This paper was presented at the

"Anti-Catholicism
The Last Acceptable Prejudice Conference"

May 24, 2002, Fordham University, New York, NY

co-sponsored by: The American Catholics in the Public Square Project, Commonweal Magazine, and Fordham Universirty's Center for American Catholic Studies

A History of the Culture’s Bias:
John McGreevy / University of Notre Dame

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Note: Much of the material below is extracted from a book titled Catholicism and American Freedom: A History, From Slavery to Abortion to be published next spring by W.W. Norton

• Two questions: how should we understand the history of American anti-Catholicism_ And how should history help us understand the controversies of the current moment, raging with a passion that none of us could have predicted when we accepted invitations for this panel nine months ago_

In a certain sense, of course, anti-Catholicism is integral to the formation of the United States.  The men and women who founded the British North American colonies in the seventeenth century lived within living memory of Martin Luther and  John Calvin. When William Brewster sailed for the New World on the Mayflower in 1620, he lugged along the just published English translation of Venetian historian Paulo Sarpi’s slashing attack on the Council of Trent and the papacy. In 1775, Thomas Paine doubted that inhabitants of the "popish world” would ever enjoy “political liberty."[1]

The alliance with Catholic France during the revolutionary war, and the heroism of such figures as Lafayette briefly made anti-Catholic statements impolitic.[2] Just a couple miles from this room, Alexander Hamilton urged the New York State assembly to allow Catholics full voting rights in 1787. Hamilton emphasized the "little power possessed by the Pope in Europe" and the needless "vigilance of those who would bring engines to extinguish fire which had many days subsided."[3]

Hostility to Catholicism began to swell again in the 1820s and 1830s on both sides of the Atlantic, as German and, especially, Irish Catholic immigrants made their way to Liverpool, Glasgow, New York, Philadelphia and Boston. John Adams complained to Thomas Jefferson about the Jesuits in 1821, and in Boston, in 1834, a mob destroyed an Ursuline convent. In 1836, a group of reformers arranged for the publication of Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures of Hotel Dieu Nunnery, a salacious (but wholly fictitious) expose of life in a Canadian convent that nonetheless became the best-selling book of the nineteenth century before Uncle Tom’s Cabin.[4] In the 1850s, an explicitly anti-Catholic political party, the American party, became the most important third party in the country’s history –the modern Republican Party emerged in 1856 only after the American party’s popularity had shattered the prospects of the Whigs.

It’s here, in the mid-nineteenth century, that we can begin to disentangle two strands of anti-Catholicism in the United States. The first is an intensely religious  anti-Catholicism derived from the Reformation era-polemics that shaped American cultural life through the nineteenth century. Here Catholics are suspect because they are perceived to take orders from the Pope, who himself might be the anti-Christ. Here Catholics believe in self-evidently ludicrous doctrines such as purgatory and transubstantiation.

This religious anti-Catholicism, does not vanish in the mid-nineteenth century. It informs the activities of the American Protective Association in the 1890s, the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, opposition to Al Smith in the presidential election of 1928, and modern evangelicalism throughout much of the twentieth century. It continues with a whimper, not a bang, with anti-Catholic asides on the website of Bob Jones University.[5]

The second strand of anti-Catholicism, what our organizers termed the “last acceptable prejudice,” is more complicated. Here Catholicism is troubling not as a set of religious beliefs per se, but as a hierarchical and authoritarian institution whose adherents are incapable of recognizing the importance of human autonomy. Call this a cultural anti-Catholicism.  Listen to Theodore Parker, one of the most important American liberals of the 1840s and 1850s: "The Roman Catholic Church claims infallibility for itself, and denies spiritual freedom, liberty of mind or conscience, to its members. It is therefore the foe of all progress; it is deadly hostile to Democracy. She is the natural ally of tyrants and the irreconcilable enemy of freedom. "[6]

