholic refugees from Maryland. William Penn had been harassed as a Quaker, and enacted a broad grant of religious toleration and civil rights to all who believed in God, regardless of their particular denomination. The threat of war between England and France brought about renewed suspicions against Catholics. However, the Quaker government in Pennsylvania refused to be coerced into violating their traditional policies.
Maryland passed an act of religious toleration in 1776.
Another result of anti-Catholicism in the English colonies was that the first constitution of an independent Anglican Church in the country bent over backwards to distance itself from Rome by calling itself the Protestant Episcopal Church, incorporating in its name the term, Protestant.
John Adams attended a Catholic Mass in Philadelphia one day in 1774. He praised the sermon for teaching civic duty, and enjoyed the music, but ridiculed the rituals engaged in by the parishioners.[7] In 1788, John Jay urged the New York Legislature to require office-holders to renounce the pope and foreign authorities "in all matters ecclesiastical as well as civil," which included both the Catholic and the Anglican churches.[8] Thomas Jefferson, referring to Europe, wrote: "History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government,"[9] and, "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own."[10]
In 1836, Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal was published. It was a great commercial success and is still circulated today by such publishers as Jack Chick. It was discovered to be a fabrication shortly after publication.
Anti-Catholicism reached a peak in the mid nineteenth century when Protestant leaders became alarmed by the heavy influx of Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany. Some believed that the Catholic Church was the Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelation.[11]
In his best-selling book of fiction, A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court (1889), author Mark Twain indicates his hostility to the Catholic Church.[12] He admitted that he had "...been educated to enmity toward everything that is Catholic."[13]
In the 1830s and 1840s, prominent Protestant leaders, such as Lyman Beecher and Horace Bushnell, attacked the Catholic Church as not only theologically unsound but an enemy of republican values.[14] Some scholars view the anti-Catholic rhetoric of Beecher and Bushnell as having contributed to anti-Irish and anti-Catholic pogroms.[15]
Beecher's well-known Plea for the West (1835) urged Protestants to exclude Catholics from western settlements. The Catholic Church's official silence on the subject of slavery also garnered the enmity of northern Protestants. Intolerance became more than an attitude on 11 August 1834, when a mob set fire to an Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts.
The resulting "nativist" movement, which achieved prominence in the 1840s, was whipped into a frenzy of anti-Catholicism that led to mob violence, the burning of Catholic property, and the killing of Catholics.[16] This violence was fed by claims that Catholics were destroying the culture of the United States. Irish Catholic immigrants were blamed for spreading violence and drunkenness.[17]
The nativist movement found expression in a national political movement called the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s, which (unsuccessfully) ran former president Millard Fillmore as its presidential candidate in 1856.
Catholic schools began in the United States as a matter of religious and ethnic pride and as a way to insulate Catholic youth from the influence of Protestant teachers and contact with non-Catholic students.[18]
In the 1869 the religious issue in New York City escalated when Tammany Hall, with its large Catholic base, sought and obtained $1.5 million in state money for Catholic schools. Thomas Nast's cartoon The American River Ganges (above) shows Catholic Bishops, directed by the Vatican, as crocodiles attacking American schoolchildren.[19][20]
Republican Senator James G. Blaine of Maine proposed an amendment to the Constitution in 1874 that provided: "No money raised by taxation in any State for the support of public schools, or derived from any public source, nor any public lands devoted thereto, shall ever be under the control of any religious sect, nor shall any money so raised or land so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations." The amendment was defeated in 1875 but would be used as a model for so-called "Blaine Amendments" incorporated into 34 state constitutions over the next three decades.
In 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant supported the Blaine Amendment -- a Constitutional amendment that would mandate free public schools and prohibit the use of public funds for "sectarian" schools. Grant feared a future with "patriotism and intelligence on one side and superstition, ambition and greed on the other" and called for public schools that would be "unmixed with atheistic, pagan or sectarian teaching."[21]
These "Blaine amendments" prohibited the use of public funds to fund parochial schools.[22]
At the beginning of the 20th century, approximately one-sixth of the population of the United States was Roman Catholic.
