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In this episode Trent explains the history and enduring effects of anti-Catholic prejudice and how Catholics should respond to it.
Transcript:
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn. In 2003, the Episcopalian author Philip Jenkins, published a book called The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice. In the book, he argued that hatred towards Catholicism is one of the few acceptable forms of bigotry left in the modern world. Indeed, the amount of bigotry Catholics have faced since the book was published 20 years ago has continually vindicated Jenkins’ thesis. In today’s episode, I want to trace the history of anti-Catholicism in America, talk about where it still comes up today, and how we as Catholics should respond to it. But before I do that, I hope you’ll do something anti, anti-Catholic and like this video and subscribe to our channel. You can also get access to my private study series and weekly livestream by becoming a patron at trenthornpodcast.com.
And what’s funny is I remember experiencing anti-Catholicism right after I got out of high school and I was a pretty new Catholic then. I was in a college psychology course and I remember our professor discussing the harm of stereotypes, and then just a few minutes later making a joke about pedophile priests. Now, he was saying it’s bigoted to say rabbis are greedy or imams are terrorists, but to him it was acceptable to just say priests are pedophiles. Indeed, Jenkins calls anti Catholicism a thinking man’s antisemitism because it’s considered acceptable and polite discourse, even though if that same prejudice were levied against other racial or religious groups, it would be considered a form of bigotry.
Speaker 3:
But what I mean by that is in both cases there’s a historical mythology we commonly draw on, and the assumption is if the church does something, then we immediately have a body of stereotypes to fit this into. This is the way this group behaves, and it serves a lot of the same functions, the way antisemitism used to work for the political right. I argue that anti-Catholicism has now become a similar tradition for the left. So the phrase and I wish I’d invented is, the thinking man’s antisemitism.
Trent Horn:
Consider, for example, what media outlets and other public figures said during the confirmation hearings of the Catholic judge Amy Coney Barrett.
Speaker 4:
Finally, new rule Democrats have to stop talking about packing the Supreme Court because it’s already packed with Catholics. Seven of the nine justices will be Catholic. And look, I have nothing against Catholics except my entire upbringing, but they are only 20% of the population.
Trent Horn:
There were articles asking if there were too many Catholics on the Supreme Court and public figures who were claiming that this number of Catholics on the court is really disturbing, including politicians who voted against her nomination like Dianne Feinstein. One of her reasons to vote against Amy Coney Barrett was that she’s just too religious to be able to serve on the bench.
Speaker 5:
I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma. The law is totally different. When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you.
Speaker 6:
Senator, I see no conflict between having a sincerely held faith and duties as a judge. In fact, we have many judges, both state and federal across the country who have sincerely held religious views.
Trent Horn:
When someone says there are too many Jews somewhere or too many blacks somewhere, they’re rightly called a bigot. Yet the presence of Catholics in elite institutions is considered disturbing and unacceptable. And of course, you can’t forget about the award the Dodgers gave to the Sisters of the Perpetual Indulgence who openly mock Catholic nuns and hold events like sexy Jesus and sexy Mary contests. How long do you think we’d have a sexy Muhammad contest? But this isn’t anything new. Here’s an anecdote from Jenkins that shows this particular double standard in action.
Speaker 7:
You say this anti-Catholicism is evident in academe, it’s evident in the arts, in newsrooms, in Hollywood. One example that stands out, and I’d like you to tell some more though, is a Halloween example. The most comical costume award went to a group of three boys. Tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 3:
Okay, after September 11th, many schools across the country were very alarmed at expressions of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim prejudice. Perfectly fine. So one school in Massachusetts ordered its teachers to be very careful doing the Halloween event that year, and they were lucky. Nobody turned up dressed as Osama bin Laden, and so everyone could relax for an evening free of prejudice. And then they awarded the prize for the most comical costume to a group of three high school students, two of whom were dressed as pregnant nuns, and one of whom was dressed as a priest who got them pregnant. Nobody thought that was prejudice. Nobody saw it. So my concern is not that prejudice exists, but that it’s acceptable or even worse, invisible.
