www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall Anti-Catholicism lies at the heart of Englishness

A mess for sure, started by man and not God. One can get a glimpse, I think, of why as Church we stay fussy with each other. Truly a sad thing, and yet for generations, that really don't understand or even care what happened, there seems be an 'inherited' bitterness.

Catholics should not be surprised by recent media hostility to the Pope. The press in Britain has plenty of form, writes Serenhedd James

4 June 2010

An Anglican friend recently lamented to me the disparity between the number of people in this country who describe themselves as being “CofE” and the number of those who actually ever set foot inside a church. I suspect that the reason is that when the survey forms come round there isn't a box to tick which says “I’m an ordinary person, with a general-if-not-specific belief in God, and I like to hear the church bells on Sunday morning, while I lie in bed with a cup of tea and the papers: but I’m definitely not a Roman Catholic.”

At the very centre of the national psyche there seems to be a basic suspicion of Catholicism which can be difficult to pinpoint: but it has certainly reared its head recently. The front cover of Private Eye with Pope Benedict on the balcony and the crowd in St Peter’s Square supplying the crude – but hardly unforeseeable – punchline may have shocked some and offended others, but it certainly should not have surprised anyone, as it belongs to a great tradition of English anti-Catholic satire: a tradition which has its roots in the dark days of the penal laws, and its high-water mark in the decades which followed emancipation.

During the penal era, anti-Catholicism was, of course, government policy. It has been argued that the excommunication of Elizabeth in 1570 provided the ideal opportunity for the Cecil administration to implement its abiding achievement: the propagation of the idea it was impossible to be a Catholic and a good Englishman. Against the historical backdrop of Armada, Gunpowder Plot, Civil War, the flight of James II, Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745, and almost constant war with France, it is easy to see how anti-Catholic feeling was easily sustained in the nation's consciousness.

Rome’s disassociation from the Jacobite cause in 1766 paved the way for the Catholic Relief legislation of the late 1770s, which in 1780 set off rioting in London: and while it is unlikely that more than a handful of the mob cared one way or the other for the Pope, they still rallied to the cry of “no Popery!”

In that context, vehement anti-Catholicism was found in both the mainstream press and satirical journals. Rome was Babylon, and the Pope its Whore: he was the Scarlet Lady, the Antichrist, whose followers were enslaved in his service, and who would cheerfully murder all good Protestants in their beds, given the chance.

Christopher Hibbert’s magnificent description of the Pope as the popular bogeyman was that of “an unseen, ghost-like enemy, lurking behind clouds of wicked incense in a Satanic southern city called Rome”.

The cartoons of James Gillray and his contemporaries make Private Eye look like Enid Blyton: a cartoon praising Scottish Presbyterian resistance to the Catholic Relief Act was entitled – and depicted in graphic detail – “Sawney’s Defence against the Beast, Whore, Pope and Devil”.

The Grand Tour did a lot for the Pope’s image in England, as those who could afford to travel widely in Europe discovered Rome and the Pope for themselves. By the end of the 18th century the penal laws had effectively fallen into abeyance – although they could be exploited in specific cases by unscrupulous individuals – and most Catholics, although barred from high office, were able to live lives of social integration. Emancipation seemed the natural progression, and followed in 1829, shortly before the Great Reform Act of 1832.

However, it would be naive to assume that the legal removal of Catholic disabilities did anything to suppress in the popular mind the suspicion of Catholicism as a foreign influence to be suspected: this sense that Catholics, however distinguished, were in some way not quite English, is one that the Catholic Church in England was unable to shake off as the 19th century progressed.

The early pontificate of Pius IX met with general approval in the British press, which hailed him as a friend of progress and freedom. In 1846 Punch portrayed him as a victor over despotism, felling it with a staff marked “rational liberty”. But the honeymoon was not to last. Pio Nono’s altered weltanschauung after he was forced to flee Rome in 1848, and his policies during the Risorgimento did not meet with favour: in 1861 Punch, again, depicted him in the act of snuffing out the sun of “modern civilisation” with the keys of St Peter. But it was not the Pope’s Italian policies which lost him the sympathy of the media in England.

