anti-Catholic Research Articles

Polysemous Tradition as a Common Basis for Ideological Resistance in Windsor Forest and The Communist Manifesto

This paper delves into the nuanced use of tradition as a foundation for ideological resistance in Alexander Pope’s “Windsor Forest” and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ “The Communist Manifesto.” Despite their divergent contexts—Pope’s text emerging from early 18th-century England and the Manifesto from mid-19th-century industrializing Europe—both works leverage historical and literary traditions to critique and resist dominant ideologies of their times. “Windsor Forest” subtly confronts ideologies of Protestant ascendancy and anti-Catholic sentiment prevalent in England following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, promoting peace and the unity of Great Britain under Queen Anne’s Stuart monarchy as alternatives to war and division. Through literary devices such as allegory and panegyric, Pope employs tradition not only to question the contemporary political and social landscape but to posit the Stuart dynasty as a symbol of national prosperity and harmony. Contrastingly, “The Communist Manifesto” openly challenges the capitalist ideology that Marx and Engels argue perpetuates class struggle and exploitation of the proletariat. The Manifesto calls for a revolutionary overhaul of the social order, drawing on traditions of socialist thought and the historical precedent of class struggle to justify its radical aims. Despite its revolutionary stance, the Manifesto similarly relies on the manipulation of tradition—both embracing and rejecting it—to articulate a vision of communist society. Both texts, therefore, are situated at the intersection of literary expression and ideological conflict, illustrating how tradition can serve as a versatile tool in the articulation of resistance. Whether through the invocation of historical continuity and national identity in “Windsor Forest” or the revolutionary call to arms in “The Communist Manifesto,” tradition is employed to critique existing social and political orders. The abstract underscores the complexity of these texts’ engagement with tradition, highlighting their shared emphasis on the transformative potential of ideological resistance. This comparison illuminates the rich dialogues between literature and politics, demonstrating how textual analysis can reveal deeper insights into the mechanisms of ideological critique and resistance.

North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the Long American Revolution by Jeffers Lennox

Reviewed by: North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the Long American Revolution by Jeffers Lennox Mark Edward Lender (bio) American Revolution, Loyalists, Indigenous, Canada, Nationalism North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the Long American Revolution. By Jeffers Lennox. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022. Pp. 353. Cloth, $35.00.) Jeffers Lennox has given us a fresh, interesting, and in some ways a novel perspective on the shaping of the American revolutionary struggle and the birth of the new republic. North of America makes a multi-faceted argument that comprehending the revolution must take into account the actions and motives of territories and groups who rejected the patriot cause. Specifically, this meant loyalist populations and a range of Indigenous nations to the north of the thirteen rebellious colonies. In concert or acting independently, these groups rallied to hold the Canadian provinces for the Crown and traditional homelands for the tribes. In so doing, they forced the rebels to consider the nature of their revolution and of the independent nation it produced. "To understand the United States and its citizens," Lennox insists, "we must explore how this country and its people were born of a relationship with people and places that refused the revolutionary path" (17). Lennox does this in seven topical chapters and an epilogue (this is not a chronological volume), each chapter dealing with a particular group, region, or issue. In each case he finds patriots, and later American citizens, constantly looking northward at those who rejected the revolution and its aftermath. The author deftly explores how American thinking and self-perceptions as revolutionaries and citizens changed as they confronted and adjusted to Indigenous, loyalist, and British initiatives in what eventually became Canada—the second nation born of the revolution. In "Of [End Page 166] Montreal" (Chapter 1), for example, he offers a fresh look at what the revolutionaries sought to accomplish in their 1775 invasion of Canada. Driving the British from Quebec, patriots hoped, would not only expand the revolution geographically and spread the ideals of the revolt, but also facilitate peaceful relationships with the northern tribes. Military and diplomatic failures in Canada, however, while disappointing for the rebels, offered them a healthy dose of reality. The setbacks taught the revolutionaries not to bite off more than they could chew and to focus on a more realistic goal—achieving independence from the empire for the thirteen colonies. It was a valuable lesson. North of America addresses other learning experiences for the revolution. Lennox skillfully explains how the mostly Protestant patriots tried to square their often-rabid anti-Catholic sentiments with a desire to entice the French-speaking population in Canada and the West into the revolutionary fold—and why the effort ultimately failed. He examines the matter of patriot diplomacy—critical to international acceptance of America as an independent power—and finds that diplomatic relations with the Indigenous nations were every bit as important. That diplomacy with the tribes ultimately failed in many instances—war was often the result—did not gainsay the fact that many Indians were strong enough to defend their homelands and merit serious negotiations. This in turn forced the expansionist Americans to more carefully gauge their movements west and to be realistic about their borders in the Northeast. These and other interactions with the northern Indigenous nations and loyal provinces gradually compelled Americans to assess their identity as a nation. At the same time a nascent Canadian nationalism took hold, and by 1812 it was clear that Canadians and Americans—with considerable shared history and even kinships—had become different peoples. Lennox's writing is worth noting. While he has tackled a subject of considerable breath and complexity, at only 278 pages of text North of America is not an overly large book. Lennox writes concisely and comes to the point; there is no excess verbiage. In fact, this is an easy and often enjoyable read with any number of new observations—all based on a deep research effort and a full command of the pertinent secondary literature. Lennox has made a genuinely significant contribution. This has been a very long way of saying that "I...

