Some notable politician who is not Catholic really ought to come to the defense of Catholics – because they are now under assault from anti-Catholic Catholic politicians. Just as there is no anti-communist so fierce as an ex-communist, so there is no anti-Catholic quite so energetically opposed to Catholic orthodoxy as a Catholic politician on the make and in need of votes from others who may share his distaste for all things Catholic.
The
uninterrupted assault on Catholics, the Reverend Robert Barron points out in National Review, is bone wearingly old. Arthur
Schlesinger, the reliably liberal historian and social critic, used to say that
a poisonous anti-Catholicism was the oldest prejudice in the United States, an
early bloom that washed upon our shore with the arrival of the Mayflower.
In the
Boston of Sam Adams’ day, anti-Papists used to place an effigy of the pope in a
chair that was paraded through the streets – Boston’s version of the English
Guy Fawkes celebration – to be jeered at pelted with missiles launched by the
equivalent of today’s anti-Catholic Catholic politicians.
Without the
aid of Catholic France, General George Washington could not have prevailed over
the British, and Washington, who rarely forgot the patriotic good deeds of his
friends, recalled this saving service when he addressed his letter to the Catholic Church in America in 1790. It was Mr. Washington’s
hope, he wrote, that “as mankind becomes more liberal they will be more apt to
allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community
are equally entitled to the protection of civil government.”
Thomas
Jefferson, who wrote to Danbury Baptists a letter in which he used the phrase
“separation of church and state,” showed his appreciation of the work of the
Catholic Church in a world set against it.
When,
following the acquisition of Louisiana from Napoleon, the Ursuline Sisters in New Orleans
wrote to then President Jefferson expressing fears they might lose their
property under the new governance of the United States, Mr. Jefferson wrote
back to assure the nuns that the Constitution prevented the government of the
United States from using its power to deprive them of their religious liberties:
To the Soeur Therese de St. Xavier Farjon Superior, and the Nuns of the
order of St. Ursula at New Orleans.
I have received, holy sisters, the letter you have written me
wherein you express anxiety for the property vested in your institution by the
former governments of Louisiana. The principles of the constitution and
government of the United States are a sure guarantee to you that it will be
preserved to you sacred and inviolate, and that your institution will be
permitted to govern itself according to it’s own voluntary rules, without
interference from the civil authority. Whatever diversity of shade may appear
in the religious opinions of our fellow citizens, the charitable objects of
your institution cannot be indifferent to any; and it’s furtherance of the
wholesome purposes of society, by training up it’s younger members in the way
they should go, cannot fail to ensure it the patronage of the government it is
under. Be assured it will meet all the protection which my office can give it.
I salute you, holy sisters, with friendship & respect.
Mr. Jefferson’s view that the government of the United States should – because it must constitutionally – make accommodations favorable to religious institutions was but a whisper in the wind for most Catholics in the United States who continued in the grip of oppression. In Boston, shortly after Mr. Jefferson issued his letter to the Ursulaine nuns, a Mother Superior in a Boston nunnery unsuccessfully held off a mob that burnt her nunnery to the ground.
To put it
briefly, Catholics in America never had an easy time of it, especially just
before and after the Civil War, when poor German and Irish immigrants, later
Italians, began flooding major cities in the Northeast. Used to the
Know-Nothings of the Lincoln period, the invidious, anti-Catholic Blaine laws,
and what then must have seemed the unassuageable anti-Catholic animus of those
whose motto seemed to be “We’re aboard, tow up the life-line,” Northeast
Catholics were not at all surprised when then Senator of Massachusetts Jack
Kennedy asserted in his campaign for the presidency that he could never become
the Pope’s political stooge.
Some
Catholics still prefer Hilaire Belloc’s
more courageous formulation. On the stump in England, one of Mr. Belloc’s speeches
was interrupted by a heckler who accused him of being a papist. Mr. Belloc
fetched in his pocket for his rosary beads, flourished them over his head and
thundered at the heckler, “Madam, do you see these beads? I pray on them every night
before I go to bed, and every morning when I awake. And if that offends you, madam,
I pray God that he spare me the ignominy of representing you in
parliament.”
Jefferson
might have applauded that remark. But not Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo.
Here’s Reverend
Barron on Cuomo:
“In the course of a radio interview, Governor Andrew Cuomo
blithely declared that anyone who is pro-life on the issue of abortion or who
is opposed to gay marriage is ‘not welcome’ in his state of New York. Mind you,
the governor did not simply say that such people are wrong-headed or misguided;
he didn’t say that they should be opposed politically or that good arguments
against their position should be mounted; he said they should be actively
excluded from civil society! As many commentators have already pointed out,
Governor Cuomo was thereby excluding roughly half of the citizens of the United
States and, presumably, his own father, Mario Cuomo, who once famously declared
that he was personally opposed to abortion. Again, the very hysterical quality
of this statement suggests that an irrational prejudice gave rise to it.”
