Why Anti-Catholic Prejudice Ought to Bother Everyone

Rev. Robert Barron:

Last week two outrageously anti-Catholic outbursts took place in the public forum. The first was an article in U.S. News and World Report by syndicated columnist Jamie Stiehm. Ms. Stiehm argued that the Supreme Court was dangerously packed with Catholics, who have, she averred, a terribly difficult time separating church from state and who just can’t refrain from imposing their views on others. Her meditations were prompted by Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s granting some legal breathing space to the Little Sisters of the Poor, who were objecting to the provisions of the HHS mandate. As even a moment’s thoughtful consideration would reveal, this decision hadn’t a thing to do with the intrusion of the “church” into the state, in fact just the contrary. Moreover, the appeal of American citizens (who happen to be Catholic nuns) and the decision of a justice of the Supreme Court in no way constitute an “imposition” on anyone. The very irrationality of Stiehm’s argument is precisely what has led many to conclude that her column was prompted by a visceral anti-Catholicism which stubbornly persists in our society.

The second eruption of anti-Catholicism was even more startling. In the course of a radio interview, Governor Andrew Cuomo blithely declared that anyone who is pro-life on the issue of abortion or who is opposed to gay marriage is “not welcome” in his state of New York. Mind you, the governor did not simply say that such people are wrong-headed or misguided; he didn’t say that they should be opposed politically or that good arguments against their position should be mounted; he said they should be actively excluded from civil society! As many commentators have already pointed out, Governor Cuomo was thereby excluding roughly half of the citizens of the United States and, presumably, his own father, Mario Cuomo, who once famously declared that he was personally opposed to abortion. Again, the very hysterical quality of this statement suggests that an irrational prejudice gave rise to it.

One does not have to search very far, of course, to find the source of this prejudice deep in the American national consciousness. Many of the Founding Fathers harbored suspicions of Catholicism that came from their intellectual formation in both Protestantism and Enlightenment rationalism. Read John Adams’s remarkable reaction to a Catholic Mass that he attended in Philadelphia to sense the texture of this prejudice. As the waves of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and Southern Europe arrived on American soil in the 19th century, many figures in the political and cultural establishment feared that an influx of Catholics would compromise the integrity of American society. Accordingly, they organized political parties the platforms of which were specifically and virulently anti-Catholic. It is startling to realize that this political anti-Catholicism was not the exclusive preserve of yahoos and extremists. Prominent and mainstream figures such as Ulysses Grant and Woodrow Wilson were vehement in their opposition to the Catholic Church. Many have argued that the election of the Catholic John F. Kennedy to the presidency in 1960 signaled a sea-change in American attitudes toward the Church, but we have to be cautious, for Kennedy represented, more or less, a privatized Catholicism that posed no real threat to the societal status quo.

What is particularly troubling today is the manner in which this deep-seated anti-Catholicism is finding expression precisely through that most enduring and powerful of American institutions, namely the law.

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