The narcissism of small differences. When religion meets politics the poetics of demagoguery can launch a thousand careers. Anti-Catholic sentiment in the New World was an almost original sin of the founding settlers. All that was missing was a blood libel. A Vatican intent on leaving half the civilized world in darkness and bondage. The rhetoric continues today with modern replays of the theme of “catholic emancipation” and playing Voltaire’s tired old records with a scratching needle. The Protestant Empire, the New Israel is under seige and in need of existential threats and when the Islam business slows down it’s good to have a Catholic game plan in the back pocket.
“A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” said Hoover. A saloon on every street corner preferable to a Catholic in the White House was the spiel in the 1928 election. But, despite our apparent rejection of the past, the great future still hasn’t arrived.No faith has delivered the goods and met the expectations in a crude sense that appeals to mobs ready to stone, burn or hang the infidels of the moment. And the Catholic Church is the classic bogeyman, a more formidable foe that the numerically outmanned yids. In every modernizing movement from Protestant Reformers , French insurrectionists, Leftists, Women’s Rights advocates, stem cell researchers, ad infinitum, there is always a fallback position that our inexorable push for progress has been halted by the Catholic Church.
The issue has always centered around the concept of the perfectibility of humankind. Moderation, prudence, courage, and justice,are the four pillars, the virtues, that were the mantra of the Roman Empire. By these works ye shall know them. From Martin Luther, there arose theological virtues of faith,charity and hope as a cornerstone of Protestantism. Saved. Amazing Grace. Redemption. They are not all that different, and Americans, with their belief in reason guiding the world, and a faith in progress seems typically Vaticanized, although the trust in the almighty bears witness to Judaism’s notion of the covenant.
---Including here, where the Prince was rumored to have secretly married a Catholic peasant…Gillray uses Hogarth’s prints of Marriage a la mode AND a Harlot’s Progress to depict his views on this subject (Gillray was not a fan of Catholics). Read More:http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2008/10/13/stars-of-political-cartooning-james-gillray/
As a parallel it’s probably not a coincidence that anti-Semitism seems to be in full flower as well, and though Islam has been doing the heavy lifting in taking the blame, the source is actually more obscure. Catholicism is no stranger to Jewish oppression, but the quote attributed to Viereck, that Catholic baiting is the anti-semitism of the liberal, is, as a general proposition, not to be dismissed. Of course all this modern tribalism arises at times of tectonic changes, technological structural reconfigurations that alter existing business and social models, not aided by the economic dislocation these engender. Socially then, Jews and Catholic adherents share some commonality in that in transitional periods, the dominant culture battens down the hatches, dives into Walden Pond, and chases the elixir of authenticity and populism usually trampling on Jews and the Catholic Church in the process.
---Graham Greene's Brighton Rock dealt with religious issues. By his own admission, Greene did not die in a state of grace This, then, was the man who died with the full honours of the Catholic church, by which he remains venerated to this day, and who was accorded a requiem Mass at Westminster Cathedral where, as his American biographer Michael Shelden observes, "a noble attempt was made to place him on the side of the angels". Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-539011/The-decadent-world-Graham-Greene--high-priest-darkness.html#ixzz1nxg4pbjd
From a review of Ken Burns’s documentary Prohibition which shows the intrinsic relation to religion ( see link at end):
President Abraham Lincoln, who actually sold alcohol himself when he was a shopkeeper, turned to taxation on alcohol in 1862 and again in 1864 to help pay for the costs of the Civil War. When we consider not only the enormous quantities of alcohol people drank in that era, from breakfast through dinner, due to the lack of a clean water supply, but also that in many cases alcohol was the only medicine available to use as a pain killer for huge numbers of men wounded in the fighting, this amounted to a very large sum, indeed. This was also an era when distilleries, brewers, saloons, taverns, and so on were ubiquitous, in what from the film’s images and descriptions show to be infinitely greater numbers than exist today,…allow me to point out that Prohibition would never have happened but for an enormous and vocal group of Protestant Evangelicals, who outright hated Catholics, as well as anyone who was not of Anglo-Saxon descent….
