Discussion for article #241210
There’s a huge element of racism in Islamophobia that does not exist in ‘yesterday’s fear of Catholics’, not to mention we’re living post 9-11, and all the xenophobia that brings along. Comparing the two is laughable.
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I vividly recall this hysteria. One specific memory… a big community revival to hear a pair of evangelist brothers (whose names have faded from memory), in about 1950 or so, when I was a teenager and very devout. These guys spent a good share of their long program orating about the terrible threat of Catholicism; they gave “examples” of those horrors from South America and other places that sounded very exotic to people in my bible-belt small town. I wasn’t quite clear what those nasty Catholics were going to do to us all but it sounded credible and very scary! This sort of propaganda was finally undercut by Kennedy’s campaign and his adherence to his promise not to let the Pope dictate politics here, and its prominence in our minds largely displaced by other hysterias. In those days the current preponderance of Catholics on the SCOTUS would have been anathema–they’d never have been confirmed.
What color were all those South Americans? I pretty much thought of them as brown-skinned, though I had no problem with that personally. No, their color was not stressed directly… but I recall that those evangelists offered a good bit of racism in their spiel too, interwoven with the “the Catholics are coming!” hysteria. In retrospect that might explain something that always puzzled me… why they chose S.A. Catholics vs, say, Europeans, to exemplify the frightening stuff. The Pope was in Italy, not Brazil, after all.
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Yup. And the Mexicans are the new Irish, just like the Italians, the East European Jews, and the Chinese. Same anecdotally driven baseless calumnies about drugs, criminality and supposed resistance to learning English and assimilating, different decade.
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Actually the Irish Catholics were not considered “white” at least for a good chunk of American history.
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My wife’s Irish Catholic great grandparents disowned their daughter when she married a Sicilian Catholic man - because they viewed him as “black.”
However when we view the results of the current Catholic-majority Supreme Court, we might honestly regret that Catholics now have a privileged place at the table. Having a religious minority injecting their “morality” into our laws is not what the Founders desired. Looking at Scalia and Alito and Thomas in particular, it’s obvious they are demented by religion and incapable of rational judgment. Protestantism can do that too, obviously. But historically, have we ever had a high court as warped by religion as this one?
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I think much of the earlier fear of Catholics is rooted in the history of immigrants from Great Britain, and a legitimate fear of Catholic nations joining with pretenders to overthrow the government over a period of approximately 200 years. The pope declared Elizabeth I a heretic and illegitimate ruler and that it was the duty of Catholics to remove her from the throne. Although there were plots against her life most English Catholics were content with her rule. The only subsequent Catholic king was James II whose poor rule got him deposed, and any future Catholic monarchs banned. The last Stuart uprising ended in 1746, but an anti-Catholic suspicion has lasted centuries longer.
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xenophobic conservatives to the point of absurdity. Not to mention that these armed yahoos could cause violence.