The New Anti-Catholicism

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 7/31/03)

Was anti-Catholicism among the causes of the American Revolution? When I said it was in something I wrote a while back, an editor questioned the claim. But you can look it up — in the Declaration of Independence, no less. Along with much else, the declaration accuses George III of "abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province…and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies."

Not so clear today, that was perfectly clear at the time. It's a reference to the Quebec Act of 1774 by which Britain granted political and legal concessions and allowed religious freedom to French Canadian Catholics, thus incensing Protestant bigots in the colonies to the south.

Today's anti-Catholicism is not the same as yesterday's, of course. Hostility to the Catholic Church now is not only more visible than it has been in a long time, but in some ways strikingly new.

The newness is spelled out in detail in The New Anti-Catholicism (Oxford University Press, 2003), an important book by a Pennsylvania State University professor named Philip Jenkins. "In modern American history, no mainstream denomination has ever been treated so consistently, so publicly, with such venom," he writes.

Jenkins is not a Catholic with a persecution complex. On the contrary, he reports, "I was a member of the Roman Catholic Church for many years, but I left, without any particular rancor, and since the late 1980s, I have been a member of the Episcopal Church." He also is a prolific and careful scholar with many other publications to his credit.

His thesis in this book is that alongside the old-fashioned Bible Belt anti-Catholicism that still exists here and there, a "new" form of bigotry arose in the 1960s from the activism of left-wing radicals.

Today it is found mainly on "the left/liberal side of the spectrum," especially among feminists and activist gays, who view the Church as the main obstacle to their political agendas on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. They are aided and abetted, it must be said, by allies in opinion-forming sectors of society.

"For many people in the United States — particularly for opinion-makers in the mass media and the academic world — Catholicism neither needs nor deserves the kind of protections that apply to other religious traditions," Jenkins says.

This has no small bearing on the way the clergy sex abuse scandal in the Church has been perceived and treated. No one — and certainly not I — wishes to suggest that this scandal has been no more than an especially luxuriant offshoot of anti-Catholicism. But someone who wishes to understand what has happened in all its ugly complexity must confront —along with everything else — the role played by anti-Catholicism, and particularly the scandal's treatment by some media. Jenkins, to his credit, documents this in detail.

Noteworthy in this context, too, has been the role of those wonderful people whom one can only call anti-Catholic Catholics — axe-grinders and special pleaders within the Church who leaped at this opportunity to vent their spleen and/or press their agendas. They, too, have their place in Jenkins's book.

A few groups, notably the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights under the redoubtable Bill Donohue, fight the good fight in defense of the Church against the new anti-Catholicism. Many Catholics just look the other way. In so doing, of course, they increase the likelihood that this bigotry will not merely persist but grow worse.

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