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F r o n t i s p i e c e
Anti-Catholic Animus
By Karl Keating
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This Rock
Volume 15, Number 2
 February 2004 
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"Catholics are less dreadful people to know than to hear about," wrote Msgr. Ronald Knox to an Englishwoman who was contemplating becoming a Catholic. This was more than half a century ago. Are Catholics still dreadful to hear about? In some quarters, apparently they are.
I have been reading John Henry Newman’s Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England. Over a course of weeks Newman spoke to a Catholic audience about low-brow anti-Catholic attacks that had escalated after the reinstitution of the Catholic hierarchy in England. He cited such grotesqueries as the Maria Monk story, which was then in the news.
In mid-nineteenth-century England, anti-Catholic sentiment was widespread, infecting all parts of society, but it was especially virulent among the less-educated classes. From their pulpits, pastors fed the common people a diet of horror stories: papal plots, intriguing Jesuits, rectories and convents supposedly connected by tunnels. The average Englishman thought Catholics must be dreadful to know because they certainly were dreadful to hear about.
During the course of the last century and a half, that old Catholic bogeyman has not disappeared. Jack Chick and a thousand others disseminate stories that the Englishman of the 1850s might think came from his own newspapers and religious tracts. So far as I can tell, this long-standing anti-Catholic sentiment, based on fables and misconceptions that have been repeated endlessly (much the way scary fairy tales used to be repeated to wide-eyed children), has been mainly an Anglophone phenomenon. Sure, anti-Catholicism has been present in every Protestant country. Just think of the stupid things Luther said about the papacy and its connections to the horrors foretold in Revelation. But it has been chiefly in English-speaking countries that there has been a persistent anti-Catholic animus, a low-level fever that never has gone away and has often spiked due to lurid sermons and parachurch groups that have made it their business to save the world from Romanism.
After the wars of religion, Europe found itself exhausted, and the Catholic and Protestant sides fell into a modus vivendi. Within most countries the minority faiths were allowed to go their own way, more or less unmolested. In England it was different. For centuries the Catholic Church was persecuted and Catholics discriminated against. Even today it is illegal for a Catholic to accede to the British throne. By the end of the sixteenth century Catholics were an oppressed and almost inconsequential minority in England, but anti-Catholic fervor did not abate. It has persisted into our own time, even if largely transmogrified, and it is found on both sides of the Atlantic.
If there has been an improvement, if the Church is no longer as fiercely attacked as it once was, that can be attributed less to an openness of mind and heart than to the weakening of belief among English-speaking Protestants. Fewer of them believe their own religion, so fewer of them hate ours. But not a few of them still do hate ours, as demonstrated by the popularity of Chick’s propaganda.
For many in America, as in England, Catholics are still dreadful to hear about.
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