On All of Our Shoulders III

In my last two entries I have been posting the document “On All of Our Shoulders,” a critique according to the magisterium of Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s social philosophy by more than 150 prominent Catholic scholars and theologians.  Here is the final section.  This is neither an attack on the Romney/Ryan ticket nor an endorsement of the Obama/Biden ticket but it does shatter the lie that the Republican ticket is “the Catholic thing to do.”  There is no clear choice for a Catholic at the polls this year—or most years.  Unfortunately this is not because both parties are offering us a platform consistent with our gospel values but rather because each of the two major parties has made serious moral compromises.  In the end it is up to each faithful Catholic citizen to examine his or her conscience and prayerfully choose the candidates whom they believe will do the greater good despite the shortcomings in their platforms.  We need to pray and to trust that God’s Kingdom will prevail not through any one of us but through the balance achieved in the common voice and thus we need to profoundly respect those who with due consideration make choices different than our own.   It is time for the hysteria to end and prayerful reflection to prevail. 

Five Principles of Catholic Social Doctrine Most in Danger of Being Forgotten or Distorted

There are many principles of the Church's social doctrine that are effectively communicated and widely known. Chief among these is the dignity and sanctity of human life from conception to natural death. Although this fundamental doctrine is far from adequately implemented in our laws, there is little or no confusion about the Church's teaching on this matter. We offer here a list of principles of Catholic social doctrine—not to argue their priority over others—but because we judge these to be the most in danger of being ignored or distorted in contemporary public debate.

1.    The Catholic view of the human person is social not individual. Congressman Ryan has stated that he learned from Rand to view all policy questions as a "fight of individualism versus collectivism." [7] The Catholic Church does not espouse "individualism," but rather sees it as an error as destructive as collectivism. [8] Blessed John Paul II described "individualism" as a dimension of the "Culture of Death" arising from an "eclipse of the sense of God." [9] The human person is "by its innermost nature, a social being. ["10] We are radically dependent upon and responsible for one another. Again, in the words of John Paul II, "We are all really responsible for all." This truth of the human person is tied to the central doctrines of the Church. It reflects the very "intimate life of God, one God in three Persons." [11]

2.    Government has an essential role to play in protecting and promoting the common good. The error of individualism leads to a mistaken understanding of the role of government. For too long politicians have echoed Ronald Reagan's misleading mantra "Government is the Problem." The Catholic Church, on the contrary, because of its social understanding of the human person, considers government to be as "necessary" for human nature as the family. The state exists to "defend and promote the common good of civil society, its citizens, and intermediate bodies." [12] Thus, while the Church does not offer a specific blueprint for policy, it does view our government's action on behalf of the common good a positive good in itself.

Catholic apologists for small government repeatedly invoke a single paragraph from John Paul II's Centesimus Annus which cautions against the excesses of a "social assistance state" ignoring the decades-long papal consensus supporting social insurance and welfare systems. In the same document, John Paul described the "intervention of governmental authority" on behalf of the defenseless as "an elementary principle of sound political organization" taught by the Church for a century. [13] John Paul later stated "One can only rejoice" that "States set up social welfare systems to assist families…and pension funds for retirees." These express a sense of national "responsibility" and "solidarity." [14]

3.    The doctrine of subsidiarity both limits government and demands that it act when local communities cannot solve problems on their own. Subsidiarity has both negative and positive dimensions. Negatively, it limits overreach by government (as well as other large organizations, including corporations). Positively, the concept (which means "help" or "assistance)" requires that government act when problems cannot be solved on the local level.

Ryan has invoked subsidiarity to justify devolving management of Medicaid to states thereby ending centralization "in the hands of federal bureaucrats." At the same time, his budget cuts Medicaid by $750 billion over ten years, a policy that will cut healthcare for an estimated 14 to 27 million Medicaid recipients. [15]

The broader outlines of the budget plan will radically reduce the size of government and consequently cut funding for private and religious safety net providers such as Catholic Charities who depend upon federal grants and contracts for much of their funding. This fails the positive obligation under subsidiarity to render needed assistance.