By 1850, Pius IX had decided to restore the English hierarchy. This might not have made much of a splash, had it been done quietly and diplomatically, and had Nicholas Wiseman not been in charge.

Wiseman was in many ways a fine man and an outstanding bishop, but he did not recognise the eggshells on which he would have to tread. The resulting media frenzy is a defining moment in the history of English anti-Catholicism in the modern era, and the field was led by Punch, and most notably by John Tenniel, whose eye for detail produced cartoons as beautifully drawn as they are politically significant.

The Pope was depicted as a burglar, breaking into the Church of England with a jemmy marked “Roman Archbishopric of Westminster”, with Wiseman as lookout, with an archbishop’s cross for a cudgel. Elsewhere both men crept up on a sleeping John Bull, to smother him with a cardinal’s hat.

Papal bulls with tassels for tails ran headlong into walls, or appeared in cattle shows failing to win any prizes. Wolves in priests’ vestments heard the confessions of kneeling geese, or lured heiresses into convents. Meanwhile, tales of horrors endured at the hands of Catholics became bestsellers: with the usual caveat, the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk still makes for splendid reading.

Anti-Catholic sentiment in the press may have abated since, and successive Fleet Street editors have been impressed with men like Cardinal Manning with his social policies, or Cardinal Hinsley with his leadership in time of crisis, or Cardinal Hume with his affability and charm.But history has shown us that for all that, a suspicion of Catholicism seems to lies at the heart of the British identity.

No one today seriously believes that the Pope is coming in September to receive Her Majesty’s submission, dissolve Parliament, and rule by Inquisition: but yet for the Catholic Church there remains a particular distaste, quite distinct from the contemporary unease with religious belief in general. As we have seen recently, one does not have to dig very deep to find people willing to attack Catholicism in the public forum.

Should we be surprised that major newspapers seem to have gone out of their way to portray Pope Benedict in a bad light? Probably not, and certainly not in Britain. He may no longer be Whore, Devil, or Antichrist, but when it comes to anti-Catholic sentiment, and hostility towards the person of the Pope, the British secular media has historic form.


anti-catholicism in England [catholicherald.co.uk]

Some of this emigrated to the Colonies; and many of these prejudices persisted even after alligience to the crown was severed in 1776.

I am amazed at how tenaciously some Christians cling to the customs of Cromwellian England.

I think it was Chesterton who remarked that it is impossible to maintain a dependably neutral attitude regarding the Catholic Church.

Fr. Serge

I get the impression that Rome was quite strongly opposed to democracy in the 19th Century, and only backed away from that position rather slowly in the 20th. From this perspective, it's hardly surprising that the USA should have little love for Rome.

English history, like all history, is too complex to be reduced to one factor, one cause. The roots of English anti-Catholicism are deeper than residual reflexive bigotry from the time of Cromwell. While Catholics like to wallow in the martyrdoms and persecutions of the Elizabethan era, Anglicans have their Book of Martyrs, too, and the trauma of Mary Tudor's short reign has become part of England's psychological DNA--in large part because it was compressed into a mere five years.

It did not help the Catholic cause that the main foreign powers arrayed against England from Henry VIII to George III were Catholic states, or that Pope Pius V formally absolved English Catholics from their allegiance to Elizabeth I (against the advice of many prominent English Catholics, by the way), or that some of England's worst kings (Charles I, James II) were either Catholic sympathizers or openly Catholic. Or that these kings associated themselves with an absolutist view of the monarchy, so that in the English collective mind, Catholicism and the Divine Right of Kings stood in contrast to the hard-won Rights of Englishmen. Or that Ireland and the Scottish Highlands were predominantly Catholic and also the classic gateway to foreign invaders from 1689 down to 1798.

