Anti‐Catholic Movement

Anti‐Catholic Movement. Inherited from British sectarianism, anti‐Catholicism became the core ingredient in the American nativist movement. Like English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish Protestants, many Anglo‐Americans considered popery a subversive culture as well as an alien creed. They were convinced that Catholics, submissive to papal authority and beset by superstition, could never be loyal or productive citizens. Before 1820, with Catholics few in number, nativist worries were more fantasy than reality. After that date, massive Irish immigration provided a large, visible enemy and intensified fears for American institutions and values. These anxieties inspired vicious anti‐Catholic propaganda with pornographic overtones, such as Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures (1836); triggered attacks on Catholic neighborhoods and churches; increased demands for limitations on immigration and more rigid qualifications for citizenship; and in the 1850s produced the American (Know‐Nothing) party with an anti‐Catholic agenda.

Reflecting economic conditions, nativism waxed and waned during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Inspired by Social Darwinism, it took on racist and anti‐Semitic dimensions, but anti‐Catholicism remained a key ingredient. Immigration brought large numbers of Catholics from Italy and Eastern Europe into urban America and Irish American control of a rapidly expanding Catholic church with a large institutional structure, including parochial schools; political domination in many cities; and labor movement leadership. All this frightened nativists. The religious factor in American prejudice was particularly noticeable in rural areas and small towns. But even in more sophisticated environments such as business, the professions, and academia, Catholics as well as Jews often faced either exclusion or quotas.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the American Protective Association, the Guardians of Liberty, the American Minute Men, Covenanters, the Knights of Luther, and especially the revived Ku Klux Klan all appealed to anti‐Catholic bigotry. The Klan mobilized against Catholic Presidential candidates Alfred E. Smith in 1928 and John F. Kennedy in 1960.

Conditions improved as the twentieth century moved along. The favorable presentation of priests in 1930s and 1940s movies, Catholic patriotism during World War II, economic and social mobility after it, growing religious tolerance, and the popularity of John F. Kennedy all helped to diminish anti‐Catholicism and open doors of opportunity to its former victims. In the late 1960s, academics were the last important segment of the population to abandon their prejudice.

Although most Catholics felt comfortable in the United States by century's end, some still complained that they experienced more media criticism and ridicule than other racial or religious minorities. What remained of anti‐Catholicism was often directed at the church's official condemnation of contraception and abortion. A majority of the American Catholic laity has rejected the former and has reservations concerning the latter.
See also Anti‐Semitism; Immigration Law; Irish Americans; Italian Americans; Labor Movements; Protestantism; Roman Catholicism; Urbanization.

Bibliography

Ray Allen Billington , The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860, 1938, rpt. 1964.
John Higham , Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, 1955, rpt. 1965.

Lawrence J. McCaffrey