Trent Horn:
To understand the roots of American anti-Catholicism, let’s look at the 17th and 18th centuries. During this period, British colonists traveled to the new world in search of religious freedom, and they found it, but only for their churches. Many of the colonies established some form of puritanism or congregationalism as their official religion, which meant other Protestants, not to mention Jews and Catholics, were subject to persecution. Some colonies would not even tolerate the existence of these religious groups, which is evident in Massachusetts act against Jesuits and Popish priests. It was passed in the year 1700 and gave Catholics several months notice that they had to leave the province. Even the colony of Rhode Island whose tolerance for members of religious minorities earned it the nickname Rogues Island, forbade Catholics from serving in public office. The other prominent location for Catholics in America was the colony of Maryland, which its founder George Calvert actually called Terra Mariae or Mary Land.
Even though this colony would become home to the first American diocese, it still had a majority Protestant population. After Calvert’s death, his son’s Cecil gave the following instructions to the governor of Maryland in hopes that a Protestant majority would not erode Catholic religious freedom. He said, “Instruct all the Roman Catholics to be silent upon all occasions of discourse concerning matters of religion, and that the said governor and commissioners treat the Protestants with as much mildness in favor as justice will permit.” Unfortunately, the vice didn’t work, and Maryland ended up becoming one of the most anti-Catholic colonies in the new world. By the mid-19th century, the industrial Revolution drew hundreds of thousands of Americans out of the farmlands and into the big city. In the 1840s, the Catholic population in the urban areas exploded because of the Irish potato famine, which brought millions of Irish immigrants to cities like Boston, New York and Baltimore.
These Catholics formed labor unions to protect themselves from violence and discrimination. The latter of which you could see all the time in, Irish need not apply, signs that could be found in US storefronts as late as 1909. Hostility towards Catholics was also fueled by conspiracy theories. One of the most popular was the 1836 book, Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, the Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed. Monk claimed that sisters at a convent in Montreal were forced to have sex with the priests from the next door seminary. The priest supposedly entered the convent through a secret tunnel. If their sexual encounters produced a baby, the baby was baptized, strangled, and then dumped in a lime pit in the basement. Most scholars considered the book to be a hoax and the non-religious debunker, Joe Nickell writes the following in the Skeptical Inquirer, the fantastic assertions she made were investigated thoroughly at the time by Protestant clergymen who were permitted to inspect the actual convent.
Discovering that its interior was incompatible with Monk’s descriptions. Much additional debunking evidence followed. Nevertheless, the book saw many additions, and by the 1920s reportedly sold over 300,000 copies. Over four decades later, states Stein, it was still going strong. Copies like the one I found continue to lie in weight for unsuspecting readers and quote, despite this hostility, Catholic immigration to the United States accelerated and anti-immigrant activists blamed increased public welfare spending and increased crime on the hoards of Catholics flooding the country. Some critics also saw the influx of Catholics as a threat to democracy because Pope Leo XIII had condemned the heresy of Americanism. The Pope was condemning the heretical view that the church should have no influence on public policy, and that separation of church and state was something all Catholics must accept. Even the second Vatican council taught that a state could show a preference for Catholicism as long as it respected the basic rights of non-Catholic citizens.
The council document on religious liberty says religious freedom, leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ. And that if special civil recognition is given to one religious community in the constitutional order of society, it is at the same time imperative that the right of all citizens and religious communities to religious freedom should be recognized and made effective in practice. Unfortunately, many people interpreted the Pope’s exhortations for the church to shape society as a mandate to conquer it and force people to live under a brutal theocracy. Ellen White, the founder of Seventh Day Adventism claim that Catholics would force every citizen to worship on Sunday, including her fellow Seventh Day Adventists who celebrate the Sabbath on Saturday. Some Adventists still promote this conspiracy in a book called National Sunday Law.
