Catholicism Under Attack

A few events late last winter set Catholics in America to wondering. On the second Sunday of Lent, Pope John Paul II issued his historic “apology” for misdeeds of the Church, past and present. It was a deeply spiritual act of contrition that most Catholics took for what it was, an act analogous to a sacramental confession for “errors and instances of infidelity, inconsistency and slowness to act” in the past and present. What Catholics in America did not expect was the onslaught of negative commentary that followed the papal apology, particularly in secular print. The New York Times, in a March 14, 2000, editorial, presented in its usual somnolent tone the secular judgment: The pope had failed to apologize for “his continued opposition to abortion and birth control, and to women in the priesthood” and “made no mention of discrimination against homosexuals… [ and] the failure of Pope Pius XII to speak out against the Nazi genocide.”

Other commentaries followed a similar path, if a bit more vicious on the rhetorical side. In the Albuquerque Journal, columnists Roberto Rodriguez and Patrisia Gonzales accused the Catholic Church of helping “to create the worldwide system of racial supremacy.” Many newspapers, including the Washington Post, the Bloomington Independent, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press, published editorial cartoons either ridiculing the papal apology or Catholic teaching on the ordination of women, birth control, and abortion. The Miami Herald ran a news story that offered without counterpoint the opinion that “the Catholic Church is directly responsible for the enslavement of Africans.” The San Francisco Chronicle editorialized about those who “have been bloodied and burdened by the unyielding march of Catholicism.”

Then there was Bob Jones University. Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush kicked off his southern campaign with a speech at Bob Jones University. Not a great deal of the rest of America knew much about the university, particularly Catholics. If we don’t play them in football, we don’t know them. But a flap ensued when. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League questioned the appropriateness of lending credence to a university that views the Catholic Church as satanic and the pope as the Antichrist. It was an uncomfortable surprise for Catholics to learn that a prominent southern university is burping out graduates indoctrinated in an anti-Catholic rhetoric that seems more like a remnant of the 1928 Smith-Hoover election than the 2000 presidential campaign.

Then there were a series of articles in the Kansas City Star that purported to prove an epidemic of AIDS in the Catholic priesthood. An uncritical story made the wire services and all the local papers. A quick review of the Star’s statistical analysis showed that it made a hash of it. Catholics were again surprised, this time to see newspapers throughout the country uncritically print a story so faulty in its basic premise that a third-grader with a slide rule could have pointed out the errors.

More important, however, was the drumbeat that played throughout the Star’s series. The cause of the AIDS epidemic in the priesthood, according to the Star, was that the vow of celibacy attracts candidates who are sexually dysfunctional and the Church’s teaching on homosexual activity, which generates an unhealthy atmosphere that leads priests into secret activities and silent shame if they do become infected. What surprised Catholics was certainly the ongoing sensationalistic coverage of priests and sex. But it was also discomforting that a secular newspaper would insinuate itself into Church teaching and practices to demand that such teaching change.

What these events show, at times subtly and at times not so subtly, is the persistence of anti-Catholicism in the United States. While most Catholics would like to consider such bigotry a historical anachronism, day-to-day events are telling them otherwise. We see anti-Catholicism in the more flagrant, nativist tradition as evidenced in Bob Jones University, and we have it as a tool of the cultural wars permeating journalism nationwide.

British Export

Anti-Catholicism—even in its most secular form in contemporary America—has its roots in the Reformation. It arrived with the Pilgrims when they landed on Cape Cod and began in England when Henry VIII was excommunicated in 1533. Our inheritance is this peculiarly vicious British strain that was reinforced by racial hatred of the Irish but formalized under Elizabeth I with the fear of invasion from the Catholic royal houses of Europe. English anti-Catholicism combined bitter Reformation theological polemics with incipient nationalism and racism. It was institutionalized in law and propagandized from the top down in the culture.

The British government exploited the foolish Gun Powder Plot of November 5, 1605, when a small group of conspirators hoped to blow up Parliament and literally ignite a Catholic insurrection. Restrictions on Catholic laity that had been lackadaisically enforced were pursued and expanded to every aspect of life. Catholicism was seen as the political and spiritual nemesis of England and portrayed as the enemy of free thought and enlightened progress. England became immersed in a culture of propaganda that would thrive for the next three centuries, continuing even after most of the legal disabilities against Catholics were lifted in 1828. History would be interpreted from an anti-Catholic perspective and the faith taught to the young based on the evils of papism. (It would virtually not be until the last quarter of the 20th century, for example, that non-Catholic British historians would begin to look more objectively at the life of the Church in England before the Reformation.) “Black legends” of Catholicism became part of the intellectual makeup of a gentleman and anti-Catholic assumptions normative thinking.

