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Cuomo: Catholics Need Not Apply



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

peter brush said…
Cuomo's bigotry appears broader than anti-Catholicism. He's got the kind of open mind referred to by Allan Bloom in his "Closing of the American Mind," the kind we modern Americanos fervently hope is created by our education "system," even if we prefer that our enlightened ones be more restrained in the expression of their secular/progressive moral superiority than the punk Governor.

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.
----
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 Pesci said…
Peter,

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.
peter brush said…
Orestes Bronson
------
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.
peter brush said…
National Review‘s William F. Buckley Jr. and Willmoore Kendall considered Strauss a comrade, as did Russell Kirk—though he came to have a more negative view of Strauss’s disciples after the 1980s.

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/
Anonymous said…
Wait this can't be true? You mean Cuomo who set up HUD to be a criminal enterprise for the democratic party?

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





Don Pesci said…
PB,

Right. And an additional link connects the Straussians with on Mises and Hayek, most especially “The Constitution of Liberty.”

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