The combination of fear and resentment toward Irish, Italian and German Catholics also fueled the rise of a semi-secret political society called the Know Nothing Party. The name came from the group’s members who would say they knew nothing about whatever the organization was planning. It’s no surprise they stayed tightlipped though, given that the Know Nothings used violence and intimidation to keep Catholics and other immigrants from being elected to public office. For example, on August 6th, 1855 or what is now called Bloody Monday, armed Know Nothing mobs controlled the city of Louisville, Kentucky. They made a show of force to prevent Catholics from rigging the day’s election. What came next were a series of beatings, lootings, arson, and murders that resulted in the deaths of at least 22 people and the near destruction of the city’s cathedral. Unfortunately, the know nothings tactics did help them win dozens of state and local elections in the 1850s when they ran as the American Party after one of their candidates, Levi Boone was elected mayor of Chicago, HE banned immigrants from the city’s government and police force.
The Know Nothings also tried to ban Catholics from holding public office. Now, article six of the US Constitution says, no religious tests shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States, but that only applies to positions in the federal government, state, and local governments could still exclude atheists, Jews, Catholics, and other religious minorities from public office. That changed when the Supreme Court’s 1961 Torcaso v Watkins case ruled that religious tests represented an establishment of religion and were unconstitutional. And as quickly though as the Know Nothings appeared, by 1860, the party was torn apart by the issue of slavery. A lot of the Know Nothings disagreed about it, but the demise of the Know Nothings did not end the spread of anti-Catholic rhetoric.
The most infamous group that assumed the anti-Catholic mantle was the Ku Klux Klan, the KKK. Before their assault on racial integration, the Klan fought to protect white Protestant America from Papists as they said, many clan members believed that every Catholic Church kept a stockpile of weapons to use in a future war against Protestants. President Harry Truman even recalled how a group of clan members in 1923 tried to intimidate him to not appoint Catholics to judicial positions.
Speaker 8:
A Ku Klux Klan officer in 1923 told me that if I didn’t promise to appoint all Catholics to county offices, when I had the opportunity to do it, the Klan would fight me to a finish. I blew up, I told him where to go and where to get off, and then went on and fought the election just the same.
Trent Horn:
The Klan engaged in a campaign of terror against Catholics, including burning crosses on church property and even murdering priests like Father James Coyle. Anti-Catholic political cartoons depicted the Catholic Church as a kind of predator ready to consume every aspect of American life, including American schools. Though I will admit the depiction of crocodiles whose mouths are bishops miters, and that is creative. Now, even though the Klansmen had no qualm about using violence and other intimidation tactics, they considered the most potent weapon against the church to be mandatory public school attendance. In 1922, the Klan teamed up with the Freemasons to pass the Oregon Compulsory Education Act. They hoped public schools would teach Catholic children civics lessons and wean them off of their troublesome immigrant heritage, including their attachment to the Catholic faith. The act would’ve basically closed every parochial school in the state of Oregon. It would’ve closed every Catholic school.
So thankfully after vocal opposition from parents and the newly formed Knights of Columbus, the case was brought before the Supreme Court. In 1925 the court ruled in Pierce versus Society of Sisters, that the Compulsory Education Act was unconstitutional and that parents had the right to determine their children’s education. Even though the Supreme Court sided with the church on school choice, Protestant America still viewed Catholics with deep suspicion. In 1928, Al Smith became the first Catholic nominated for the presidency. Unfortunately, he lost the election to Herbert Hoover and he lost in part because of his Catholic faith. In one case, Smith was accused of imposing Catholic morality on the public because he did not support alcohol prohibition. A stance that drew heavy backlash from Protestants who considered alcohol to be sinful, and it’d be more than 30 years before another Catholic ran for president and Protestant opposition remained fierce.
The famous evangelist Billy Graham, gathered a group of fellow Protestants in Montrose, Switzerland in order to come up with a plan to halt the momentum of John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign for president. In the face of this criticism, Kennedy realized the importance of keeping the religion question from sidelining his message to voters. So on September 12th, 1960, Kennedy gave a historic speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association that provided the framework for future Catholics to assuage the fears of non-Catholic voters.
John F. Kennedy:
For contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I’m the Democratic Party’s candidate for president who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me. Whatever issue may come before me as president, if I should be elected on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling, or any other subject, I will make my decision in accordance with these views in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be in the national interest and without regard to outside religious pressure or dictates.