My point here is not to dig up a dusty past that would sooner be forgotten. The point is that anti-Catholicism, with all its canards, myths, and legends, permeated American culture from its infancy. It arrived with the Pilgrims and flourished in the New World. It is part of our inheritance, a cultural DNA passed on from generation to generation. It has permeated how we think, how we manage our affairs, and how even we as Catholics present ourselves to the general culture. It is part of the assumptions that create our views and even our very language.

Anti-Catholicism existed throughout the colonies where the public celebration of Catholic life was prohibited and assorted legal disabilities existed everywhere. We find it exploited by the colonists before the Revolution with the claim that the Intolerable Acts were setting up a papist empire west of the Alleghenies. During the Revolution, the Tories used it to their advantage, and Catholics remained a small, distrusted community after the war. The 19th century witnessed an unbroken chain of anti-Catholicism, from the burning of an Ursuline convent outside Boston, to anti-Catholic riots in Philadelphia and the rise to power of the Know-Nothings in the 1850s, to the powerful American Protective Association at the end of the century. Before World War I, a study by the Knights of Columbus found more than 60 anti-Catholic national newspapers—including The Menace, with a circulation of 1.5 million copies weekly. There was the explosion of anti-Catholicism that greeted the nomination of Governor Al Smith of New York as the first Catholic candidate for the presidency in 1928.

After World War II, anti-Catholicism emerged in its secular form. Freed from the shackles of post-Reformation Protestant theology, the old anti-Catholic canards were stripped of theological entanglements. The fear of “Catholic Power,” as enunciated by Paul Blanshard in the 1950s, built on an anti-Catholicism in the left that preexisted the war because of the Church’s public anticommunism, opposition to birth control, and growing strength as a conservative cultural force. It was prominent in the “culture wars” of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, which would see an entrenched anti-Catholicism in media, the stage, the arts, cinema, and academia. Anti-Catholic sentiment was exploited through the debate on life issues, and was highly visible in the gay rights movement. It became a central tactic of the euthanasia campaign in the 90s.

An Enduring Legacy

Anti-Catholicism hasn’t gone away. It has been a persistent part of life in America and a powerful force in American culture. It persists because the culture understands the language and thinking of anti-Catholicism and because it is viewed as the product of an enlightened mind.

Anti-Catholicism exists in three distinct and interrelated patterns in America. Nativist anti-Catholicism bubbles just below the surface in many regions of the country: this is the Bob Jones variety, a theological, Reformation-based prejudice. Anti-Catholicism also persists as a race-based prejudice. It identifies Catholicism with ethnic groups deemed inferior to the white Anglo-Saxon culture, whether they were the Irish and Italians in the past or the Hispanics today. Finally, it exists as an elitist prejudice. Anti-Catholicism is the acceptable prejudice of the high-minded and allegedly right-thinking.

That elitist nature of anti-Catholicism accounts much for its persistence. While the New York Times might scoff at the theological backwardness of the Bob Jones crowd, it shares the same essential prejudices and assumptions rephrased from a secularist perspective. Anti-Catholicism thrives in the professions, medicine, academics, law, fine arts, media, and journalism. While it certainly has been a prejudice that has permeated every economic and cultural level of society, it persists because, from generation to generation, it has been a shared bigotry of society’s leadership. In a recent Gallup study, anti-Catholicism was found to be most prevalent among the best educated and the highest income brackets. It is the prejudice of the chattering classes in particular.

Anti-Catholicism thrives because its assumptions are so unchanging. The anti-Catholicism that exists in American society today would be recognizable to the Pilgrims. When the Puritans railed against lascivious priests and a superstitious popery only interested in power, their echoes can be heard in the reporting of the Kansas City Star and the editorials of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Anti-Catholicism is not disagreement with what the Church believes and teaches. Like any other bigotry, anti-Catholicism is the use of negative generalizations, false history, stereotypes, appeals to shared prejudices, accusation of base motives, misrepresentations, and ridicule of beliefs. It is done with the intent of mocking, dismissing, or publicly attacking Catholic positions or applications of belief in the public square without actively engaging the actual issues or positions involved.