Put that together with traditional English xenophobia, propensity for violence (English civility goes back no further than the mid-19th century, and probably died some time in the 1980s), and it is no wonder that England retains a deep-rooted suspicion of the Church of Rome (would that they had a similar deeply-held suspicion of Islam, too!).

The United States, founded by Englishmen, naturally imported England's Protestant culture. We would not be who we are without it, and thank God for that (so, it could be the Reformation was part of the Divine Plan after all). The majority of early immigrants to the United States came from the Protestant states of Germany, as well as Scandinavia and the Netherlands, which reinforced the anti-Catholic bias already present. The few Roman Catholics in the United States prior to the Irish immigration of the 1840s-50s were largely assimilated English Catholics who blended seamlessly into the culture, despite their quaint adherence to the "old religion".

The Irish (as opposed to the Scotch-Irish), when they arrived, were treated much the same way Mexicans are today--an alien, unassimilable lump with strange language and customs, generally regarded as little better than savages (there is a good book on the subject called How the Irish Became White [amazon.com] ), status they did not transcend until the dawn of the 20th century, when other "undesirables" (Italians, Jews, Poles, Russians) took their place at the bottom of the totem pole.

Because of the Catholic Church's general antipathy to democratic government (which it maintained until well into the 20th century) and religious pluralism (down to Vatican II), as well as the continuing perception that Catholics acted at the beck and call of the Pope (in much the same way that Mormons jumped whenever Brigham Young said "Hop, frog!"), Catholicism was seen as incompatible with American values--one reason why American Catholic leaders such as Cardinal Gibbons and Bishop John Ireland worked so hard to develop "American Catholicism" as a way of both integrating Catholics into American society while keeping them separated from it (their desire to exert total control over the spiritual life of American Catholics, and to present a monolithic and "acceptable" face to American society explains much of their hostility to the Greek Catholics when they arrived).

The American public school system originated as a fundamentally anti-Catholic attempt to "protestantize" Catholic children by indoctrination (I personally think did not work out very well wherever there were large numbers of Catholics, such as New York City), and there were attempts to prevent the establishment of parochial schools as a Catholic alternative.

Both England and the United States have a large, untapped well of latent anti-Catholicism, which tends to bubble to the top whenever there is scandal within the Catholic Church. This has tended to make American Catholics, including the hierarchy, rather secretive and paranoid, with a tendency to hide rather than expose scandals that, in the end, only makes things worse (I'm sure you know where this is going).

Ironically, among the more conservative American Protestant communities, anti-Catholicism is a much stronger force than anti-semitism: with their Old Testament focus, Evangelicals tend to look favorably upon Jews and Israel, while liberal Protestants exhibit an increasingly overt anti-semitic streak combined with disdain for conservative Christians of all types, both Catholic and Protestant (most don't know much about the Orthodox).

All of these trends are bound up in a tangled historical root ball, and until and unless everybody--Catholic and Protestant alike--come to terms with history, there will be no real resolution or reconciliation.

How do you like this little tidbit from Samuel Adams' speech to the Continental Congress, August 1, 1776.

"Our forefathers threw off the yoke of popery in religion: for you is reserved the honor of levelling the popery of politics. They opened the Bible to all, and maintained the capacity of every man to judge for himself in religion. Are we sufficient for the comprehension of the sublimest spiritual truths, and unequal to material and temporal ones? Heaven hath trusted us with the management of things for eternity, and man denies us ability to judge of the present, or to know from our feelings the experience that will make us happy. "You can discern," say they, "objects distant and remote, but cannot perceive those within your grasp. Let us have the distribution of present goods, and cut out and manage as you please the interests of futurity." This day, I trust the reign of political protestantism will commence."

Fear of a French Catholic invasion from Quebec was not far from the minds of our Founding Fathers. The Quebec Act sent shivers down Adams' spine.