Trent Horn:
From the 1980s onward, anti-Catholicism shifted from Protestantism to secular forces because Catholics and Protestants found themselves united in their common stance against evils like abortion and sexual immorality. But some anti-Catholic bigotry could still be seen in the conspiracy theories pedaled by fundamentalists such as the author Jack Chick. For example, in 1981, the Protestant magazine, Christianity Today debunked the story of Alberto Rivera, an alleged former Jesuit priest who claimed the Jesuits were behind world wars and communism and other theories that Chick had been peddling for years. Chick himself had published all kinds of absurd conspiracies.
My favorites are his claim that the Vatican has a computer that stores a record of every Protestant in America, and that the Jesuits sent seductive teenagers to cause Protestant pastors to fall into sin. You can’t make this stuff up. Well, Chick can, but more and more anti-Catholic bigotry would come from secular forces who opposed the church’s teachings on moral issues. In 1989, over a hundred people were arrested while protesting at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, claiming the church’s opposition to abortion and homosexual conduct were of threat to their very lives.
Speaker 10:
The whole world is watching.
Speaker 11:
Where are we and what’s going on here today?
Speaker 27:
All right, today we’re gathered in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral to protest the church’s bastardization of my teachings.
Speaker 11:
Who are you?
Speaker 27:
I’m none other than JC, the son of man. I’m here to say that I support a woman’s right to choose. Jesus is pro-choice and Jesus says, teach safe sex. Every lesbian and gay teenager that isn’t taught about dental dams or condoms is risking possible transmission of HIV. And I’m here to say, teach safe sex in the public schools. Well, there was a rumor that I used to hang around with about 12 guys. Let me tell you the passion in the garden. I really could have used a condom then because boy did I get.
Trent Horn:
Throughout the 1980s and nineties, you could find more and more open hostility to Catholicism. This came in the form of films like The Last Temptation of Christ and Kevin Smith’s Dogma. Catholic characters on television shows turned more and more into caricatures, or even someone like Father James Martin admitted by the early 2010s that this constituted a form of anti-Catholic prejudice.
Father James Martin:
I think a lot of portrayals of nuns and priests on TV and in the movies are stereotypical. Post sex abuse crisis, frequently when you see a priest show up on a TV cop show, he’s usually a pedophile. Nuns are usually portrayed as like ninnies basically, or stupid. I mean, I always say here are women who kind of built the Catholic healthcare system in the United States and ran universities, but when they come on TV, they’re portrayed as being idiots basically. So I think there’s a lot of stuff that slides by on TV and in the movies that would never be allowed to happen with other groups. I mean, if you portrayed a rabbi or an Imam like that, people would rightfully complain. But in a way, I think because we live in a largely Protestant culture, I think because of the sex abuse crisis, and I think because of some suspicion about the Vatican and Catholic theology, in a sense, anti-Catholicism is more acceptable. In fact, one person once called it the last acceptable prejudice.
Trent Horn:
After news of the sexual abuse scandal broke in the two thousands, many people justified anti-Catholic bigotry as being a proportionate response for the bishop’s failure to protect children and their crime of protecting abusers instead. However, Jenkins has a good response to those who say they’re only attacking the church’s leaders, not ordinary Catholics.
Speaker 7:
That hostile comments about Jews or blacks are considered attacks on community, but that attacks or anti-Catholic remarks are generally regarded as an attack on an institution. Why is it okay to attack… Or not okay to attack a community, but okay to attack an institution?
Speaker 3:
I think what many people would argue is if you attack, for example, the NAACP, then that’s not an attack on all African-Americans, and that’s a perfectly fair point. So why can’t you attack the Catholic Church? And my response to that is, there other organizations do not occupy the central role in the structure of the religion that the Catholic Church occupies for Catholics. If you say, for example, I am just attacking the church. I’m just attacking the clergy, not ordinary believers. Well, what does that say about the ordinary people who hold that stupid evil oppressive religion? How foolish, how gullible must they be? So it’s almost impossible to draw that kind of line between institution and ordinary belief in this case. So I think that’s often very misleading. An attack on the clergy often is an attack on ordinary belief and believers.
