Sunday Edition #2 Hating The Catholic Church

Sunday Edition                    #2

Opinion and Points for Discussion for the Catholic That Thinks!   This Week:

Anti-Catholic Bias

Is Alive and Well

A

sk any Christian in America if it is easy to follow their faith in America in the twenty-first century and no matter which denomination the person belongs to you will probably hear that being a Christian is difficult.  They will agree that our society is turning away from Christian morality and are turning to left-leaning, liberal, secular morality where God has no place.  The same people will express a longing for that “old time religion” where people knew what was right and what was wrong.  In those long gone old-time religion days, the Christian world was united in many things including the sacredness of life, the absolute sinfulness of abortion, the validity of the ten commandments as rules of law, the fact that in marriage, what God joined together man could not cut asunder.  Then, one by one each denomination was invaded by a new generation of members, those who we now call “baby boomers.”  These children of my generation, the kids of the veterans of World War Two and Korea were brought up differently and they had other ideas regarding the notion of freedom.  In the Protestant world old pastors saw their flocks shrink as the young ones went to preachers that preached not the true Gospel, but rather a watered down version of it.  Little by little the Protestant world changed.  Here and there divorce was accepted.  In another denomination, an abortion was deemed okay “under certain circumstances.”  Day by day the face of the Protestant churches changed, becoming at once more liberal and at the same time less focused on the message of the Gospel.  These same people who long for the old-time religion will also tell you their opinion of the Roman Catholic Church for those teachings were preserved in pristine condition and passed down from father to son and from mother to daughter.  The Catholic Church is called the “Whore of Babylon” and its leader, the Pope of Rome is called “The Antichrist.”   The core teachings of the so-called “Bible Believing” Christians changed over time to accommodate the members but their prejudices against Catholics did not. In America, the land both I and my parents before me were born in, the land that I love, Catholics can be the target of hate without fear of reprisal.  The Catholic Church is a large soft target that anyone can speak out against without any fear of being brought up short and being lectured on tolerance and diversity.

Anti-Catholic bigotry has a long history.  The first settlers on the continent were Protestants who were glad to be leaving England where Catholic influence was still being felt.  Once they arrived at Plymouth Rock they set up laws and regulations that prohibited the Catholic Church from setting up shop in their colony.  The holy days of the Church were no longer celebrated and December 25th was considered just another work day (unless it fell on Sunday.)  In the colony of Massachuttes, there was a law that exiled Catholic priests.  They were given one warning and if they were caught if they returned to the colony the penalty was death.  Later on, the Know Nothings and KKK did what they could to make the Roman Catholic Church go away, they did not succeed, but they did hold a lot of political power at the start of the twentieth century and the immigration laws of the 1920’s that effectively turned off the fuel for the melting pot was seen as a way to protect America from the invasion of European immigrants, almost all Catholic, that would water down the influence of the Protestants.  At the time, and even up until the 1960’s it was thought that no Catholic could be a good American because he had to follow what the Pope, a leader of a foreign country, said.   It was John F. Kennedy who famously said that he was not the Catholic candidate, he was the Democratic candidate for president.  

But is Anti-Catholic feeling still going strong today? 

-         Under Obamacare, Catholic organizations were mandated to pay for contraception for their employees.

-         In New York, an obscene statue of the Blessed Virgin is displayed in a public art museum.

-         In the media, when a Catholic does something good, religion is not mentioned.  On the other hand, a Catholic’s religion is always mentioned if misbehavior is involved. 

-         Type “Roman Catholic” in any search engine on the internet and I bet that among the first ten websites listed, at least five will be anti-Catholic in nature.

-         Publishers like Jack Chick publish inflammatory, untrue accounts of renegade priests and nuns gone wild and weird little comic book tracts that are so patently bad that some Protestant bookstores won’t stock them.  Yet, the stories, which are like the ones that were made popular by the Ku Klux Klan in the early twentieth century are still available,

-         When Pope Paul VI died in 1978, Bob Jones of Bob Jones University wrote, “Pope Paul VI, archpriest of Satan, a deceiver and an antichrist, has, like Judas, gone to his own place.”

-         Will the day come when a Catholic Priest’s refusal to wed a same-sex couple brings them into legal trouble as a practitioner of hate?

-         Can you imagine Senator Feinstein asking a Muslim if his religion would affect his being a judge?  Luckily Amy Barrett was a Catholic and the question could be asked without fear.

-         The now-ousted Steve Bannon showed that anti-Catholic bias is just below the surface when he said that the Catholics supported the dreamers because they need illegal aliens to fill the churches.

I think you see that there is no lack of anti-Catholic bias out there.  It is quite ironic that the Catholic Church has become the main proponent of the full Gospel.  Unlike our Protestant brothers and sisters, our Church has as a matter of policy not kept up with the times.  Her doctrine remains unchanged.  Her garment is unrent.  Granted, with an ultra-liberal Pope such as Francis, it remains to be seen what condition he will leave the Church in when his reign ends.  His silence on the interpretation of his document on whether a divorced and civilly remarried couple can receive communion, I believe, is carefully crafted to allow dialogue and change without him having to mount the throne of Peter and declare it.  The good part about this is that the next pope will be able to roll it all back and put things back where they belong.  But that, my friends, is a topic for another time.  

Please, leave your comments if you like to and until next week Sunday Edition says, “Have a blessed week.”