When Catholicism was the target

[Woodmonkey]

When Catholicism was the target

In April, Benedict XVI will make his first visit to the USA as pope. When he does, some will complain about clean-up costs, traffic snarls, rescheduled television shows and other inconveniences. Others will express (and the media will obsess about) their various disagreements with the pope's writings and church teaching. And many millions will be inspired, comforted and encouraged by his work, life and witness, and by the theme of his new encyclical letter, "Saved By Hope."

Today, thanks in part to Pope John Paul II's globetrotting, evangelical papacy, visits by popes to America are occasions for reflection, celebration and souvenir-selling. In our not-so-distant past, though, papal invasions loomed large in all kinds of nightmare scenarios.

(Illustration by Alejandro Gonzalez, USA TODAY)

It is easy to forget but, from the Puritans to the Framers and beyond, anti-"popery" was thick in the cultural air breathed by the early Americans. Our forebears were raised on hair-raising tales of Armadas and Inquisitions, Puritan heroism and Bloody Mary, Jesuit schemes and Gunpowder Plots, lecherous confessors and baby-killing nuns. As the great historian John Tracy Ellis once observed, a "universal anti-Catholic bias was brought to Jamestown in 1607 and vigilantly cultivated in all the thirteen colonies from Massachusetts to Georgia."

In the 1830s, Samuel Morse (who invented the telegraph) wrote a popular book, Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, warning that Irish immigration to American cities was part of a papal plan of conquest.

About the same time, Lyman Beecher — a Presbyterian minister and the father of Uncle Tom's Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe — revealed, in his own A Plea for the West, that Catholic immigrants in the American West were laying the groundwork for the pope's Mississippi Valley invasion. (Some tracts identified Cincinnati as the planned site for the new Vatican.)

Fast-forward: The Speech

These and similar concerns were a crucial part of the context when, in September 1960, John F. Kennedy addressed a Houston gathering of Southern Baptist ministers. Hoping to become the first Roman Catholic president, Kennedy assured his audience, "I do not speak for my church on public matters — and the church does not speak for me." Arthur Schlesinger later reported that Kennedy's speech, and his deft performance during the question-and-answer period that followed, "knocked religion out of the campaign as an intellectually respectable issue."

Well, it's back, and so is "the Speech."

Now, perhaps it reflects poorly on the state of political oratory that one of the most discussed, and most interesting, candidate speeches in the 2008 presidential campaign was delivered nearly 50 years ago. (At least until Mitt Romney's speech about his Mormon faith last month in College Station, Texas.) Nonetheless, we should not be too surprised by the Speech's staying power. After all, we Americans have long worried about, and wrestled with, the relationship between faith and politics.

At the same time, however, our public policies and aspirations have always been shaped by religious commitments and ideals. It is then appropriate, and healthy, that the religion-and-public-life themes elaborated in Kennedy's Houston speech remain part of our national conversation. Indeed, it would be strange, and almost un-American, if they were excluded or ignored.

We should remember, though, that what worried the skeptical Baptist ministers in Kennedy's audience was not just the possibility that his religious convictions might have shaped his views and values, and might inform his judgment. This was not a group that was convinced, or even imagined, that policy and politics could or should be swept clean of religiously informed morality.

No, the concern about Kennedy and Catholicism was, for many, much more specific.

Some in his audience worried — in a way that, one hopes, seems strange to us today — that a President Kennedy would be under the control, and would follow the direction, of the agents of a foreign power — namely, the pope and other bishops of the Catholic Church. More than 150 prominent Protestant ministers and laypersons — including the generally sunny Rev. Norman Vincent Peale — produced a statement warning that a Catholic president would be under "extreme pressure from the hierarchy of his church" to align U.S. foreign policy with that of the Holy See.

Similarly, in 1991, when Judge Clarence Thomas was nominated to succeed Justice Thurgood Marshall, Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder wondered aloud whether Thomas, who had attended Catholic schools, would be sufficiently independent of the pope. And, in 2005, when Judge John Roberts was nominated to the Supreme Court, atheist provocateur Christopher Hitchens challenged his colleagues in the press to stop tiptoeing around Roberts' faith, and reminded them that the Catholic Church is a "foreign state" that "claims the right to legislate on morals."

Perspective and religion

Today, most Americans have abandoned such worries. To be sure, many are unmoved by, and perhaps even hostile to, popes' persistent reminders that our nation's longstanding professed commitment to human dignity and freedom, if taken seriously, should push us to re-examine our laws and practices with respect to abortion, punishment, family, economic policy and international relations. (We like our celebrities, and even our saints, so long as they agree with us.)

If America has outgrown the anti-Catholicism with which Kennedy had to contend, does this mean that candidates' religious beliefs and affiliations — for example, Romney's membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — are, or should be, irrelevant to their positions or to voters' decisions? The question is timely, and the answer is complicated.

We should care — and we need not apologize for caring — about our political leaders' beliefs, commitments, ideals and values. These are, for many people, shaped and informed by one religion or another.

True, there is a risk that questions about the political implications of candidates' religious beliefs can traffic in ignorance and prejudice, especially if the tradition at issue is, or is perceived to be, non-"mainstream." We should, therefore, all take particular care to get the facts right about religious traditions and teachings, and avoid going after cartoonish straw men.

Thankfully, we live in a time when no one feels the need to take up arms to protect Cincinnati from Benedict's invading armies. We should always be on guard, though, against the temptation to demonize, dismiss, or distort the beliefs and aspirations of those whose faith seems foreign to us.

Richard W. Garnett is the John Cardinal O'Hara, C.S.C. associate professor of law at the University of Notre Dame.

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