Anti-Catholic Bigotry in Politics

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 6/5/03)

After all these years I don't remember exactly what Sister said, but I'm not likely ever to forget the feeling she put into saying it — the mix of anger, hurt and they'll-do-the-same-thing-to-you-if-they-get-a-chance resentment trembling in her voice as she spoke to our class in a Washington, D.C., parochial school.

It was the late 1940s, two decades after Al Smith's presidential campaign of 1928, and for this kindly woman the pain of that episode was still fresh and raw. Her message to us was simple: Anti-Catholic bigots kept Smith out of the White House, and they would inflict similar humiliations on other Catholics if given the chance.

Inevitably, I recall her distress as we approach the 75th anniversary of the Smith campaign. Historians say that Al Smith, a popular New York governor running on the Democratic ticket, would have lost that election anyway. For a number of reasons, 1928 was not a Democratic year. But the anti-Catholicism that erupted when Smith ran made the campaign a watershed of sorts.

Charles Morris argues in his book American Catholic that the bigotry accompanying Smith's resounding loss to Herbert Hoover hastened the movement of Catholics into a ghetto subculture. In that respect, the events of 1928 were not unlike the fundamentalists' defeat in the 1925 Scopes trial, which turned on the teaching of evolutionism in public schools and pushed fundamentalists into half a century of self-imposed cultural isolation.

Morris probably overstates the case — the Catholic subculture was already well developed by then, nor were Catholics ever as ghettoized as he suggests. But the triumph of anti-Catholicism in 1928 undoubtedly helped create an us-vs.-them mentality that lasted many years. It rang out loud and clear in my parochial school classroom in the '40s.

Symbolically and psychologically, the big shift for Catholics was the 1960 presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy. Smith confronted the bigots head-on, declaring bigotry in fundamental conflict with American values. Kennedy took a markedly different approach: Speaking to suspicious Protestant ministers in Houston, he assured them he wouldn't permit the Church to get in the way of his duties as president.

Kennedy's victory has been hailed as the definitive defeat of political anti-Catholicism. That may be so. But it had a high price, one still being paid.

The price is measured in surrender to views that conflict with Catholic values. Today's pro-choice Catholic politicians, for whom courting the abortion lobby has become a central condition of their careers, are clear current examples.

For instance: When the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith last January published a document on the political responsibilities of Catholics, including the duty to be prolife, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) shrugged it off. Or again: When Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), a congressman with a previously pro-life voting record, decided he wanted to compete for the Democratic presidential nomination, he declared himself to be a convinced supporter of legal abortion.

The list could be extended. Many Catholic voters whose loyalties lie with the Democratic Party still think of it as it was in Al Smith's day. But it's not. Although some bravely pro-life Democrats remain, the party is officially at odds with pro-life stands on abortion and other issues. The posturing of pro-choice Catholic politicians underlines that.

How many of them, one wonders, now could say something Smith said in 1937, after an audience with Pope Pius XI: "I have always been proud of being a Catholic. I was never prouder than I was today, when I could call him 'Father,' and he called me 'Son.'"

Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, D.C.

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