The reverend
is a priest and therefore an interested party. G. K. Chesterton, Belloc’s
friend, was a convert and so understood Catholicism from the outside in, and he
saw Mr. Cuomo descending the staircase of history decades before he was born:
"Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As
he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of
some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only
legitimate sense . . . becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine
after another in a refined skepticism, when he says that he has outgrown
definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own
imagination, he sits as God, holding to no form of creed and contemplating all,
then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of
the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of grass. Trees have no dogmas.
Turnips are singularly broad-minded."
Comments
The Bill of Rights provides (superfluous) protection of religions from the Feds, but we have no obligation to let more (or fewer)Catholics into the country based on an equality principle we imagine to be fundamental to our founding (and that we imagine with Emma Lazarus applies across the universe). On the other hand, I'm with Willmoore Kendall in thinking that the U.S. Constitution's purpose as stated in the preamble is entirely consistent with Catholic doctrine, if not with John Locke.
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so we the American people adopt, by our own free act, an overriding purpose, a supreme symbol, a commitment that is truly ours unless and until we repudiate or modify it—”in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” ... Never mind that the overriding purpose is a six-fold purpose—nations that get it into their heads that there is one good, other than salvation, that merits absolute priority over all other goods, are sure to come to a bad end—as, happily, we have not. (Well, not yet, anyhow.) Never mind, either, that the six-fold purpose is pretty obviously cribbed from Medieval Catholic political philosophy—there are worse wells to carry your jugs to (for example: the John Locke well that the framers of the Declaration carried their jug to). In short: I find myself unable to read the Preamble of the Constitution (which we have never repudiated, never revised) as other than an express repudiation of the tenet of the Declaration’s creed that might seem to commit us somehow to equality.
And I conclude: The Declaration of Independence does not commit us to equality as a national goal—for more reasons than you can shake a stick at.
http://www.mmisi.org/IR/24_02/kendall.pdf
Don’t know if you read this one on Kendall: http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/01/maverick-conservatism-willmoore-kendall.html
Its forward was written by Bill Buckley. Kendall always reminded me of Roger Williams in one respect. Williams quarreled with everyone, establishing a church in which, at the end, he was the sole worshiper.
Buckley used to say of Kendall that he could never have more than one friend at a time. Why confuse things?
Also, you probably should have a look – if you haven’t already – at Orestes Bronson’s “The American Republic.” Bronson is in print again. All his works are being republished, but TAR is his magnum Opus. Like William and Kendall, he shucked off the fashionable creeds of the day with remarkable speed and ended up in the Catholic Church quarreling with John Henry Newman across the water -- and his own bishop. He drank down the German Romantic philosophers like port wine, an amazing bolt of lightning.
Of course, as soon as his train arrived at Rome, he was persona non grata with his former transcendentalist friends: Emerson, Thoreau, who was his roommate for a time, Bronson Alcott, the whole bunch.
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Thanks, Don. I don't think I've ever heard of O.B.
I think I first met Kendall in one of Buckley's conservative compendia, "Dream Walking," or other. I bumped into Kendall's "Contra Mundum" in a (now defunct) used bookstore many years ago. His books are nowhere in any of our libraries, not even in the excellent East Hartford one, where there was once upon a time a conservative head librarian. But, them internets are marvelous in providing e-texts and access to out of print books.
I believe the argument Kendall and M.E.Bradford had with Harry Jaffa to be critical to a definition of American identity and to a definition of conservatism. As much as we have to, and as much as Bradford and W.K. certainly did respect Jaffa's scholarship, they had the better of the argument about Lincoln and the founding. Kendall died before the nineteen-sixties really hit the fan, and before the decades long expansion of federal government's ambitions and control. I believe he'd be a lot more appreciative of Buckley's libertarian tendencies than he was were he alive today to see the mess we've made of his country.
This is worth stating explicitly because less historically informed commentators than Gottfried—who touches on such associations just briefly—may think there’s some mystery as to how latter-day Straussians came to occupy a prominent place in the conservative movement. The simple answer is: they inherited it, both from Strauss himself and from Harry Jaffa, who is ideologically idiosyncratic but has been influential in right-wing Republican and NR circles since the early 1960s.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/mccarthy/leo-strauss-and-the-rights-civil-war/
Cuomo who lost 59 Billion dollars out of HUD and was the father of the worst housing market collapse in history?
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/092106_about_cuomo.shtml
Now you're accusing him of being Anti-Catholic????
Don it can't be true??? s/off
Right. And an additional link connects the Straussians with on Mises and Hayek, most especially “The Constitution of Liberty.”