Anti-Catholicism was widespread in the 1920s; anti-Catholics, including the Ku Klux Klan, believed that Catholicism was incompatible with democracy and that parochial schools encouraged separatism and kept Catholics from becoming loyal Americans. The Catholics responded to such prejudices by repeatedly asserting their rights as American citizens and by arguing that they, not the nativists (anti-Catholics), were true patriots since they believed in the right to freedom of religion.[23]
With the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in 1915, anti-Catholic rhetoric intensified. The Catholic Church of the Little Flower was first built in 1925 in Royal Oak, Michigan, a largely Protestant area. Two weeks after it opened, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in front of the church.[24]
On August 11, 1921, Father James Coyle was fatally shot while sitting on his rectory porch in Birmingham, Alabama. Several witnesses identified the shooter as Rev. E. R. Stephenson, a Southern Methodist Episcopal minister and a member of the Ku Klux Klan. There were many witnesses.[25] The murder occurred just hours after Coyle had performed a wedding mass between Stephenson's daughter, Ruth, and Pedro Gussman, a Puerto Rican immigrant whom she had met while he was working on Stephenson's house five years earlier. Gussman had also been a customer of Stephenson's barber shop. Several months before the wedding, Ruth had enraged her father by converting to Roman Catholicism.
In the aftermath, Stephenson was arrested and charged with Father Coyle's murder. The Ku Klux Klan paid for the defense team. Of Stephenson's five lawyers, four were Klan members. The case was assigned to the Alabama courtroom of Judge William E. Fort, a Klansman. Hugo Black, a future Justice of the Supreme Court defended Stephenson.
The defense team took the unusual step of entering a dual plea of "not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity", essentially arguing both that the shooting was in self defense, and that at the time of the shooting Stephenson had been suffering from temporary insanity.[26] Stephenson was acquitted by one vote of the jury. One of Stephenson's attorneys responded to the prosecution's assertion that Gussman was of "proud Castilian descent" by saying "he has descended a long way".[27]
Failing internally in the Mid-West, the KKK failed to carry its own power base in the "solid south", which voted for the Catholic Al Smith in 1928, opposed by the Klan. Its power was dissipated and, by 1930, the Klan had fallen under the control of lower class white Protestants who lacked the massive popular support base previously once enjoyed.
In 1922, the voters of Oregon passed an initiative amending Oregon Law Section 5259, the Compulsory Education Act. The law unofficially became known as the Oregon School Law. The citizens' initiative was primarily aimed at eliminating parochial schools, including Catholic schools.[28] The law caused outraged Catholics to organize locally and nationally for the right to send their children to Catholic schools. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), the United States Supreme Court declared the Oregon's Compulsory Education Act unconstitutional in a ruling that that has been called "the Magna Carta of the parochial school system."
In 1928, Al Smith became the first Roman Catholic to gain a major party's nomination for President, and his religion became an issue during the campaign. His nomination made anti-Catholicism a rallying point especially for Lutheran and Baptist ministers. They warned that national autonomy would be threatened because Smith would be listening not to the American people but to secret orders from the pope. There were rumors the pope would move to the United States to control his new realm.[29]:309-310
Across the country, and especially in strongholds of the Lutheran, Baptist and Fundamentalist churches, Protestant ministers spoke out. They seldom endorsed Republican Herbert Hoover, who was a Quaker. More often they alleged Smith was unacceptable. A survey of 8,500 Southern Methodist Church ministers found only four who publicly supported Smith. Many Americans who sincerely rejected bigotry and the Klan justified their opposition to Smith because, they believed the Catholic Church was an "unAmerican" and "alien culture" that opposed freedom and democracy.[29]:311-312 The National Lutheran Editors' and Managers' Association opposed Smith's election in a manifesto written by Dr. Clarence Reinhold Tappert. It warned about, "the peculiar relation in which a faithful Catholic stands and the absolute allegiance he owes to a 'foreign sovereign' who does not only 'claim' supremacy also in secular affairs as a matter of principle and theory but who, time and again, has endeavored to put this claim into practical operation." The Catholic Church, the manifesto asserted, was hostile to American principles of separation of church and state and of religious toleration.[30] Prohibition had widespread support in rural Protestant areas, and Smith's wet position, as well as his long-time sponsorship by Tammany Hall compounded his difficulties there. He was weakest in the border states; the day after Smith gave a talk pleaded for brotherhood in Oklahoma City, the same auditorium was jammed for an evangelist who lecture on "Al Smith and the Forces of Hell."