Trent Horn:
Now, the Catholic public theologian, Steven Millie’s claims it’s hard to be a victim as the hegemony. Catholics are the largest group of religious believers in the US, we also have an outsized social and cultural influence. But once again, Jenkins notes how this argument doesn’t work because other groups like Jews also have positions of power or wealth in society, but that doesn’t mean they’re incapable of being victims of prejudice. From 2018 to 2020, anti-Catholic hate crimes rose by 50%, and there has been an epidemic in vandalism and even arson attacks on Catholic churches.
Speaker 13:
Tonight, investigators say someone started a fire at a historic church in Philadelphia, as you may have seen the fire here, it swept through St. Leo the great Roman Catholic Church in the Tacony neighborhood of the city Sunday, leaving it destroyed.
Speaker 14:
Father John Kern came to see for himself the damage done to the statue of the Blessed Mother. Boston Police tell us, someone called in just after nine o’clock Saturday night to report plastic flowers held in the statue were set on fire, creating black soot that burned the statue.
Speaker 15:
Brought these Two canisters of gasoline, lighter fluid, and barbecue lighters into St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He’s charged with attempted arson, reckless endangerment, and criminal possession of a weapon.
Speaker 16:
Surveillance video on campus helped law enforcement identify him as the suspect. The fire forced the closure of the school and put students on remote learning.
Speaker 17:
The video shows him spreading a clear liquid on three church pews and then setting them on fire. The fire quickly ignites and burns the pews, but firefighters were able to put it out before the church is a total loss.
Speaker 18:
Tuesday, May 23rd when the 41-year old is seen on surveillance video outside the shrine of our Lady of Guadalupe in Desplaines starting a fire and tossing numerous items from the shrine into the flames, from crutches to religious items to various church property, police estimate the damage to be over $78,000.
Speaker 19:
Higher at the city’s oldest Catholic Church is an apparent arson.
Speaker 20:
We first brought it to you as breaking news during Good Morning, Indiana. It happened at the historic St. John’s Catholic Church in downtown Indianapolis causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage.
Speaker 21:
Someone needs a lot of prayers to have targeted this space.
Speaker 22:
A historic and sacred building in an era where it seems that nothing is sacred.
Trent Horn:
In spite of a rise in anti-Catholic violence. The US Justice Department instead said that it was traditionalist Catholics that represented a violent extremist threat. In March of 2023, Senator Josh Hawley questioned Attorney General Merrick Garland about why the Justice Department sent dozens of armed SWAT agents to arrest a peaceful Catholic pro-lifer at his home when even local authorities had declined to prosecute him for an alleged crime of disorderly conduct at an abortion facility.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Let’s talk about the Mark help case. For example, you’ve been asked about this already today, and frankly, your answers really astound me. This is a case where a Catholic pro-life demonstrator, father, was accused of disorderly conduct in front of an abortion center. The local prosecutor, the Philadelphia district attorney, who is a Democrat, a liberal, very progressive, declined to prosecute. There was a private suit that got dismissed, and then after all of that, your Justice Department sent between 20 and 30 armed agents in the early morning hours to the Houck private residence to arrest this guy after he had offered to turn himself in voluntarily. Here’s the photo. Once again, you can see the long guns. You can see the ballistic shields. You can see that they’re wearing bulletproof vests. Why did the Justice Department do this? Why did you send 20 to 30 SWAT style agents in a SWAT style team to this guy’s house when everybody else had declined to prosecute and he’d offered to turn himself in?
Attorney General Merrick Garland:
Determinations of how to make arrests under arrest warrants are made based by the tactical operators in the district. They’re not-
Senator Josh Hawley:
But you surely looked into it by this point, right? You know the answer? Surely.
Attorney General Merrick Garland:
All I know is what the FBI has said, which is that they made decisions on the ground as to what was safest and easiest. I do not agree with your description of what happened on the scene.