Having been born and raised in East Tennessee, where the populace is about 98% WASP, I can tell you I was something of a popish curiosity growing up. In school I sometimes felt like the bearded lady: "Wow! Would you look at that! A real-life papist!" And I used to get questions like: "Do you use the Bible?" and "Do you do whatever the pope says?" Most of the questions were honest inquiries fueled by misunderstanding more than anything else.
Now and then, though, you'd get some hard-core Protestants looking for a theological throwdown. I once had a coworker ask, "So why do you worship Mary?" To which I replied, "Well, we don't." Response: "Uh, yes you do." A mildly heated argument, conducted in the spirit of genuine filial ecumenism, followed.
Or you may remember that after His Holiness Pope John Paul II fell asleep in the Lord, a rural Protestant church infamously posted a sign that read: "No Salvation in a Hell-Bound Pope." (The sign made it onto Knoxville's evening news, at least.)
My point being--I'd argue there's still a sizeable vestige of anti-Catholicism here in America, especially in areas with a population largely descended from the English/Scotch-Irish who settled in it.

If you want to look into the roots of American anti-Catholicism (and much else), I suggest David Hacket Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America [amazon.com] and Kevin Phillips' The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare and the Triumph of Anglo-America. [amazon.com]

Partly correct. A much more blatant and dangerous anti-Catholicism is found among the Left, in media, academia and government, who find the Church's support for moral absolutes, to say nothing of its existence as an independent nexus of authority, at odds with their belief in an all-wise, paternalistic state. They are willing to accept the Church's support when it concurs with their agenda, but when it does not, the knives come out.

In comparison, the existence of a few kooks on the Evangelical Fundamentalist fringe, and the kind of vestigial, "social" anti-Catholicism born of ignorance that one finds in areas where few Catholics live, is mild and innocuous. Interestingly, when my wife and I were baptized as Catholics, we found unconditional support from only two places in our families--me from my Orthodox Jewish aunt and uncle, my wife from her very devout Baptist aunt and uncle. My parents, as secular as they make 'em, to this day don't seem to accept what we did.

Go figure.

StuartK,

You're absolutely right, and I apologize if I came across sounding like I'm trying to portray my formative years as a ongoing martyrdom.

By and large, the overwhelming majority of the Protestants I spent my childhood with were true Christians in the best sense and more often than not their faith made me a better Christian and a better Catholic, and I was blessed to be a part of their lives. Sadly it's the few kooks I encountered that often spring up in my all-too-human mind.

And I would agree that the more dangerous anti-Catholicism is to be found among secularists who despise the Church based on truths rather than people of faith--kooky as they may be--who distrust the Church because of misunderstandings and misinformation.

Maybe when encountering those who believe the Holy Father is destined for eternal damnation and those who deny eternity, I should have a much greater appreciation for the former--relatively speaking, of course.

I suggest

An ugly little secret : anti-Catholicism in North America

Andrew M. Greeley

Fr. Serge

Well, if Andrew Greeley was the voice of Catholicism in North America, I'd be anti-Catholic, too. For that matter, there are some people who aren't too sure Andrew Greeley isn't anti-Catholic himself.

Father Greely's science fiction offering, The Final Planet, was masterfully written, but severely heterodox. Female bishops and priests.

His christmas themed novel involved defection to Orthodoxy, when, being set where it was, it could have easily used an EC parish, and avoided the whole defection issue.

The man oozes heterodoxy in everything of his I've read, and has been an open proponent of women's ordination.

His scolastic works would be likewise tainted by his insidiously heterodox authorial slant.

Greeley is a sociologist, and as an historian, I am bound by guild rules to disdain everything he and all sociologists do or write.

I highly recommend "Puritan's Empire" by Charles Coulombe for an excellent analysis of anti-Catholicism in America.

He starts with a history of the Old World preceding colonization, and then follows through from the discovery of the New World right up through the middle of the twentieth century.

It also shows how frequently American Catholics were more concerned with being respectable than being good Catholics.

Booth