Editorial

Protecting religious freedom

As we complete Religious Freedom Week on June 29 and look forward to Independence Day on July 4, we should realize that we must always be alert to combat efforts to deprive us of religious freedom. Throughout U.S. history, Catholics’ religious freedom has been threatened.

Christopher Columbus, who discovered America, was, of course, a Catholic. The Catholic countries of Spain, Portugal and France began exploring our continent—Central and South America, Canada and most of what is now the United States. But then the English colonies were begun along the eastern coast, and the plight of Catholics in those colonies was bleak indeed.

The only “Catholic colony” on the east coast was Maryland, founded as a religious haven for Catholics who fled from persecutions in their homelands. However, it didn’t remain Catholic for long after William Stone, an Episcopalian, became governor. Soon anti-Catholic legislation forbade Catholics to attend Mass except in their own homes, and they were barred from all public offices.

The peace treaty that ended the French and Indian War in 1763 seemed to end any influence the Catholic Church would have when it placed eastern North America under the control of England. So it’s remarkable that patriotic Catholics helped fight the Revolutionary War. But they did, and were praised for it by George Washington.

The Catholic Church has always accepted the philosophy of the Declaration of Independence as the philosophy of the Church. Two centuries before Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration, St. Robert Bellarmine emphasized that secular or civil power “is in the people, unless they bestow it on a prince,” and “the multitude may change the kingdom into an aristocracy or democracy.”

Our forefathers were wise enough to include freedom of religion in the First Amendment to the Constitution. But that doesn’t mean that Catholics haven’t had to fight for that right.

Sometimes they did that literally, especially with the rise of the Native American Party in 1844 when people from Ireland started emigrating to escape the Potato Famine. In Philadelphia, two Catholic churches and rectories were burned, 40 people were killed, more than 60 others were injured, and 81 homes were destroyed.

The Nativists (called Know Nothings because they were instructed, if they were stopped by law officials, to say, “I know nothing”) thought they could do the same in New York on election day of 1844. A mob of 1,200 headed for the old St. Patrick’s Cathedral. “But there they halted, for a reason they had,” Archbishop John Hughes said later. Two thousand well-armed members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians were waiting for them. The Nativists dispersed.

The Know Nothings continued their anti-Catholicism. In Louisville, on Aug. 6, 1855, 22 Catholics were killed and many injured. In Baltimore, the elections of 1856, 1857 and 1858 were marred by violence. In Maine, the Know Nothings tarred and feathered a Catholic priest, Father Johannes Bapst, in 1851.

In the 20th century, the anti-Catholic and anti-black Ku Klux Klan was particularly strong in the early 1920s. Here in Indiana, it had 250,000 members and it controlled the governorship and legislature. Archives of at least one Indianapolis Catholic parish tell of armed parishioners protecting their church at night.

On May 17, 1924, the Klan planned a rally in South Bend to intimidate the University of Notre Dame. Instead, Notre Dame students met the trains as the Klansmen arrived, beat some of them up, and put them back on the trains. The Klan did have its meeting after

Holy Cross Father Matthew Walsh, Notre Dame’s president, and football coach Knute Rockne intervened and settled the students down.

The Klan began to fade after its leader, D.C. Stephenson, was convicted in 1925 of abducting, raping and murdering Madge Oberholtzer.

Today the Catholic Church in the United States doesn’t face anything like the anti-Catholicism it once did. However, it continues to try to function in a much more secular society than ever before. Laws now permit abortion, same-sex marriage and other things the Church considers morally wrong. Catholics are expected to pay, through their taxes, for contraceptives. There are efforts by some to punish Catholic institutions if they don’t fall in line with secularism.

We must be ever vigilant to protect our religious freedom.

—John F. Fink