---Now, let’s be clear. The temperance movement was led mainly by WASPs who were suspicious of America’s move towards a more diverse, urban society in the 1920s. In fact, even the Ku Klux Klan “supported prohibition as a weapon against immigrants,” Daniel Okrent notes in his new best-selling book Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. In fact, Okrent also notes that some “dry” Americans (as the prohibition forces were known) faced a problem when their anti-Catholic feelings ran up against their anti-alcohol impulses. When New York’s own Al Smith ran for president in 1928 -- with his thick New York accent, Tammany Hall background and Irish roots -- he was the first Catholic to make a serious run for the White House. This did not sit well with the likes of Rev. Bob Jones, who said, “I would rather see a saloon on every corner than a Catholic in the White House.” Jones even said that, rather than a Catholic, he’d prefer a black president, though he used a word much more offensive than “black.” Read more: http://www.irishcentral.com/story/news/sidewalks/boardwalk-empire-fighting-the-empire-of-demon-drink-103042054.html#ixzz1nxUP3xJL image:http://www.thesmalls.com/cuttysark/the-real-mccoy/index.html
This is not a pleasant thing to say, of course, but then many truths in history are unpleasant. The documentary clearly shows how a real loathing and mistrust of Catholic immigrants, not only for their religious practices but also because their attitudes towards the use of alcohol, completely took hold of the white Protestant Low-Church wing of the National psyche. If you were a fervent Baptist in 1898 America and saw your new German or Italian neighbors celebrating the First Communion of their child in the front parlor, with a big family party full of strange music and plenty of beer and wine, you probably felt as though the world was coming to an end – or that at the very least that the arrival of the Antichrist was getting closer….Read More:http://blogofthecourtier.com/2011/10/05/review-prohibition/
---I have long believed that some adventurous and audacious scholar could well make the case that the two persons (not political office holders) who did the most substantial, long-lasting damage to the United States of America were the clergymen Lyman Beecher and Charles G. Finney. Perhaps historian David Goldfield, author of America Aflame! How The Civil War Created a Nation, is that person as this incisive review of his new book details. Goldfield backgrounds the ethnocultural/ethnoreligious dynamic that contributed to the outbreak of this horrific conflict. This exciting volume is at the top of my must-read list. Beecher, co-founder of the temperance movement, supporter of the Second Great Awakening, help spread the rabid anti-Catholic contagion throughout America with his book, A Plea For The West. His brood of thirteen children included Charles Beecher, Catharine Beecher, Edward Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, Harriette Beecher Stowe (and her noxious husband Calvin Stowe), the motley crew responsible for compulsory government schooling, prohibition, anti-Catholicism, women's suffrage, abolitionism, and the Civil War. Finney was the key proponent of the Second Great Awakening and hence of the postmillennial pietistic Protestant intervention into public affairs in compulsory government schooling, prohibition, anti-Catholicism, women suffrage, a
tionism, "blue laws" and other anti-sex legislation such as censorship of birth control information and pornography, the Civil War, and the spawning of the welfare state.---Read More:http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/89539.html image:http://mafiatoday.com/general-breaking-news/the-mafias-greatest-untouchable-the-flamboyant-1920s-mob-boss-and-the-true-story-behind-tvs-boardwalk-empire/
ADDENDUM:
A consistent critic of Prohibition as governor of New York, Smith took a stance on the Eighteenth Amendment that was politically dangerous both nationally and within the party. While the Democratic platform downplayed the issue, Smith brought it to the fore by telling Democrats at the convention that he wanted “fundamental changes” in Prohibition legislation; shortly thereafter, Smith called openly for Prohibition’s repeal, angering Southern Democrats. At the same time, the Anti-Saloon League, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and other supporters of the temperance movement exploited Smith’s anti-Prohibition politics, dubbing him “Al-coholic” Smith, spreading rumors about his own addiction to drink, and linking him with moral decline. A popular radio preacher put Smith in the same camp as “card playing, cocktail drinking, poodle dogs, divorces, novels, stuffy rooms, dancing, evolution, Clarence Darrow, nude art, prize-fighting, actors, greyhound racing, and modernism.”Read More:http://millercenter.org/president/hoover/essays/biography/3
---Let’s look at one of the supposedly anti-Catholic Nast cartoons. “The American River Ganges” (above) depicts an army of bishops crawling onto our shores. Their miters have transformed into crocodile mouths, as they prepare to devour young children.--- Read More:http://cartoonblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/10/10095425-thomas-nast-anti-irish-anti-catholic-bigot
Howard Zinn:In the year 1610, a Catholic priest in the Americas named Father Sandoval wrote back to a church functionary in Europe to ask if the capture, transport, and enslavement of African blacks was legal by church doctrine. A letter dated March 12, 1610, from Brother Luis Brandaon to Father Sandoval gives the answer:
Your Reverence writes me that you would like to know whether the Negroes who are sent to your parts have been legally captured. To this I reply that I think your Reverence should have no scruples on this point, because this is a matter which has been questioned by the Board of Conscience in Lisbon, and all its members are learned and conscientious men. Nor did the bishops who were in Sao Thome, Cape Verde, and here in Loando-all learned and virtuous men-find fault with it. We have been here ourselves for forty years and there have been among us very learned Fathers . .. never did they consider the trade as illicit. Therefore we and the Fathers of Brazil buy these slaves for our service without any scruple….Read More:http://www.mvla.net/teachers/HectorP/SoPol/Documents/APHOTUS/A%20People%27s%20History%20of%20the%20United%20States.pdf
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