Anti-Catholicism in the United States

Because the Reformation was based on an effort to correct what was perceived as the errors and excesses of the Catholic Church, its proponents formed strong positions against the Roman clerical hierarchy in general and the Papacy in particular.

[13] Many of the English colonists who settled in North America during the 17th and 18th centuries, such as the Puritans and Congregationalists, had themselves fled Europe due to religious persecution by the Church of England, whose doctrines and modes of worship they believed to be firmly rooted in Roman Catholicism.

[1] 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.

In 1649, the Act of Toleration was passed in the Province of Maryland, where "blasphemy and the calling of opprobrious religious names" became punishable offenses, but it was repealed in 1654 and thus Catholics were outlawed once again.

[18] 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.

Numerous ex-priests and ex-nuns were on the anti-Catholic lecture circuit with lurid tales, always involving heterosexual contacts of adults—priests and nuns with dead babies buried in the basement.

He 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.

In particular it singled out the celibacy of priests as a sin and violation of the law of nature and assumed men's efforts to repress their sexual energy would lead inevitably to child abuse, incest, rape, and murder.

He gave a speech at the Catholic University of Notre Dame in Indiana in 1904, and praised the "enterprise, courage, and fidelity to duty that distinguished those heroes of Spain who braved the then frightful dangers of the deep to carry Christianity and European civilization into the far-off Orient."

Anti-Catholicism was widespread in the 1920s; anti-Catholics, led by the Ku Klux Klan, believed that Catholicism was incompatible with democracy and that parochial schools encouraged separatism and kept Catholics from becoming loyal Americans.

In Alabama, Hugo Black was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1926 after he had built a political base in part through his delivery of 148 speeches at local Klan gatherings, where his focus was the denunciation of Catholicism.

"[54] A leading Constitutional scholar,[55] Professor Philip Hamburger of Columbia University Law School, has strongly called into question Black's integrity on the church-state issue because of his close ties to the KKK.

Hamburger argues that his views on the need for separation of Church and State were deeply tainted by his membership in the Ku Klux Klan, a vehemently anti-Catholic organization.

In Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), the United States Supreme Court declared the Oregon's Compulsory Education Act unconstitutional in a ruling that has been called "the Magna Carta of the parochial school system."

Many Americans who sincerely rejected bigotry and the Klan justified their opposition to Smith because they believed the Catholic Church was an "un-American" and "alien" culture that opposed freedom and democracy.

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."

[60] Prohibition had widespread support in rural Protestant towns, and Smith's wet position, as well as his long-time sponsorship by Tammany Hall compounded his difficulties there.

The surge proved permanent; Catholics made up a major portion of the New Deal Coalition that Franklin D. Roosevelt assembled and which dominated national elections for decades.

[71] Daniels was a staunch Methodist and worked well with Catholics in the U.S., but he had little sympathy for the church in Mexico, feeling it represented the landed aristocracy that stood opposed to his version of liberalism.

The main issue was the government's efforts to shut down Catholic schools in Mexico; Daniels publicly approved the attacks, and saluted virulently anti-Catholic Mexican politicians.

"[74] In 1946, the judge David A Rose, called upon Boston's attorney general to investigate anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish alleged activities and publications of the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America.

[80] Eleanor Roosevelt, the president's widow, and other New Deal liberals who were fighting Irish-dominated Democratic parties, feuded publicly with church leaders on national policy.

In July 1949, Roosevelt had a public disagreement with Francis Joseph Spellman, the Catholic Archbishop of New York, which was characterized as "a battle still remembered for its vehemence and hostility".

"[81] During the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, Eleanor Roosevelt favored the republican Loyalists against General Francisco Franco's Nationalists; after 1945, she opposed normalizing relations with Spain.

[8] In politics, the two factions often joined forces with the Republican Party and formed the Christian right in order to advocate conservative positions on social and cultural issues, such as opposition to gay marriage and abortion.

[97] Starting in 1993, members of Historic Adventist splinter groups paid to have anti-Catholic billboards that called the pope the Anti-Christ placed in various cities on the West Coast, including along Interstate 5 from Portland to Medford, Oregon, and in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

[98][99][100][101][102] 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.

There were nine Catholics (six justices, both vice-presidential candidates, and the Speaker), three Jews (all from the Supreme Court), two Mormons (including the Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney) and one African-American Protestant (incumbent President Barack Obama).

These included cases of arson, beheaded statues, gravestones defaced with swastikas, smashed windows, pro-abortion graffiti, theft, and more having taken place in Catholic churches and buildings.

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.