4.    The "preferential option for the poor" demands both individual and collective action, including the acts of the state. In the words of John Paul II, the preferential option for the poor affects "our daily life as well as our decisions in the political and economic fields;" placing demands upon individuals as well as "leaders of nations." [16]

The portrayal of the Last Judgment in the Gospel of Matthew is a judgment of the nations based on how they treat the "least of these." This was the "central moral measure" applied by the USCCB in its evaluation of the Ryan budget. "The needs of those who are hungry and homeless, without work or in poverty should come first." [17]

Ryan, like Rand, sees "dependency" as our most serious problem. Thus, he describes his understanding of preferential option as "don't keep people poor, don't make people dependent on government so that they stay stuck at their station in life." [18]

It should go without saying that poverty is not caused primarily by a too generous government safety net that becomes in Ryan's words, "a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency." [19] It is much easier to cut government programs than to help people out of long-term poverty as the very mixed results of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act prove. [20] Ryan's 2012 budget achieves 62% of its designated savings from cuts to programs for low-income families and individuals while cutting the top marginal tax rate and the corporate tax rate. [21] It is impossible to justify this as a serious exercise of the preferential option for the poor.

5.    Economic forces must be reckoned among any serious account of the threats to society and human dignity. Ryan's budget resolutions speak mainly of overbearing government and free individuals acting in a private sector whose justice is never questioned. It is hard to reconcile this vision with the history of the past forty years, in which globalization has deindustrialized America and deregulation has increased the power of private corporations. At the same time, unions, which official Catholic teaching has long recognized as indispensible to the rights of workers and the common good, have been severely weakened. [22] Whatever the threat of government power, any adequate response to our challenges must address the facts of economic power as well. Modern papal social doctrine has addressed both threats since its inception.

In Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI has offered an analysis more probing than that offered by either political party.

Benedict speaks of the loss of state power in the face of globalization and calls for the development of new forms of government engagement.

In our own day, the State finds itself having to address the limitations to its sovereignty imposed by the new context of international trade and finance, which…has altered the political power of States….[T]heir powers…need to be prudently reviewed and remodelled so as to enable them, perhaps through new forms of engagement, to address the challenges of today's world. [23]

Benedict continues the century-long papal teaching that the market alone cannot address the needs of the common good:

Economic activity cannot solve all social problems through the simple application of commercial logic. This needs to be directed towards the pursuit of the common good, for which the political community in particular must also take responsibility. Therefore, it must be borne in mind that grave imbalances are produced when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution. [24]

Benedict offers a description of the temptation to reduce the social safety net that reads like an analysis of the Ryan Budget:

From the social point of view, systems of protection and welfare…are finding it hard and could find it even harder in the future to pursue their goals of true social justice in today's profoundly changed environment….[T]he market has prompted new forms of competition between States as they seek to attract foreign businesses…. These processes have led to a downsizing of social security systems as the price to be paid for seeking greater competitive advantage in the global market, with consequent grave danger for the rights of workers, for fundamental human rights and for the solidarity associated with the traditional forms of the social State. Systems of social security can lose the capacity to carry out their task, both in emerging countries and in those that were among the earliest to develop, as well as in poor countries. Here budgetary policies, with cuts in social spending often made under pressure from international financial institutions, can leave citizens powerless in the face of old and new risks. [25]

Conclusion:

The momentous challenges facing our nation cry out for the full wisdom of the Church's social doctrine. We live at time when the social indifference of libertarian thought is achieving broad cultural legitimacy and political power. This vision of the human person and society are fundamentally at odds with the Gospel and the principles of Catholic Social Doctrine. Legitimate disagreements with the Obama administration must not lead the Church to edit the fullness of its teachings for political expediency. Our political obligations as Catholics go beyond choosing a candidate for which to vote. In the words of Faithful Citizenship, "our participation should help transform the party to which we belong." [26] Ours is a moment that demands the fullness of the Church's teachings as few others have. To be truly prophetic, the Church—bishops, clergy and lay faithful—must proclaim the fullness of its message to all parties, movements, and powers.