The Garden Atonement and the Mormon Cross Taboo

The Garden Atonement and the Mormon Cross Taboo

Popery, Politics, and Prejudice: Anti-Catholic Sentiment during Australia’s Great War Conscription Debates

Historians have tended to treat the anti-Catholicism of the conscription controversies of 1916–17 as a homogeneous phenomenon. Consequently, the sectarian undercurrents of wartime Australian society have been presented as a unified whole, obscured behind an ill-defined characterisation of Protestant bigotry. This article addresses this problem by distinguishing themes within the broader anti-Catholic dynamic. It tracks the expression and consolidation of anti-papal enmities, racial prejudices, and political suspicions as underlying themes of anti-Catholic ideology in the wartime community. Although these prejudicial strands overlapped, by examining each in isolation we get a clearer picture of both the broader sectarian phenomenon and the conscription debates’ sustaining of the issue.

Faith and Assimilation: Italian Immigrants in the Us

We study the effects of religious organizations on immigrants' assimilation. We focus on the arrival of Italian Catholic churches in the US between 1900 and 1920, when four million Italians had moved to America, and anti-Catholic sentiments were widespread. We combine newly collected Catholic directories on the presence of Italian churches across years and counties with the full count US Census of Population. We find that Italian churches reduced the social assimilation of Italian immigrants, lowering intermarriage rates and increasing ethnic residential segregation. We find no evidence that this was the result of either lower effort exerted by immigrants to ``fit in'' the American society or increased desire to vertically transmit national culture. Instead, we provide evidence for other two, non-mutually exclusive, mechanisms. First, Italian churches raised the frequency of interactions among fellow Italians, likely generating peer effects and reducing contact with other groups. Second, they increased the salience of the immigrant community among natives, thereby triggering backlash and discrimination.

Heaven's Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World

Heaven's Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World

Native American Boarding School Policy

This study examines how anti-Catholic sentiment, and nativist views during the nineteenth century influenced Progressive policy makers during the Native American boarding school era to impose a militarized and patriotic system of education onto Native children. In an attempt to prove their loyalty to the United States, Catholic church policy makers adopted the federal government’s model of educating Native Children. This system unintentionally hurt the Native population because Catholic Priests and Nuns shifted their philosophy of respecting Native values to imposing patriotic values onto Native children. The federal government’s role in the boarding school era often overshadows the role of religious denominations, specifically the influence of Catholic Indian schools. The point of this study is to examine and recognize how the social environment in the U.S. during the nineteenth century influenced Native American policy and gives anyone interested in the boarding school era a more nuanced understanding as to why Progressives sought to assimilate Native children into the American mainstream.

