Father Albert J. Nevins, M.M.
It is an over-simplification to state that the American colonies were founded by people who came to the New World seeking religious freedom. It is true that the early settlers in the Northeast did seek freedom to worship in their own way—but it was a freedom that they were not prepared to give to others who might differ in belief. Religious prejudice existed between sects and was responsible for driving Roger Williams from Massachusetts to Rhode Island, the Puritans from Virginia to Maryland, but it was particularly virulent in the case of Catholics.
The prejudice against Catholics was conceived mainly in the anti-Papal passion of Queen Elizabeth. Prejudice became a fixed state of mind, a fanatical compulsion, against which logic and reason had no effect. The Christian doctrine of love was implicitly amended to exclude Catholics. Separation of Church and State was interpreted to mean that Catholics should have no influence on civil government. The colonists, the vast majority of whom were Protestant, made provisions for the union of Church and State in all colonies except Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Maryland was founded as a place of religious freedom; but when Protestants gained control, Catholics faced discrimination.
The coming of the Revolution did little to alter anti-Catholic sentiment. George Washington had to rebuke the Boston patriots for their anti-Catholicism. It is an arguable opinion that, except for the Americans’ anti-Catholicism, Canada would have joined the colonies in breaking away from England. In 1788, Massachusetts put through a Puritan-inspired law that excluded Catholics from public office. In the following year, the Massachusetts Constitution was adopted, and it provided for public support of Protestant teachers of “piety, religion, and morality.”
This union of Church and State was not confined to Massachusetts. In 1784, the New Hampshire Constitution was approved, and it included a religious test that barred Catholics from public office, and the provision for public support of Protestant teachers of religion. The State Constitution of North Carolina, adopted in 1776 and in force until 1835, denied office to all but Protestants. New Your, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Georgia limited their officials to others than “Papists.” When President Andrew Jackson appointed a Catholic, the competent Roger Brooks Taney, first as Attorney General and then as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, he provoked political storms. When President Franklin Pierce appointed a Catholic, William Campbell, to his Cabinet as Postmaster General, another brouhaha resulted—the accusation was even hurled that the act was a plot for the Pope to get access to the mails and read United States Government correspondence.
In 1852, the Know Nothing Party was founded, and it spread like wildfire throughout the country. “Americans must rule America!” was the rallying cry. Under the Know Nothings, religious bigotry reached a high point not previously attained. The party elected officials to office, and for a time held considerable power; it was anti-Catholic, anti-immigration, terroristic and brutal. The Know Nothings provoked riots in many sections of the country, each riot aimed at Catholic immigrants.
The undoing of the Know Nothing movement resulted from mob violence, plus the incompetence of persons the members of the movement elected to office. Gradually sensible Protestants worked against the Know Nothing Party, and it disappeared beneath the weighty problems facing America in pre-Civil war days. While there was a basic mistrust and suspicion of Catholics, the root of the problem was fundamentally economic. There was a fear that Catholic immigrants would depress wages and take “Protestants’” jobs. There was also the threat of political control by the growing number of urban Catholics. The situation was repeated by the Negro emigration to the North after the Civil War.
The next anti-Catholic movement, springing from the same causes, appeared in 1887: it was stimulated by the American Protective Association—popularly known as the A.P.A. The Association. The A.P.A. sought to repeal naturalization laws, to forbid teaching any foreign languages in public schools, and to tax Church property. Its forays into politics became its undoing, because politicians used the organization for their own ends.
Some years later—on Thanksgiving night, 1915—thirty-four men gathered on a mountain top near Atlanta, Georgia. There, under a blazing cross, they pledged loyalty to the Invisible Empire, the revived Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. That movement, which used murder, whippings, and Tar-and-feathers as weapons, was anti-Catholic, anti-Negro, anti-Semitic, anti-alien. Father James Gillis, the celebrated Paulist orator and writer, called the Klan, “the most curious combination of comedy and tragedy, of buffoonery and villainy,” ever to appear on the American scene.
The Ku Klux Klan had considerable strength inside the Democratic Party; and in 1924, it was influential in blocking Governor Alfred E. Smith, a New York Catholic from the nomination for President. The Klan attempted to keep Governor Smith from the 1928 nomination. Tactics failed and Smith won the nomination.
The bigotry that was released by the 1928 Presidential campaign rocked the United States. Scurrilous literature, wild accusations, anti-Catholic sermons, were the order of the day. One of the most effective weapons used against Smith was a fraudulent document that purported to be the secret Knights of Columbus oath. The “Oath” first appeared in a congressional campaign in 1912, and an investigation by the House Elections Committee proved it a fraud. The Klan and other bigoted groups circulated almost countless copies of the “oath.” The Knights of Columbus prosecuted when evidence could be obtained, and they gained many convictions.
The Presidential campaign of 1960 gave ample evidence that bigotry was far from dead. The same type of literature that appeared in 1928 was present again; the bogus Knights of Columbus oath reappeared; and sermons rang out to tell why a Catholic could not be President. But is bigotry is not dead, neither is it as vigorous as it once was. The majority of Americans voted for John F. Kennedy, because that considered him to be the best qualified. The Constitutional provision that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust of the United States” was finally applied, if not by all Americans at least by a majority, to the highest office in the land. From: Our American Heritage, Our Sunday Visitor, 1972.
In 1928, The Knights of Columbus published an editorial in the New Your Sun, wherein the actual 4th degree oath was made available: “I swear to support the Constitution of the United States. I pledge myself, as a Catholic citizen and Knight of Columbus to enlighten myself fully upon my duties as a citizen and to conscientiously perform such duties entirely in the interest of my country and regardless of all personal consequences. I pledge myself to do all in my power to preserve the integrity and purity of the ballot, and to promote reverence and respect for law and order. I promise to practice my religion openly and consistently, but without ostentation, and to so conduct myself in public affairs, and in the exercise of public virtue, as to reflect nothing but credit upon our Holy Church, to the end that she may flourish and our country prosper to the greater honor and glory of God.”