03/26/00

Religion in Politics: playing the anti-Catholic card

I’m writing this on St. Patrick’s Day. A few years back, a clever little volume called “How the Irish Saved Civilization” was being read with a great deal of satisfaction by all those with a few drops of Irish blood, and the author has since followed up with a book or two about other nationalities. The book explained how monks and scholars and missionaries from Ireland went to the continent of Europe after the disruption of Roman civilization by tribes usually called barbarians. The Irish brought literacy and art, manners and morals and, most of all, hope in the midst of violence. They civilized the Frankish and Germanic tribes by making them Catholic and thereby enabled Europe to pass from the Dark Ages into the Middle Ages.

The book contained no surprises for me. At a very young age I had read a volume of Irish history called “The Isle of Saints and Scholars”. The book was given to my mother by the Sisters of Mercy who taught her at the now-closed St. Finbarr School on 14th and Keeler. What my mother’s Irish history book emphasized, and what is understated in the popular history today, was how the Irish had themselves been civilized by the Catholic faith. The Irish were brought into civilization by coming to believe in Jesus Christ as savior of the whole world through his body, the universal Church.

If they had not become Catholic, the Irish would have been neither saints nor scholars and would have had no motive to leave home and go east to preach Jesus Christ in a Europe under barbarian siege. Without the truths of the faith taught by St. Patrick and without the discipline of the faith accepted from him, the Irish would themselves have been just a collection of warrior tribes stuck on the farthest island off the west coast of Europe. If the Irish are civilizers, it’s less because they’re Irish than because they’re Catholic. I hope I can write that without laying myself open to the charge of anti-Irish prejudice, since three of my grandparents bore the names of McCarthy, Delaney and Connolly. And my Grandma George (baptized Mary Connolly after the Great Fire by the Jesuits at Holy Family on 12th Street) used to say that the German side of the family had been dead for so long that it no longer counted!

When, after the First World War, the Irish made it clear to all the world that they were determined to change their relationship to the British Empire after centuries of subjugation and penalization for their own faith in their own land, the British government of that day separated six of the counties of the Province of Ulster from the rest of Ireland by deliberately playing the anti-Catholic card. Ireland has known bloodshed, in fits and starts, ever since. Playing religious differences off against each other may be good politics in the short run: somebody wins. In the long run, however, civil society, civilization itself, is destroyed.

Is the anti-Catholic card being played in U.S. politics today? It wouldn’t be the first time. The history of this country is bound up with anti-Catholicism. One of the complaints of the American colonials against King George III was that he permitted the free exercise of the Catholic religion in newly conquered French Canada, putting the purity of their own religion in jeopardy. At the time of the revolution, the only public Catholic Church in the thirteen colonies was St. Joseph’s in Philadelphia, where the Quakers permitted a tolerance of Catholicism that was illegal elsewhere. Even in colonial Maryland, which had been founded by Catholics as a haven of religious freedom for everyone, Catholics had to worship quietly in private homes when the Church of England became established in the colony.

Decades after the revolution, when Catholic immigrants began coming in great numbers, especially the Irish escaping starvation, anti-Catholic hate literature was popular and convents were burned in Boston and Philadelphia. The Know Nothing party was formed in the 1840s with an explicitly nativist, anti-Catholic bias. With its partner, the Whig Party from revolutionary times, it merged into the Republican Party, which was formed just before the Civil War. After the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan was as adamantly against Catholics as it was against Jews and “Negroes”. Nor was the Klan an exclusively Southern movement. In Oregon, where there are few African-Americans and even fewer Jews, it was strong into the 1930s and contributed to the banning of Catholic schools in that state, a ban finally overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. In the Midwest, more than one Catholic church has witnessed a burning cross on its lawn.

The Klan’s more respectable version was called the American Protective Association, which was concerned about protecting the United States from Catholic influences. Its successor organization was Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (POAU). Books by anti-Catholic polemicist Paul Blanshard were popular in my youth. The sincerity of his belief that Catholicism was a threat to American freedom doesn’t alter the fact that his spin on Catholic teaching and practice did much to give a respectable face to anti-Catholic prejudice.

Today, anti-Catholicism in American life has two sources. There is the religious anti-Catholicism of some fundamentalist Protestants. Protestants since Martin Luther have identified the Pope with the anti-Christ, although only fundamentalists, and not all of them, will make that identification now. This deep religious conviction that Catholicism is a totally false religion is hurtful. It is sad to hear the Church which is our mother called a whore and to hear God’s holy word in Scripture misused and distorted into saying things it does not say. We have become newly aware of this rhetoric during the current primary campaign, with the fracas over Gov. George Bush’s ill-advised visit to Bob Jones University in South Carolina. But Catholics’ full participation in American life today is not threatened by Bob Jones or his university. Graduates of Bob Jones University don’t sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Not only sad but frightening is the secular anti-Catholicism, sometimes internalized by some Catholics themselves, which makes the denial of elements of Catholic teaching a test for higher political office or even for offering a public service. In California today, the state government is considering forcing Catholic hospitals to do abortions, and there is at least one Republican legislator in the Illinois General Assembly who would do the same. We’ve come a long way in one generation from Vatican II’s description of abortion as a “heinous crime” condemned by all Christian churches, to reluctantly accepting abortion as a rare but necessary tragedy, to proclaiming it a fundamental human right which all must support, no matter their conscientious beliefs.

During a recent primary campaign debate with Senator Bradley, the Vice President called attention to the presence in the audience of the president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights League and assured her that his presidential appointees as judges would be pro-choice. With that public promise on national TV, he cut off thousands of faithful Catholic jurists from full participation in serving their profession or their country. That’s the kind of promise that revives in new guise the old discrimination against Catholics in public life unless they are willing to compromise their faith or reduce it to a purely personal and private opinion. As a Catholic, I find the Vice President’s promise, no matter his own sincere intentions, frightening.

The Catholic Church does not permit her pulpits to be used by politicians nor her priests to be engaged in party politics; other churches do, without much out cry about separation of church and state. All people of faith, however, bring religion into social questions, for social questions are often moral issues. The usual Catholic approach to social questions which are also moral issues is to analyze them using natural law theory rather than using explicitly religious terms. Our social teaching is biblically based but often philosophically expressed, in order to permit civil discussion about the common good with everyone in the society.

There will be no civil conversation at all, however, if politicians of any party play the anti-Catholic card. I do not believe that Catholics will allow themselves to be easily manipulated. Nor do I believe that Americans will allow politicians or pundits to stir up religious bias and introduce the risk of future bloodshed for short-term political gain. What is at stake in this highly dangerous game is our civilization. God bless you.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago

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