Senator Josh Hawley:
You don’t agree with my description? I’m pointing out what the photo is. There are agents here who have long guns and ballistic shields. Let’s take a look at the hardened criminals that your Justice Department sent these armed agents to go terrorize on that morning. Here they are. Here they are at mass. Here’s the seven children with Mr. Houck and his wife in this early morning, they were all at home. Mrs. Houck has said repeatedly, the children were screaming, they feared for their lives. You’ve got these agents demanding that he come out, they’ve got the gun, she said pointing at the house and at them, he has offered to turn himself in, and this is who you go to terrorize. What’s really interesting to me is this seems to directly contradict your own memorandum about the use of force at the Justice Department. You say officers may use only the force that is objectively reasonable to effectively control an incident. Are you telling me that in your opinion as Attorney General, it was objectively necessary to use 20 or 30 SWAT style agents with long guns and ballistic shields for these people?
Attorney General Merrick Garland:
What I’m saying is that decisions about how to go about this were made on the ground by FBI agents.
Senator Josh Hawley:
So you’re saying you don’t know?
Attorney General Merrick Garland:
I’m saying what I just said.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Which is that you’re abdicating responsibility?
Attorney General Merrick Garland:
I’m not abdicating responsibility.
Senator Josh Hawley:
Give me the answer, is do you think in your opinion, you are the Attorney General of the United States. You are in charge of the Justice Department and yes sir, you are responsible.
Trent Horn:
So where are we today? According to the Gallup Polling agency in 1958, only two thirds of Americans were willing to vote for a Catholic presidential candidate. But today, 94% of Americans would vote for a Catholic candidate. But this is often contingent on being the right kind of Catholic. Do Catholics still face prejudice in American politics like they did just a few decades ago? Probably not, as long as their Catholic identity is a line in their biography or a photo of them doing something innocuous like attending mass. But when Catholic politicians try to defend the unborn child’s right to life or the objective definition of marriage, well you can bet then suddenly their faith will become a target of criticism. So what should Catholics do in the face of anti-Catholic prejudice? There’s two extremes we need to avoid. It can be tempting to simply ignore the prejudice or even to make excuses for it based on what the hierarchy has done.
Some Catholics ignore the prejudice because they don’t want to look like entitled whiners. They just close their eyes, plug their ears, go on about their day as if nothing happened. But if people can get away with anti-Catholic prejudice in small doses, they’ll feel emboldened to try more brazen acts of bigotry. Also, if we care about people’s souls, then we will admonish them to not commit an evil like prejudice or bigotry. On the other hand, you can turn into a whiner or have a victim mentality that sees oppression everywhere, even when it does not exist. We don’t want to act like critical race theorists, for example, who see racism everywhere, even in the most benign misunderstandings. So that’s the other extreme we have to avoid. I can’t give you a firm rule to decide when anti-Catholic prejudice warrants a public outcry. You’ll have to use your best judgment.
A good analogy for deciding when we should call out bigotry is to imagine another minority group being treated in the same way. If the media and public figures would call it prejudice for those groups to be treated in that way, then we should make them aware of the double standard. For example, even many in the media were sympathetic when the LA Dodgers awarded the Sisters of the Perpetual Indulgence because if any other group mocked religious figures in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, or Islam, they’ll be rightly called out for their bigotry. So we need to be careful and wise in what we choose to call out because we also have to be aware that people can be subject to outrage fatigue. And we also remember the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. So we don’t want to be the Catholics who cried prejudice. We want to be very discerning and point out blatant acts of bigotry and make people know about them and exhort them to respond to them in a charitable but firm way.
We should also emphasize in our response that we aren’t calling out prejudice merely because our feelings are hurt or that we are upset. Once again, we shouldn’t present a victim mentality. We can talk about being upset, but we should also say that evils like discrimination and prejudice are just bad for society. If one group is mistreated, all groups are at risk. As the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. In any case, even though it’s an older work, if you want more on this issue, I still recommend Jenkins book on anti-Catholic prejudice. And another good book on a related subject, which is also written by a non-Catholic, is Rodney Stark’s 2016 book, Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History. So I hope this episode was helpful for you, and I just hope that you have a very blessed day.
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