Is the Pope A Catholic?

Note: Transcript is from an earlier broadcast and may contain some inaccuracies.

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. Today, we’re spending an hour considering how

BRIAN: Past generations have labeled one group or another as an enemy, and the consequences of that label.

PETER: In the mid 19th century, many Americans saw shadowy foreign enemies within our own borders. These enemies had sheer numbers on their side, and were powerful enough to undermine democracy itself. Who were they? Catholics.

MAURA FARRELLY: Catholics were ill prepared to handle the responsibilities of living in a democracy. That is to say, they were ill prepared to handle the responsibilities of freedom, is what the belief system was in the 19th century.

PETER: This is Maura Farrelly, who has written about the history of Catholicism in the United States. She says that many Americans believe that Catholics didn’t posses the individual reason necessary to be a good citizen.

MAURA FARRELLY: The thought was that they were supposed to always do whatever it was that their priests told them to do, that they were a bit like children, in some respect. And so giving children the right to vote or the right to run for office could be dangerous, because they don’t know how to think for themselves.

PETER: In the 1840’s, the Catholic population in cities like Boston and Philadelphia surged with new immigrants. Rumors flew that these new arrivals were ordered to the United States by the pope himself. His plan? To overrun the electric with voters who could bring America under his control.

BRIAN: This anti-Catholic sentiment often turned violent over seemingly small issues. In 1844, riots broke out in Philadelphia over of all things, footnotes. The Catholic Bible had them to guide readers. The Protestant King James Bible did not. Some Protestants took the annotated Bible as another sign that Catholics were incapable of free thought. When Catholic leaders tried to introduce their version of the Bible to the city schools, many residents saw this as evidence of an enemy invasion.

MAURA FARRELLY: Newspaper editors started spreading rumors that what Catholics were really trying to do was remove the Bible entirely from the public schools.

BRIAN: So did they begin to portray these Catholics as basically enemies of good American school children?

MAURA FARRELLY: Absolutely, that this was a part of the pope’s plan. He had sent Catholic see the United States and the first place to undermine democracy, and that involved an awful lot of different things. But one of the things it involved was getting the Bibles out of the public schools, because the thought was that Protestant morality is the best way cultivate the kind of virtue that democratic citizens need. And so if Catholics are trying to remove the Protestant Bible from the public schools, which they weren’t, but again, this is how it was perceived, if they’re trying to remove it, they’re really threatening the success of democracy.

BRIAN: How many people really believed that this was a real threat? That behind this Bible issue was really a foreign enemy, really a pope pulling the strings over from Italy?

MAURA FARRELLY: Oh, it was pervasive. I can’t necessarily give you numbers. But what I can tell you is that this threat was pervasive, and it was respected and respectable. In fact, in Philadelphia, there was a newspaper editor by the name of Lewis Levin. And it might be a little bit inaccurate to say this, but at least as far as Philadelphia’s concerned, he really was the Rush Limbaugh, or the Mike Savage of his day. He ran a newspaper that was called The Daily Sun, and he editorialized frequently about the growing Catholic threat in the city of Philadelphia. And a few months before the riots actually broke out in Philadelphia, he published an editorial in which he fretted that our government is changing to a monarchy, he told his readers.

And then he went on to say when His Holiness, the pope, will have a king ready sprinkled with holy water to mount the throne in the name of Catholic liberty, this is what he predicted would be happening in Philadelphia as a consequence of all of the Catholic immigrants who were moving into the city.

BRIAN: Got it, which it was not the case, but that was the fear.

MAURA FARRELLY: Right. Rhetoric and reality.

BRIAN: Right. So did folks act on that fear?

MAURA FARRELLY: They acted quite violently. They burned houses. They burned churches. At one point, the priest of one of the churches that was threatened became so concerned that he started stockpiling armaments in the church, which then just only exacerbated the situation.

BRIAN: Sure.

MAURA FARRELLY: It’s not really clear the numbers. It’s believed that at least 15 people were killed, but it may have been more than that. More than 50 people were injured. And at least $150,000 in property damage was done. And just to put that in perspective, at this point in time, in Philadelphia, average household income was about $900 a year.

BRIAN: Maura, I know that there was violence against Catholics in the 19th century, and it even bled into the 20th century. And surely, there’s prejudice against Catholics, even today. But what I really want to know is when did Catholics stop being seen as enemies of the state?

MAURA FARRELLY: Until recently, I was under the impression that there was no more anti-Catholicism in the United States. But I did recently publish an article online that was about the history of anti-Catholicism. And woo, let me tell you some of the trolls that have posted comments to that article have alerted me to the fact that there is still some element of anti-Catholicism in the United States today.

BRIAN: You’re talking about and some guy sitting in his underwear in the basement there. You’re not associating that with respectable opinion anymore?

MAURA FARRELLY: Not at all. But that was respectable opinion in the United States really up through the election of John F. Kennedy and a little bit beyond. It’s really only been within the last 50 or 60 years or so, I would say, that anti-Catholicism has not become a respectable fear.

BRIAN: But in spite of that, Maura, there are those who see Muslims today, those who practice the Islamic religion, as being controlled or dominated by foreign religiously motivated fanatics. Do you think America needs to have enemies like, and you can fill in the blank, we talked about Catholics today. But it could’ve been the Mormons. It could’ve been atheistic communists in the 1950s.

MAURA FARRELLY: It was atheistic communist.

BRIAN: So would you say that Americans have a need to have an enemy of the state who is controlled by some kind of power from outside of America?

MAURA FARRELLY: Well, I would throw it back to you. And I’d say, when you tell somebody that you’re an American, when you say, I am an American, what does that mean? It doesn’t mean that we have a common ethnicity, a common race, a common religion. We do have a common history. But I think American an identity is at its core, just an idea. That’s what we root ourselves in is we are an idea.

BRIAN: And is that idea independence?

MAURA FARRELLY: Freedom. I was going to say freedom. I’ll take independence, freedom defined as independence.

BRIAN: Mhm.

MAURA FARRELLY: And I do think that we need to self-consciously define ourselves as a nation in a way that the residents of many other nations do not have to and never have had to. And there is a really quick, and easy, and dirty way to define yourself, and that’s to point to what you are not, and to say, we are not that.

BRIAN: But what about what we’ve become? What about the history of these Catholics seen as the enemy by many in the 19th century, turning into some of the best Americans? Why do we remember that when we’re so worried about control of folks who think a little bit differently or appear to think a little bit differently?

MAURA FARRELLY: Well, maybe we could say we have the freedom to do that, because new enemies have moved in. We really can’t let go of our old enemy until we have a new enemy. And so it is not without reason that era of good feeling that I talked about is developing in the last 50 years or so happened when it did. It happened really at some of the most salient parts of the Cold War, when we were more concerned about communists in Russia than we were about Catholics in the United States. Say what you will about Catholics, at least they believe in God.

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BRIAN: Maura Farrelly is a professor of American studies at Brandeis University. She’s the author of Papist Patriots, The Making of an American Catholic Identity. We’re going to shift away from imagined enemies to ones that have walked among us for centuries, spies.