Footnotes

7.    Address by Paul Ryan to Atlas Society "Celebration of Ayn Rand," 2005. 

8.    Catechism of the Catholic Church, #2425. "The Church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies associated in modem times with "communism" or "socialism." She has likewise refused to accept, in the practice of "capitalism," individualism and the absolute primacy of the law of the marketplace over human labor. Regulating the economy solely by centralized planning perverts the basis of social bonds; regulating it solely by the law of the marketplace fails social justice, for "there are many human needs which cannot be satisfied by the market." Reasonable regulation of the marketplace and economic initiatives, in keeping with a just hierarchy of values and a view to the common good, is to be commended."

9.    John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, #22-23.
10.Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, #12.
11.John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, #38, 40.
12.Catechism of the Catholic Church, #1882, 1910.
13.John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, #48, 10.
14.John Paul II, Address to Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, 2002.
15.Kaiser Commission On Medicaid And The Uninsured, "House Republican Budget Plan: State-by-State Impact of Changes in Medicaid Financing," May 2011. http://www.kff.org/medicaid/upload/8185.pdf
16.John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, #42.
17."Federal Budget Choices Must Protect Poor, Vulnerable People, Says U.S. Bishops' Conference," April 17, 2012. http://www.usccb.org/news/2012/12-063.cfm.
18."Paul Ryan Says His Catholic Faith Helped Shape Budget Plan," Interview with David Brody, Christian Broadcasting Network, April 10, 2012. http://blogs.cbn.com/thebrodyfile/archive/2012/04/10/only-on-brody-file-paul-ryan-says-his-catholic-faith.aspx
19.The Path to Prosperity: Restoring America's Promise (2012 Budget Resolution), 25. http://budget.house.gov/uploadedfiles/pathtoprosperityfy2012.pdf
20."The prevalence of extreme poverty rose sharply between 1996 and 2011. This growth has been concentrated among those groups that were most affected by the 1996 welfare reform." "Extreme Poverty in the United States, 1996 to 2011," National Poverty Center, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan, February 2012, 4. http://www.npc.umich.edu/publications/policy_briefs/brief28/policybrief28.pdf
21."Chairman Ryan Gets 62 Percent Of His Huge Budget Cuts From Programs For Lower-Income Americans," Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, March 23, 2012. http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3723
22.John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, #20, and Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, #25.
23.Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, 24.
24.Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, 36.
25.Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, 35.
26.United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, #14. http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/faithful-citizenship/forming-consciences-for-faithful-citizenship-document.cfm

On All of Our Shoulders II

Yesterday I posted the first two sections of the statement “On All of Our Shoulders,” an evaluation of the Ryan Budget proposal according to the norms of the magisterium issued by 150+ Catholic scholars and theologians.  Today I am posting the next two sections.   My point, as I wrote yesterday, is not to portray Congressperson Ryan in a negative light and certainly not to make him out to be a “ bad Catholic,” but only to demonstrate that the choice for Catholic voters in this election is not a moral “slam-dunk” in the Romney/Ryan hoop.  I believe that a Catholic can, in good conscience, vote for the Republican ticket because of its opposition to legalized abortion.  I also believe that a Catholic can look at the moral issues of the Republican Platform’s economic policies and compare them unfavorably—again, from a moral standpoint—to those of the Democratic candidates and go for the Obama/Biden ticket.  There are serious moral flaws in the projects of each party.  Ironically the Democrats seem to understand this better than the Republicans, but I think it is important that we not only look at the spectrum of issues in making our choices, but respect those who also look hard at the same moral spectrum of issues and make a different choice.  So now, back to “On  All of Our Shoulders….”