Huguenot Contributions to English Pan-Protestantism, 1685-1700

Abstract Following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, hundreds of thousands of French refugees sought shelter in Protestant states like the United Provinces and England. In England, the influx of Huguenots contributed significantly towards the argument for greater pan-Protestant engagement with the European continent. Huguenot-authored pamphlets advertised Catholic barbarity, deepening pre-existing anti-Catholic sentiments and imbibing those sentiments with other anti-French concerns, such as Louis XIV’s supposed immorality and his striving for universal monarchy. Further, key Huguenot authors reinterpreted the Glorious Revolution as one synchronizing the country with its Protestant brethren. In so doing, the Huguenots supported William III’s commitment to the Nine Years’ War and increased the quantitative and qualitative arguments to carry out an expensive religious-ideological foreign policy, often against domestic criticisms in England that the outcomes of the war did not match the expense.

“A Handful of Loose Beads”

Amy Coté, “‘A Handful of Loose Beads’: Catholicism and the Fictional Autobiography in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette” (pp. 473–494) This essay considers the influence of confession as a Catholic liturgical sacrament and as a literary genre informing the fictional autobiography in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). In her earlier novel Jane Eyre (1847), Brontë used the tradition of Protestant spiritual autobiography as a literary genre focused on the individual’s spiritual development. Villette, written as it was at the height of a wave of anti-Catholic sentiment in England in the 1840s and 1850s, has understandably been read as a nationalistic rebuke of Catholicism. This essay complicates this narrative, and shows how Brontë looks to Catholic liturgical traditions, most notably the sacrament of confession, to trouble the generic conventions of the Protestant spiritual autobiography and, by extension, of fictional autobiography.

Love and Depth in the American Novel: From Stowe to James

Love and Depth in the American Novel: From Stowe to James

Desegregating Dixie: The Catholic Church in the South and Desegregation, 1945–1992

Mark Newman is the leading authority on southern churches during the civil rights movement. His first book, Getting Right with God (2001), is a prize-winning study of Southern Baptists and race relations between 1945 and 1995. His Divine Agitators (2004) covers the Delta Ministry project of the National Council of Churches. Newman's latest work, Desegregating Dixie, is a study of the Catholic Church in the South during the civil rights movement that combines prodigious research with carefully nuanced insights. Historians of the civil rights movement, American Catholicism, and African American history will use this monograph for decades. Newman convincingly rejects the sociological view that the hierarchical polity of the Catholic Church made it more progressive than southern Protestant churches on the issue of race relations in the South. In theory, Catholic bishops had great authority over priests and communicants, but, in reality, many southern white Catholics shared segregationist views with their Protestant neighbors. Prior to 1945, southern Catholic bishops felt little pressure to make civil rights an issue. Even when race relations became a growing societal concern, southern Catholic bishops did not want to move too quickly ahead of their flocks or incite anti-Catholic sentiment in the overwhelmingly Protestant and conservative South.

Where did Julia Sit?: Another Borrowing from Montaigne in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi

At the beginning of Act 2, Scene 4, of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (probably written in 1613), the Cardinal appears with his mistress Julia and they flirt onstage, obviously fueling anti-Catholic sentiment in early audiences. First, he says to her ‘Sit. Thou art my best of wishes’ (2.4.1).1 There is no stage direction here in the original texts, but given the dramatist’s many borrowings elsewhere from John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays (1603, 2nd edn, 1613),2 it is evident, I argue, that Webster intended Julia to sit, not simply on a chair or even on a bed but in the Cardinal’s lap. In the same Act, before the scene in question, when Bosola ridicules women for their natural promiscuousness by referring to their sexual habit as ‘the mathematics’ by which ‘to know the trick how to make a many lines meet in one centre’ (2.2.21–2, 24–5), Webster borrowed this idea and the expression, as F. L. Lucas and other critics have already noted, from Book 3, Chapter 5 in Montaigne’s Essays: ‘All the worlds motions bend and yeelde to this conjunction: it is a matter euery-where infused; and a Centre whereto all lines come, all things looke’.3 Then, Montaigne goes on to discuss phallicism on the next page, and Webster must have continued to make notes in his commonplace book. The French philosopher refers to the contemporary instances of the ‘devotion’ to the male genitalia:

The House of Harper: Melville's Anti-Catholic Publisher

The House of Harper: Melville's Anti-Catholic Publisher

The Church of Scotland and the ‘increase of popery’,c.1690–1714

This article explores representations of ‘popery’ compiled by the Presbyterian Church of Scotland between 1690 and 1714. The ‘increase of popery’ was a ubiquitous phrase in this period. Synods and presbyteries regularly complained of Catholic encroachments in their parishes, and sent extensive reports of the activities of ‘papists’ to the general assembly and its commission. In turn, these national church courts collated these local petitions into longer representations of the ‘state of popery’ in Scotland. Representations have not been examined systematically by scholars. Indeed, representations have often been dismissed as cynical ploys rather than sincere expressions of anxiety at Catholic survival. Yet the very significance of these documents lies in their polemical nature. This article argues that the emphasis on political disaffection in national representations was informed by the Church's fraught relationship with central government, and with rival Protestant groups. Desperate efforts to showcase the necessity of Presbyterian government underpinned national representations of ‘popery’; as such, anti-Catholic sentiments were informed increasingly by the weaknesses of Scottish Presbyterianism as much as by actual Catholic activity. By contextualising representations of ‘popery’ and approaching them as part of a genre, the clerical petition, this article provides new perspectives on the nature of Scottish anti-Catholic polemic.

A strictly American institution: Neil O'Brien, blackface minstrelsy, and the invention of white Catholic identity

AbstractThis article examines the politics of race, religion and nation in relation to blackface minstrelsy during the first decades of the twentieth century. Having been superseded by more modern amusements, minstrelsy was outdated as a performance genre, yet the minstrel show served as a forum for Neil O'Brien and the Knights of Columbus fraternal society to participate in the invention of a white American Catholic identity. For fraternal society members, estranged from national belonging by religious difference, these performances situated the group as proponents of an old-fashioned American tradition, structured around anti-blackness. At a time of anti-Catholic sentiment, Catholic fraternal society members gathered for minstrel performances, distancing themselves from black people and marking themselves as white Americans.

Secularism, race, religion and the Public Instruction Act of 1880 in NSW

PurposeThrough a political genealogy, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the institutionalisation of the so-called “secular principle” in NSW state schools in the late-nineteenth century, which is commonly assumed to be a historical moment when religious neutrality was enshrined in public education, was overdetermined by the politics of racialisation and ethno-nationalism.Design/methodology/approachThe historiographical method used here is labelled “political genealogy”. This approach foregrounds how every social order and norm is contingent on political struggles that have shaped its form over time. This includes foregrounding the acts of exclusion that constitute any social order and norm.FindingsThe secular principle institutionalised in the NSW Public Instruction Act of 1880, far from being the “neutral” solution to sectarian conflict, was in fact a product of anti-Catholic sentiment fuelled by the racialisation of Irish Catholicism and ethno-nationalist anxieties about its presence in the colony.Originality/valueThis paper makes clear that “the secular” in secular schooling is neither a product of historical and moral “progress” from a more “primitive” state to a more progressive one, nor a principle of neutrality that stands outside of particular historical and political relations of power. Thus, it encourages a more pragmatic and supple understanding of “the secular” in education. It also invites both advocates and critics of secular education to adapt their arguments based on changing historical circumstances, and to justify the exclusions that such arguments imply without recourse to transcendent principles.

Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620–1860

Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620–1860

Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620-1860. By Maura Jane Farrelly

Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620-1860. <i>By Maura Jane Farrelly</i>

Maura Jane Farrelly, Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620-1860

Maura Jane Farrelly, Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620-1860

No Foreign Despots on Southern Soil: The Know-Nothing Party in Alabama, 1850-1857

No Foreign Despots on Southern Soil:The Know-Nothing Party in Alabama, 1850-1857 Robert Farrell (bio) On july 28, 1851, samuel f. rice announced his candidacy for Alabama's Seventh Congressional District.1 Instead of representing one of the established political parties, however, Rice ran as a "southern rights" candidate, demanding that Alabama immediately secede from the Union because, he believed, an abolitionist spirit dominated northern voters.2 The federal government no longer benefited the South, Rice argued, and southerners could not hope to protect their property, especially their slaves, from northern abolitionists. Secession, he insisted, should occur as soon as possible.3 Though Rice lost his bid for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1851, he found a new political home four years later in in a budding nativist political party. Samuel F. Rice provides a case study for the American or "Know-Nothing" Party in Alabama.4 Like many Know-Nothings, he desired an alternative to existing political parties because he was convinced that the Whigs and Democrats encouraged abolitionism to grow in [End Page 99] the United States by extending the right to vote to immigrants and foreign-born Catholics.5 Rice sarcastically argued: If our opponents are correct in their high estimate of foreigners, why do they not at once reduce the period for naturalization from five years to one year, or one month, and import without delay enough of them to vote down the Abolition party, and to deliver the South and the republic from all troubles and dangers? If foreigners are indeed the friends of slavery and of Southern Rights, they ought to be brought over the ocean speedily and in large quantities, for they are needed.6 By 1855, Rice and other Alabama Know-Nothings maintained that the American Party's focus on the dangers of foreign influence provided the most effective way to curb abolitionist power in America. By restricting foreign influences, the South could successfully destroy abolitionist fanaticism and remain within the Union. In taking this position, Rice demonstrated the importance of nativism to the success of the American Party in Alabama.7 Reflecting existing nativist cultural values, such as anti-Catholic sentiments, Alabama Know-Nothings embodied broader conservative trends already existing within the South.8 Political nativism in Alabama, however, demonstrated different priorities than northern Know-Nothing policies. Southerners emphasized anti-foreign ideology more than anti-Catholic prejudice when crafting public policies. While anti-Catholic bias certainly existed in the South as an acceptable cultural value, it proved dangerous to Know-Nothing political aspirations because of southerners' insistence on maintaining [End Page 100] a strict constructionist application of the Constitution.9 Moreover, states' rights ideology profoundly shaped Know-Nothing attitudes towards immigration policies in Alabama more so than the ideology shaped the party's northern counterpart. Know-Nothing policies proved attractive to Democrats as well as former Whigs. While most southern Know-Nothings originally belonged to the Whig Party, a realistic possibility existed for a new political alliance between Know-Nothings and secessionist "Fire-Eaters" based on nativist ideology.10 The American Party and Fire-Eaters [End Page 101] shared philosophical outlooks regarding the role of foreign-born Catholics and immigrants in American politics. Furthermore, during the mid-1850s, Fire-Eaters and moderate Democrats were divided over the timing and necessity of secession.11 Internal divisions within the Democratic Party and philosophical similarities between Know-Nothings and Fire-Eaters threatened Democratic hegemony in the South. In response, Alabama Democrats attempted to portray their party as more faithful to conservative political and cultural values. To solidify their claim as the most conservative party, southern Democrats in Alabama radicalized their ideology concerning states' rights and slavery. While southern Democrats had been willing to compromise on slavery before 1850, they became increasingly unwilling to do so, hoping to ensure Fire-Eater support in state elections. Thus, the Democratic Party in Alabama became increasingly unwilling to compromise on slavery due to their political battles with southern nativists, which contributed to secession and the outbreak of the Civil War. These intra-state political battles and cultural tensions demonstrate the importance of the Know-Nothing Party in Alabama and national politics. The American...