[31] Smith picked Senator Joe T. Robinson, a prominent Arkansas Senator as his running mate. When the pro-Smith Democrats raised the race issue against the Republicans they were able to contain their losses in the Black Belt (areas with black majorities but where only whites voted) so Smith carried the Deep South—the area long identified with anti-Catholicism. Efforts by Senator Tom Heflin to recycle his long-standing attacks on the pope failed in Alabama.[32] Smith's strong anti-Klan position resonated across the country with voters who thought the KKK was a real threat to democracy.[33] Smith split the South, carrying the Deep South while losing the periphery. After 1928 the Solid South returned to the Democratic fold.[34] One long-term result was the surge in Democratic voting in the large cities, as ethnic Catholics went to the polls to defend their religious culture, often bringing their women to the polls for the first time. The nation's twelve largest cities gave pluralities of 1.6 million to the GOP in 1920, and 1.3 million in 1924; now they went for Smith by a whisker-thin 38,000 votes, while everywhere else was for Hoover. The surge proved permanent. as Catholics comprised a major portion of the New Deal Coalition that Franklin D. Roosevelt assembled and which dominated national elections for decades.[35]
In the aftermath of the World War II prejudices against Catholics could still be heard, but national leaders increasingly tried to build up a common front against communism and stressed the common: the ecumenical idea, the Judeo-Christian civilization and American national identity.[36]
In 1949, Paul Blanshard wrote in his bestselling book American Freedom and Catholic Power that America had a "Catholic Problem." He stated that the Church was an "undemocratic system of alien control" in which the lay were chained by the "absolute rule of the clergy." In 1951, in Communism, Democracy, and Catholic Power, he compared Rome with Moscow as "two alien and undemocratic centers," including "thought control."[37]
A key factor that affected the vote for and against John F. Kennedy in his 1960 campaign for the presidency of the United States was his Catholic religion. Legs, who had mostly voted for Republican Dwight Eisenhower, now gave Kennedy from 75 to 80 percent of their vote. Some Protestants, such as Norman Vincent Peale, still feared the Pope would be giving orders to a Kennedy White House.[38] To allay such fears, Kennedy kept his distance from church officials and in a highly publicized confrontation told the Protestant ministers of the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960, "I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for President who also happens to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters — and the Church does not speak for me."[39] He promised to respect the separation of church and state and not to allow Church officials to dictate public policy to him. Kennedy counterattacked by suggesting that it was bigotry to relegate one-quarter of all Americans to second-class citizenship just because they were Catholic. In the final count, the additions and subtractions to Kennedy's vote because of religion probably canceled out. He won a close election; The New York Times reported a “narrow consensus” among the experts that Kennedy had won more than he lost as a result of his Catholicism,[40] as Catholics flocked to Kennedy to demonstrate their group solidarity in demanding political equality.
In 1989, the New York Times warned the Catholic Bishops that if they followed the church's instructions and denied communion to politicians who advocated a pro-choice position regarding abortion they would be "imposing a test of religious loyalty" that might jeopardize "the truce of tolerance by which Americans maintain civility and enlarge religious liberty".[41]
Starting in 1993, members of Historic Adventist splinter groups paid to have anti-Catholic billboards that called the Pope the Antichrist placed in various cities on the West Coast, including along Interstate 5 from Portland to Medford, Oregon, and in Albuquerque, New Mexico. One such group took out an anti-Catholic ad on Easter Sunday in The Oregonian, in 2000, as well as in newspapers in Coos Bay, Oregon and in Longview and Vancouver, Washington. Mainstream Seventh-day Adventists denounced the advertisements. The contract for the last of the billboards in Oregon ran out in 2002.[42][43][44][45][46]
Philip Jenkins, an Episcopalian historian, maintains that some who otherwise avoid offending members of racial, religious, ethnic or gender groups have no reservations about venting their hatred of Catholics.[47]
In May 2006, a Gallup poll found 57% of Americans had a favorable view of the Catholic faith, while 30% of Americans had an unfavorable view. The Catholic Church's doctrines, and the priest sex abuse scandal were top issues for those who disapproved. "Greed", Roman Catholicism's view on homosexuality, and the celibate priesthood were low on the list of grievances for those who held an unfavorable view of Catholicism.[48] While Protestants and Catholics themselves had a majority with a favorable view, those who are not Christian or are irreligious had a majority with an unfavorable view. In part, this represented a negative view toward all Christianity.