Prudence Misused

Catholic promoters of Ryan's policies often invoke "prudence" to argue that since bishops are not competent to judge the details of policy proposals, there is no properly "Catholic" problem with his policies. This distorts the authentic Catholic meaning of prudence. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines prudence as "right reason in action." It is the virtue through which we "apply moral principles to particular cases." [2] In St. Thomas Aquinas's words, no one "can properly apply one thing to another unless he knows both the thing to be applied and the thing to which it has to be applied." [3] Thus, prudence demands both knowledge of the principles of Catholic Social Doctrine and honest attention to the details and realistic consequences of policies.
Aquinas also warned that prudence is a risky business. We are perennially tempted to use it as a cover for achieving goals contrary to our professed principles. Aquinas taught that the vice of "craftiness" often masquerades as prudence. Craftiness uses "means that are not true, but fictitious and counterfeit" to achieve its ends "whether good or bad." [4] For that reason, we must always scrutinize the principles that inspire our actions in prudential matters. Are our actions and policies consistent with the ideals we proclaim? Or would an honest assessment reveal they are guided by less laudable motives?
Prudence and Principle, Love and Truth:
The Church's social doctrine is not simply an imperative to believe in God and help the poor, for which any proposal can claim equal legitimacy by promising positive consequences. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church states that the Church teaches specific principles of social doctrine.
These principles of the Church's social doctrine "concern the reality of society in its entirety: from close and immediate relationships to those mediated by politics, economics and law; from the relationships among communities and groups to relations between peoples and nations." [5]
A Catholic use of prudence requires evaluating the compatibility between policy proposals and these substantial teachings.
Benedict XVI expressed the true challenge of Christian prudence in his great social encyclical Caritas in Veritate: the truth of Christian love must animate all dimensions of society. Caritas is more than a generic inspiration, if love is truth, it must give specific form to our actions.
Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. It falls prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word "love" is abused and distorted, to the point where it comes to mean the opposite.
Without truth, without trust and love for what is true, there is no social conscience and responsibility, and social action ends up serving private interests and the logic of power, resulting in social fragmentation, especially in a globalized society at difficult times like the present. [6]

Prudence and Policy

Prudence also requires consideration of the full range of options available and an honest assessment of the outcome of policy proposals. After decades of tax cuts, honesty requires considering revenue increases in addition to program cuts. Government programs are not perfect and need to be improved. Proposals to slash or eliminate programs without proposing alternatives, however, is exactly the kind of indifference Jesus condemned in the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Rich Man and Lazarus.

Footnotes

2. Catechism of the Catholic Church, #1806
3. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II: 47, 3 resp.
4. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II: 55, 3 resp.
5. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, #161.
6. Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, #3,4.

Catholic amd Democrat--The Roots Are Deep

When a Methodist gets money, he becomes an Episcopalian

When a Baptist gets money, he joins the Presbyterian Church.

The Rev, Samuel D.

Burdhard whose quip

that the Democrats

were the party of Rum,

Romanism and Rebellion

sealed the deal between
Catholics and the
Democratic Party

When a Catholic Priest is named a bishop

He becomes a Republican. 

Catholics have traditionally been Democrats—after all, the Democrats are the party of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion. (See entry for March 7, 2011.) What has caused our hierarchy to shift to the Republicans?  And why is our laity not following?