The overlap between religious and cultural anti-Catholicism is significant, but we can make distinctions. Parker was a radical Protestant minister, but he was also a representative figure of nineteenth century North Atlantic liberalism, religious or not. Like John Stuart Mill in England, Giuseppe Mazzini in Italy, Jules Michelet in France and others, Parker had become convinced that freedom or liberty meant an autonomous self, exempt from external constraint. The individual as negotiator of contracts, as voluntary (and equal) marriage partner and as owner of himself and his labor must serve as the starting point for a progressive social order. In the United States Ralph Waldo Emerson famously extolled “self-reliance” (and Emerson not coincidentally complained of “Romish priests, who sympathize, of course, with despotism.”)[7]  

Parker and Emerson, I should emphasize, were not simply bigots. If nineteenth century liberals idealized human autonomy, Catholics habitually invoked communities. This meant that Catholics offered acute criticism of  the new industrial economy, and how the right to contract for an individual might mean very little to workers unable to find jobs at more than subsistence wages. But the same Catholics only belatedly joined the first great human rights campaign of the modern era, against slavery. Again Theodore Parker:   “The Catholic clergy are on the side of slavery…They love slavery itself; it is an institution thoroughly congenial to them, consistent with the first principles of their Church…”[8]

Even so, Parker, Emerson and many of their nineteenth century successors did cross the line from legitimate criticism of Catholic views on particular subjects such as slavery to a cultural anti-Catholicism. Like many American liberals in the nineteenth century, they too casually equated Catholic belief with opposition to the most precious achievements of modernity, notably individual autonomy and the political democracy and experimental science that came in its wake. Max Weber’s link between Protestantism and the capitalist ethic is one version of this story, and Weber himself was shaped by fierce debates between liberals and Catholics in late nineteenth century Germany. In the United States, the American pragmatists recently sketched by Louis Menand, including Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey, habitually framed their own philosophical tributes to contingency against Catholic intransigence.[9]

Differences of opinion between Catholics and American intellectuals did not always result in political battles. In the early twentieth century, American liberals and Catholics found much common ground in their criticism of laissez-faire capitalism, and their support of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. During the 1930s, especially, American liberals focused on modest attempts to redistribute wealth and support for trade unions – policies that had deep resonance within the still largely working-class Catholic populations of the urban North. When Franklin Roosevelt quoted Pius XI’s papal encyclical on the social question, Quadregesimo Anno, Catholic intellectuals responded with giddy shivers of delight.[10]

In the 1940s the tempo shifted. Prominent intellectuals such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Talcott Parsons, John Dewey and others, appalled by Catholic support of Franco during the Spanish Civil War and worried about the possibility of government aid to parochial schools,  offered lacerating criticism of Catholicism as incompatible with American democracy.  Here, too, as in the nineteenth  century, many  intellectuals moved from legitimate criticism of a powerful institution to a cultural anti-Catholicism – many of these figures shared an unspoken assumption that any hierarchical institution, any organization making truth claims  was morally suspect. One prominent contributor to the Atlantic Monthly insisted in 1948 that “[T] he clear implication in our Constitution [is] that religious truth is an individual quest, that authoritarianism and religion are contradictory terms.”[11]

These particular fears about Catholicism faded in the 1950s, and John Kennedy’s election in 1960 and the Second Vatican Council seemed to mark a new rapprochement. Instead, since 1965 we’ve seen renewed, perhaps even more intense, conflict,  between Catholics and liberals around issues of sex and gender.