The primary elements of anti-Catholicism are shared prejudicial assumptions that can be found throughout the history of the Church in the United States. They are stereotypes relished in colonial times and assumed in contemporary news and entertainment media. To summarize these assumptions, Catholics are portrayed as essentially anti- intellectual. The faith is presented as a collection of meaningless superstitions and thoughtless rituals that are a product of a preenlightened era. Catholics are portrayed as incapable of independent thought. A constant in anti-Catholic propaganda is that the Catholic Church represents tyranny, and all its actions are motivated by power. Religious or faith-based ideals are dismissed and motives for Catholic action are presented as the desire to oppress or as a means to exercise power, particularly over non-Catholics.

Similar to the fear of inferior races, Catholicism is still viewed as an alien or foreign presence within the United States. This is expressed by those who see the faith as somehow foreign to American values of freedom of thought and expression. In contemporary media coverage, this is often seen in the underlying assumption that anti-Catholicism is acceptable and results from Catholics taking positions contrary to the prevailing sentiment. This is an argument consistently used on the editorial pages of the New York Times when the Church speaks out on issues such as abortion or euthanasia. In effect, the argument is that if the Church refuses to keep her benighted views to herself, she can only expect a bigoted response and deservedly so.

One of the most curious anti-Catholic assumptions is in regard to sexual practices, where Catholicism is viewed as both a source of perversion and the cause of sexual repression. This is an assumption as old as Henry VIII. On the one hand, because of the practice of celibacy, Catholicism is viewed as an unhealthy, sexually repressed faith with unmanly leadership and prudish laity. At the same time, Catholics are viewed from the Margaret Sanger perspective as unthinking breeders, while the clergy are perceived as lascivious predators of the young and innocent. Again, this is a prejudice that transcends time.

In America, anti-Catholic literature was so strewn with sexual deviancy that it was often referred to as “Puritan pornography.” The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, alleging sexual profligacy in a convent in Montreal, was first published in 1835 and became a best-seller, second only to the Bible in 19th-century American religious publishing. Though proven to be totally false, the book remains in print today.

21st-Century Prejudice

Today, this dual anti-Catholic assumption thrives. The hierarchy and the clergy are portrayed as old celibate males out of touch with reality. At the same time, it is argued that, in general, clergy are crass sexual predators. This is central to the Kansas City Star’s thesis, where the argument is made that aberrant sexual behavior is rampant among the clergy and, at the same time, the natural result of an unnatural celibacy. Clergy are portrayed as lascivious because they are prudes, and prudes because they are lascivious.

A new book on homosexuality, The Silence of Sodom (University of Chicago Press), makes just this argument. The author contends that on the one hand, the Church is the greatest source of “oppression” for homosexuals. But on the other hand, the author weaves a fantasy of homoeroticism in the Church’s all-male priesthood and all-male religious orders.

One area where we concretely see these prejudices at work on a daily basis is in media coverage of the Church. In the book that I edited, Anti-Catholicism in America (Our Sunday Visitor, 2000), the full text of the Center for Media and Public Affairs’s (CMPA) latest analysis of media coverage of the Catholic Church is included. The study was jointly sponsored by Our Sunday Visitor and the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Written by Linda S. Lichter, S. Robert Lichter, and Dan Amundson, this represents an updating of CMPA’s groundbreaking 1991 study, Media Coverage of the Catholic Church.

The new study confirms that anti-Catholicism remains a potent force in American journalism. Among its findings on media coverage of the Catholic Church in the 1990s, the CMPA study reports:

• One-sided reports on the role of women in the Church were the leading source of controversial coverage of the Catholic Church.

• Three of four sources, including 90 percent of sources on television news, criticized the alleged treatment of women by the Church.

• Criminal charges against Catholic clerics accounted for one of twelve discussions about the Catholic Church. Seven of ten sources criticized the Church for her handling of these charges.

• Nine of ten sources criticized the Church’s ecumenical efforts, with particular emphasis on Catholic-Jewish relations.

• Debate was more balanced on church-state issues and sexual morality, but there were significant differences among media outlets. Television news paid the most attention to sexual issues and was highly critical of the Church in this area.

• In comparison to the 1991 study, which surveyed Catholic Church coverage in the media going back to 1963, the CMPA found that coverage had declined by more than 50 percent from the 1960s to the 1990s. Criminal allegations against clergy dominated 1990s coverage. Debate over issues of power within the Church grew in the 1990s, while coverage of internal Church issues on doctrine and sexual morality declined.

Overall, the CMPA study found that the media’s calls for reform of Church authority structures rose to all-time highs and that Church teachings and practices received less support in the media in the 1990s than in any previous decade.