I was shocked to see that according to a recent Pew survey, President Obama leads Governor Romney among Catholics 54% to 39%.   While the majority of African-American Catholics and Hispanic Catholics are strongly pro-Obama, a slight majority of White Catholics are now sliding into the Obama camp.  A clue to this surge might be found in the surveys that indicate that the one faction of the Catholic vote that is not weighted toward the President are the White Catholic weekly Mass-goers among whom Romney has a slight edge.  Some attribute this to weekly Mass-attendees being “more faithful” Catholics who are inclined to follow the leadership of their bishops.  While that may be true, the converse conclusion must then also be true: that there is a majority of White Catholics, including both those who attend Mass weekly and those who have stopped attending regularly, who have lost their confidence in the leadership of the bishops.    
What shocked me about the Pew Survey results is not that the majority of Catholics are not following the bishops’ lead, but that I would have thought that since the majority of (white) Catholics in this country have gradually slipped up into the better-off classes and are no longer among the working (labor union) class, that their politics would have turned as well from the traditional alliance between the Catholic Church and the Democratic party.  But they haven’t.  What are the reasons that they are staying locked in the Democratic Party?
It may be that despite their newly acquired relative affluence Middle and Upper Class Catholics are still convinced of the basic Catholic view of society as a cooperative unit in which those who have more have responsibility for those who have less. Catholic social teaching over the 120 years or so since Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum has embraced the idea that not only are individuals responsible for works of charity but that society itself has an obligation from each of its members towards all of its members.   This corporate view is at odds with Paul Ryan’s Ayn Rand views of a world in which each person must look out for his or her own interest first rather than for the “common good.”   It may be that the boomer generation of Catholics gratefully remember their parents’ stories of  the Church’s support for organized Labor in the years of the great depression and realize that without the boost that Catholic Social teaching—along with the Democratic New Deal and the G.I. Bill—gave their parents, they—the boomers—would not have had the social and educational opportunities that empowered them to make the jump into the Professional and Managerial classes.   It may also be—and given that the Catholic boost in the Obama ratings comes because of the non-weekly attendees—a sign that not only have the bishops become irrelevant to many of the Catholics-in-the-pews but there is actually a backlash against their leadership among those whose disaffection with the leadership of the last twenty years or so has made them indifferent towards formal Catholicism.  Given the recent scandals and the poor quality of Episcopal leadership this factor cannot be discounted.  As hard as the Timothy Dolans and Sean O’Malleys try to pedal forward the bike of American Catholicism, the number of foot-draggers on the bishops bicycle built for 450 (or whatever the number of American bishops) is holding back the advance of the Institutional Church.  O well, there may be grace in that too. 

The Dream That Has Turned to a Nightmare

Archbishop of Boston,Cardinal Sean O'Malley 

greets President Barack Obama at the Funeral

of Senator Ted Kennedy in 2009.

Sean Winters, a writer for the liberal-oriented National Catholic Reporter wrote a scathing attack on the Obama Administration last week over the decision not to exempt Catholic educational and health-care institutions from the mandate to provide employees with insurance coverage for abortions, sterilizations, and contraceptives including abortifacients.  Winters wrote: 

President Barack Obama lost my vote yesterday when he declined to expand the exceedingly narrow conscience exemptions proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services. The issue of conscience protections is so foundational, I do not see how I ever could, in good conscience, vote for this man again.

Winters is one of the many Catholic liberals whose enchantment with the Obama presidency has “hit the wall” as they have realized that the candidate and Administration they went out on a limb to support has betrayed them.  Catholics have probably not voted as a bloc since the 1960 campaign that put John F. Kennedy in the White House as the first Catholic President.  Certainly by the 1972 election the liberal/conservative split in the Church was reflected in the political choices that Catholics made in the polls with liberals going for Humphrey and conservatives going for Nixon.  The situation became even more divisive with the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision establishing constitutional protection for a woman’s “choice” in opting for abortion in an unwanted pregnancy.  By 1980 Republicans had realized that the abortion issue could be used to political advantage in weaning Catholics away from their traditional alliance to the Democratic Party.  Ronald Reagan and the Bushes promised us the sky when it came to ending abortion while they delivered very little.  Yet the gradual shift of many Catholics to the GOP was not so much about “the Right to Life” as it reflected the emergence of American Catholics from labor to management level jobs and from working class to professional class.  As Catholics became more and more educated and Middle Class, and as Democrats moved from being the party of Labor to the party of suburban liberals the political face of American Catholicism began to shift as well.  “We have worked hard,” many thought, “and we want to keep what we have—let those behind us work to get here like we have worked.”   Yet there was a faithful cadre of Catholics left in the Democratic Party.   Mostly they were intellectuals, or at least committed Catholics who took their faith seriously and were familiar with the long tradition of social encyclicals and they could not bring themselves to embrace a party whose economic theories are at such variance with the Catholic Tradition.  Now this group has become disillusioned.  Winters writes:

I accuse you, Mr. President, of treating shamefully those Catholics who went out on a limb to support you. Do tell, Mr. President, how many bullets have the people at Planned Parenthood taken for you? Sr. Carol Keehan, Father Larry Snyder, Father John Jenkins, these people have scars to show for their willingness to work with you, to support you on your tough political fights. Is this the way you treat people who went to the mat for you?

There will be few true-blue Catholics left in the Obama camp but the President need not worry.  I doubt those Catholics will go running to Mitt Romney.  They recoil in horror at Newt.  Santorum, they think, is from another planet all together, and they can’t recognize his Latin Mass Catholicism  as anything other than the ecclesial equivalent of the embalmed (and poorly embalmed) remains of Pope Pacelli.  (See blog entry for April 14, 2011.)   Where will they go in November?  They will be like homeless ghosts wandering in the political underworld seeking some provisional shelter where they might alight long enough to cast their spectral -vote for some obscure pale shadow-candidate of some phantom sixth party who champions all that is just, all that is iconic, all that is virtuous—someone who can replace Obama, not in the White House for sure, but on that pedestal they had constructed for him in their own temple of Feel-Good-American Civil Catholicism.  Obama has let us down But that is our fault not his.  He is intelligent and articulate but he never was the Angel of Democratic Idealism we projected him to be.  We made him into something no man could be.  I have that Jansenist streak that runs through us American Catholics, especially those of us who pretend to a pharisaical orthodoxy, and I know in my heart that no man is pure and God alone is holy.  It just took us three years to realize that Barack is made from the common mud from which God rolled out you and me. 