Let me make three observations:

• First, no one in 1965 could have predicted that abortion would become a cornerstone of American liberalism, that a woman’s right to choose would become so valued that the 1984 Democratic platform would call legal abortion a “fundamental human right.” As late as the mid-1960s, the Democratic party, often led by Catholic politicians, was arguably more conservative on sexual ethics than the Republican party of Nelson Rockefeller, Gerald Ford  and even a California governor named Ronald Reagan.
• Second, the Catholic Church was the single most important opponent of legal abortion in the 1960s and 1970s. This guaranteed renewed conflict between Catholics and liberals. It also meant that  many liberals began to insist that so-called “religious” views had no place in the public sphere. Laurence Tribe, perhaps the country's most influential constitutional lawyer, argued before Congress in defense of Roe v. Wade in 1974 that only "ways of reasoning acceptable to all” should inform public debate, and branded Catholic arguments on abortion as impermissible efforts to legislate "religious faith upon which people will invariably differ widely."  Involving the State in a woman’s decision whether to terminate her pregnancy, Tribe argued, was as ill-advised as permitting governmental aid to Catholic schools.[12]
• Third, the same decade, from 1965 to 1975, saw the birth of both the modern women’s movement and the modern gay and lesbian rights movement. The combined effect was to weaken, perhaps fatally, Catholic credibility on all matters related to sex. The impact of the women’s movement was obvious: even as women achieved positions of leadership throughout American society, they were prevented from doing so within the Catholic church. (And the sudden collapse in the number of women entering religious orders made the public face of Catholicism more male in the 1970s than it had been in the 1950s.)  In itself, this gender hierarchy did not destroy the plausibility of the Catholic argument on abortion, as pro-life women attested. And yet the effect has been devastating: on one side, in a culture where personal experience seemed crucial to the assessment of moral problems, pro-choice women spoke of the terrors of unwanted pregnancy and the dangers of illegal abortions. On the other side, priests and (male) Catholic lawyers outlined in abstract terminology their opposition to the taking of innocent life. As one Catholic activist confided in 1967, the "impasse over [abortion] will not be broken by talking (as Catholics have been prone to talk) only about the right to life. If nothing else, that has been a principle which has precluded the need to look at the evidence, or listen to the testimony of women who want abortions."[13]

The impact of the modern gay and lesbian rights movement has become evident more recently. As we know realize, the gay awakening that came in the wake of the 1960s has had an immense, if largely uncharted effect on the Catholic priesthood. As sexual identity came to be understood as central to personal identity, many seminarians and priests came to understand themselves as gay, often in a clerical culture where bishops simultaneously  denied the relevance of the issue publicly, and  privately worried about a preponderance of gays in the seminaries.[14] Again the disregard of personal experience was central: how could Catholics credibly discuss sexual orientation (and important related issues such as the character of marriage)  when Catholic leaders seemed incapable of acknowledging the issue’s centrality to their own lives_  All of this occurred in a society where the pace of change was breathtaking: in 1965 gays and lesbians were largely invisible, or at best understood as pitiful figures; now we watch Will and Grace.

My general point is this: some of the scorn heaped on official Catholic views on sexuality in the last two decades results from a cultural anti-Catholicism with enduring, if intermittent strength in American society, one whose underpinnings I’ve tried to sketch here. A central assumption of this cultural anti-Catholicism in the twentieth century is that autonomy is the preeminent moral good, and that “abstract” rules cannot adequately guide the individual faced with complex moral decisions. In this context, prohibitions on abortion are unreasonable attempts to legislate morality, an awkward defense for liberals who also write checks supporting, say, Amnesty International’s praiseworthy attempts to legislate morality throughout the world. Cautions against premarital sexual relations seem ludicrous. Celibacy, in a highly sexualized culture, is positively unhealthy. Priests, if we are to believe even such a distinguished figure as Garry Wills, too often enter the priesthood only to please their mothers.[15]

At the same time, the inability of Catholic leaders to offer a compelling vision of sexual ethics, one that takes women’s experience seriously, one that honestly acknowledges the importance of sexual identity for its leadership caste, invites criticism. If at times commentators on the current sexual abuse crisis  have relapsed into stereotypical notions of Catholics as authoritarian and backward, or compared Catholic leaders with the Taliban, most of the analysis, from Catholics and non-Catholics,  has rightly and appropriately focused on an appalling misuse of episcopal authority. None of this is pleasant. But Catholics at such a charged moment as our own should be especially careful not to mistake criticism for prejudice, acceptable or not.

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