The Last Acceptable Prejudice

Over at National Review Online’s Corner, Rev. Robert Barron—of Word on Fire fame, and the rector of Mundelein Seminary outside Chicago—has an interesting piece in response to “two outrageously anti-Catholic outbursts” that garnered public attention recently: New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s declaration that opponents of abortion were not welcome in the State of New York, and a virulently stupid column on the Supreme Court’s Catholic cabal by Jamie Stiehm for U.S. News and World Report. Barron traces a bit of the history of anti-Catholic sentiment in American history, then adds:

What is particularly troubling today is the manner in which this deep-seated anti-Catholicism is finding expression precisely through that most enduring and powerful of American institutions, namely the law. We are a famously litigious society: The law shapes our identity, protects our rights, and functions as a sanction against those things we find dangerous. Increasingly, Catholics are finding themselves on the wrong side of the law, especially in regard to issues of sexual freedom. . . . I would hope, of course, that it is obvious how this aggression against Catholics in the political sphere ought deeply to concern everyone in a supposedly open society. If the legal establishment can use the law to aggress Catholics, it can use it, another day, to aggress anyone else.

Many others have observed that anti-Catholicism remains the “last acceptable prejudice” in American society. Anti-Semitism, though alive and well in certain liberal circles and resurgent throughout Europe, has generally disappeared from America’s public forum, as have most of the other -isms—racism, sexism, etc.— whatever MSNBC might say. But the Catholic Church continues to stir up a particular, and particularly vocal, hatred.

That the vigor of traditional American principles and institutions and the vigor of American Catholicism are becoming increasingly intertwined is apparent to any with eyes to see. Those who would destroy the latter would do much to destroy the former.

Which reminds me that there is a second prejudice we still tolerate: anti-Americanism. How telling that the same people cling to both.