The Know-Nothings and Anti-Catholicism

We mentioned in previous posts that the Whig party was the anti-immigrant/anti-Catholic party. The Whigs were the liberal party and the heirs of the Enlightenment democratic heritage that valued reason about Tradition—a position that would put them into opposition with Catholicism, especially the European variety of Catholicism that had been closely tied to monarchism and absolutism in opposition to democracy. The “old-school” American Catholics of the Archbishop John Carroll variety had long ago, at the time of the American Revolution, accommodated themselves quite comfortably to the democratic ideals of the new nation, but the “new school” Catholics emigrating from Europe and brining European ideas with them were more reserved not only about American political structures but about American society in general and the American Church in particular. We start to see here in the 1830’s a fork in the path of the American Church, a fork which will allow two Catholic Churches to develop side by side with each other, a Church which will usually be broad enough to accommodate both branches in its communion but at two periods—in the final decades of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth and again at the final decades of the twentieth and the opening decade of the twenty-first centuries will find that communion stretched close to its point of fracture. But that is the topic for a future series of blogs. We want to stay on the topic of anti-Catholicism.
The Whig distrust of Catholics and immigrants drove the waves of Catholic immigrants into the Democratic party. At the same time, the Whig inability to achieve its political goal of preserving the ascendency of WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) political and economic power led the decline of the party. As the Whigs lost power, it was natural for another party to rise in its place to preserve the same set of ideals in opposition to the Jacksonian Democrats. Two parties would fill that vacuum. The first would fail, the second would endure.
Eventually the Republican party would emerge to balance the Democrats, but the time was not yet ripe for the Republicans. As the Whigs faded, their banner was taken up by a short-lived political alliance (it becomes a party in the 1850's) called the “Know-Nothings,” Originally not a national party but a loose-knit alliance of various local groups, in many respects like today’s Tea Party, the Know-Nothings began in New York State in 1843 as the American Republican Party. Within two years it had spread to other states and became a national organization known as the Native American Party. Ten years later it changed its name to the American party. It was only when it took on this name that it evolved from what might be called a movement into a formal political party. Its genius and its success was in organizing on the local and grass-roots level. It tended to do well in local elections, and to some extent in state elections, but was never effective in electing a President—though it did try.
Before we go further, an incident in Europe fueled the anti-Catholicism in America. In 1848 there was a revolution against the Papal Government in Central Italy—the Papal States. American Catholics often forget that for centuries the Popes had not only been spiritual leaders but also ruled a nation in central Italy. Italy, as we know it, only became a nation in 1870 when the King of Savoy, his Prime Minister Cavour, and his great General, Garibaldi, overthrew a variety of Kings, princes, Grand Dukes, and Dukes, uniting their various independent principalities into a single nation. One of the Kings overthrown and deprived of his temporal crown was the Pope—but this is some 22 years later. In 1848 a group of Italian Nationalists, drove the Pope—the newly elected Pius IX—from Rome where he fled to Gaeta outside Naples and prepared for a possible flight from Italy. (The British—strange friends (Well, not so strange when you know your history)—had a warship waiting to take him to refuge/exile should he so need. He didn’t need, as it turned out.) With the help of French troops, the rebellion was squashed and the Pope was restored. Pius had been a political liberal to this point favoring Democratic reforms. When he saw what Democratic Reforms led to—well, he wasn’t to sure about Democracy any more. The Americans saw the crushing of the Roman Revolution of 1848 as a blow to Democratic government. It reinforced their stereotype of Catholicism as monarchist and absolutist. And it made the American Nativist Party very successful. Rumor flew that the Pope planned an invasion of America to destroy our freedom even as he had destroyed the liberties of the Roman people. Today it sounds pretty silly that a papal army with the intent to invade would attack America (remember the old Peter Sellers' movie, The Mouse That Roared?) but in the 19th century many believed it. As late as the election of John Kennedy in 1960 many were convinced that the Pope had designs on this country.
The Know-Nothing Party platform was
• Severe limits on immigration, especially from Catholic countries
• Balancing what immigration there was in favor of English, Welch, Scots, and Protestant Irish
• Restricting political office to native-born Americans
• Mandating a wait of 21 years before an immigrant could gain citizenship
• Restricting public school teachers to Protestants
• Mandating daily Bible readings in public schools
• Restricting the sale of liquor
The Know-Nothings—and by the way they were called that, because when questioned about their political organization they would answer, like Sergeant Shultz “I know nothing.” Of course they didn’t have Shultz’s accent; they didn’t like Germans, or Irish, or anybody except those of British extraction. There was a secrecy to their organization and how these various local groups coordinated their efforts which actually led to their being particularly effective. In the spring of 1854 they won elections in Boston, Salem and other New England towns. That autumn they swept the state elections. (Gone was the moderation of Mayor Lyman and Edward Cutter and the Charlestown Selectmen of 1834) In Philadelphia their candidate, Robert Conrad, promised to crack-down on crime, close Saloons on Sundays, and appoint only native-born Americans to city posts. In Washington DC the Know-Nothing candidates won in a landslide. They were unsuccessful in New York—with its large immigrant population—but won a credible 26% of the vote in a four-way election. They did manage to elect both the Mayor of San Francisco and the Governor of California.
The following year they carried Chicago and the Know-Nothing Mayor, Levi Boone, barred all immigrants from city jobs, The success of the Know- Nothings led them to coalesce into a national party in 1854 as the American Party. One of the voices raised against the Know-Nothings was Abraham Lincoln who said—and given the political atmpsphere in Illinois said courageously-- As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
Lincoln was no particular friend of Catholicism—few politicians could afford to be at this period—but he was committed to democracy and the ideals of the Republic and he saw how the Know-Nothings threatened to undermine the basic values on which this nation was founded

I'm not sure where the image today comes from; i found it in my photo file but it is not one of my pictures. (I am pretty handy with Photoshop, but not that fancy)