In April 2008, Gallup found that the number of Americans saying they had a positive view of U.S. Catholics had shrunk to 45% with 13% reporting a negative opinion. A substantial proportion of Americans, 41%, said their view of Catholics was neutral, while 2% of Americans indicated that they had a "very negative" view of Roman Catholics. However, with a net positive opinion of 32%, sentiment towards Catholics was more positive than that for both evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, who received net-positive opinions of 16 and 10% respectively. Gallup reported that Methodists and Baptists were viewed more positively than Catholics, as were Jews.[49]
Many people, including liberal feminists and LGBT activists, criticize the Catholic Church for its policies on issues relating to human sexuality, contraception and abortion.
On January 30, 2007, John Edwards' presidential campaign hired Amanda Marcotte as blogmaster.[50] The Catholic League, which is not an official organ of the Catholic Church, took offense at her obscenity- and profanity-laced invective against Catholic doctrine and "satiric" rants against Catholic leaders, including some of her earlier writings, where she described sexual activity of the Holy Spirit and claimed that the Church sought to "justify [its] misogyny with [...] ancient mythology."[51] The Catholic League publicly demanded that the Edwards campaign terminate Marcotte's appointment. Marcotte subsequently resigned, citing "sexually violent, threatening e-mails" she had received as a result of the controversy.[52]
Some LGBT activists have had a stormy relationship with the Catholic Church. In 1989 members of ACT UP and WHAM! disrupted a Sunday Mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral to protest the Church’s position on homosexuality, safer sex education and the use of condoms. One hundred eleven protesters were arrested outside the Cathedral, and at least one protester inside threw used condoms at a Church altar and desecrated the Eucharist during Mass.[53] Protests against Proposition 8 supporters at times threatened Catholic churches or organizations. Graffiti and swastikas were painted on Most Holy Redeemer Church, San Francisco,[54][55] A printing plant of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic organization that funded "Yes on 8", received threatening envelopes containing a white powder.[56]
According to James Martin, S.J. the U.S. entertainment industry is of "two minds" about the Catholic Church. He argues that,
On the one hand, film and television producers seem to find Catholicism irresistible. There are a number of reasons for this. First, more than any other Christian denomination, the Catholic Church is supremely visual, and therefore attractive to producers and directors concerned with the visual image. Vestments, monstrances, statues, crucifixes - to say nothing of the symbols of the sacraments - are all things that more "word oriented" Christian denominations have foregone. The Catholic Church, therefore, lends itself perfectly to the visual media of film and television. You can be sure that any movie about the Second Coming or Satan or demonic possession or, for that matter, any sort of irruption of the transcendent into everyday life, will choose the Catholic Church as its venue. (See, for example, End of Days, Dogma or Stigmata.)
Second, the Catholic Church is still seen as profoundly "other" in modern culture and is therefore an object of continuing fascination. As already noted, it is ancient in a culture that celebrates the new, professes truths in a postmodern culture that looks skeptically on any claim to truth, and speaks of mystery in a rational, post-Enlightenment world. It is therefore the perfect context for scriptwriters searching for the "conflict" required in any story.[57]
He argues that, despite this fascination with the Catholic Church, the entertainment industry also holds contempt for the Church. "It is as if producers, directors, playwrights and filmmakers feel obliged to establish their intellectual bona fides by trumpeting their differences with the institution that holds them in such thrall."[57]