Anti-Catholicism’s Powerful Impact

The larger question that needs to be addressed is that of the impact itself of anti-Catholicism in America. “No Irish Need Apply” signs have been taken down (though one can certainly raise very serious questions of its economic impact on Hispanic Catholics or the treatment of Cuban Americans in the general press). There are numerous Catholics in government, business, science, and professional life. Leaving aside for a moment the various ideological hoops of denial Catholics are required to jump through to be successful in America, Catholics have been extraordinarily successful in this country. As Peter Steinfels argued recently in the New York Times, there may be agreement that a certain philosophical anti-Catholicism persists, but it creates no real harm. Anti-Catholicism, Steinfels implies, is real but essentially meaningless.

We need only look at three areas to see the draconian impact of persistent anti-Catholicism in America. First, on a practical level, the precedents to deny aid to parochial schools and school parents are built on 19th-century anti-Catholic assumptions, legislation, and jurisprudence. In the era after the Civil War, anti-Catholic fervor over the school question coalesced in the movement to legislate so-called Blaine amendments into state constitutions. It would be these amendments that codified the nativist identification of “sectarian” with Catholic. Sen. James G. Blaine of Maine had proposed such an amendment to the Constitution. Though defeated in 1875, it would be the model incorporated into 34 state constitutions over the next three decades. Today 31 states have Blaine amendments, or amendments derived from the Blaine formula, in their constitutions forbidding state aid to Catholic schools.

In 1971, the Supreme Court issued a series of rulings that referenced essentially nativist, anti-Catholic material in denying aid to Catholic schools. In Lemon v. Kurtzman, Justice William Douglas’s concurrence reads like a Know-Nothing commentary: “In the parochial schools… [the] purpose is not so much to educate, but to indoctrinate and train, not to teach Scripture truths and Americanism, but to make loyal Roman Catholics.”

Following these 1971 decisions, courts used the nearly farcical procedure of focusing questions of public aid through the prism of the visible sectarian nature of the Catholic institution in question. Crucifixes on walls, mission statements involving faith, and even trophies from Catholic sports leagues publicly displayed became part of judicial evidence.

To move from the profane to the sacred, anti-Catholicism—and the acceptance of anti-Catholic assumptions—has been a core tactic in the pro-abortion movement. Pro-abortion rhetoric from the beginning has centered not on the issue of human life but on the purported imposition of Catholic belief on American law. (This was so successful an argument that many Catholics themselves have embraced it, particularly politicians.) Chants of “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries” were meant to specifically appeal to anti-Catholic prejudice. The entire philosophy of choice, which is both fundamental to pro-abortion rhetoric and avoids the entire issue of the sacredness of human life, is based on an appeal to a visceral anti-Catholicism. Catholics and the Church are attempting to extend their power over personal lives, the argument goes, and limit freedom of choice. It has been well-documented that the abortion movement was successful in winning hearts and minds solely for its appeal to the accepted assumptions of anti-Catholicism.

The so-called “death with dignity” pro-euthanasia movement has adopted the same anti-Catholic strategy. Very quickly the issue went from debating mercy killing to a question of free choice and the attempt by Catholics to deny that free choice. In 1997 in Oregon, when the attempt to repeal the 1994 Death with Dignity Act was overwhelmingly defeated, postelection analysis attributed the victory to a strategy of anti-Catholicism. Those in favor of physician- assisted suicide were able to present the Catholic Church as an alien force determined to overthrow Oregon law. One organization that lobbied in support of physician-assisted suicide was called the “Don’t Let Them Shove Their Religion Down Your Throat Committee.” Barbara Lee, leader of Oregon Right to Die, referred to the Catholic Church as “a political machine driven by dogma.”

Additionally, of course, anti-Catholic rhetoric is foundational to so many of the culture issues we face. Pick an issue in the culture wars, and you will find anti-Catholicism being used as a strategy to appeal to a wider constituency than it would generate on its own merits. It is central, for example, to the gay rights movement, and its literature invokes it incessantly.

Anti-Catholic tactics are used in these areas because they are successful. Anti-Catholicism is invoked because it is believed by a wide range of people in the United States who have been propagandized for generations. It is part of our thinking, our assumptions, and our cultural fabric. Anti-Catholicism has not only been a powerful and persistent force in America: It has also been disastrous for the national soul.

Author

  • Robert P. Lockwood

    At the time this article was published, Robert P. Lockwood, former president and publisher of Our Sunday Visitor, was director of research for the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

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