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. 

Anti-Catholicism in Post-Civil War America

      I will eventually come back to the topic about Vatican II being under attack from within the Church, but I have noticed that questions of the history of the Church in the United States tend to draw considerably more interest than European Church history or “history in the making” issues.  And so today I want to go back to the subject of the history of anti-Catholicism in the United States.   In earlier blogs we looked at the Charlestown Convent burning, the Philadelphia Riots, the Know-Nothing movement and other episodes in nineteenth century America of prejudice against Catholics resulting in violence and discrimination.  At some point I want to take a deeper look at anti-Catholicism in the pre-Revolutionary colonies, especially Massachusetts, New York and Virginia.  Today however I want to pick up the thread where we had left off with the American Civil War and Catholic involvement in the Lincoln assassination. 

In a certain sense the Civil War was a bit of a draw for Catholics.  On the one hand the remarkable work of the nursing sisters on the battlefields, the diplomacy of Bishop John Hughes of New York, and the Irish immigrant troops that fought for the Union built up the esteem of Americans for the Catholic faith.  On the other hand, the Diplomatic Recognition of the Holy See for the Confederacy, the support for the Confederacy of Archbishop Oder of New Orleans and Bishop Lynch of Charleston, along with refusal of Bishop Elder of Natchez to have prayers said for the President of the United States, and the predominance of Catholics in the Lincoln conspiracy cast Catholicism in an unfavorable light, at least among the Northerners in general and Republicans in particular.

In the years immediately after the Civil War, veterans of the Confederate army organized the original Ku Klux Klan to resist the Northern “Carpetbagger” politicians who were enforcing “Reconstruction” in the South in order to disenfranchise those who had been loyal to the Confederacy and to keep the African American population, almost all former slaves, from exercising their political and civil rights. This “First Klan” (as opposed to the revived Klan, or “Second Klan” of the 1920’s and 30’s did not have a specifically anti-Catholic agenda but that is not to say that there wasn’t strong anti-Catholicism in the Southern United States.  Catholicism was virtually unknown in the South whose population—with the exception of Maryland and Louisiana— was almost entirely Baptist and Methodist Protestant.  Catholicism’s being unknown was both a blessing and a curse.  Catholicism was not a strong threat and thus did not provoke as strong a reaction as it did in places such as Ohio and Indiana where the Catholic-Protestant balance was more delicate with the rural population being Protestant and Catholics often holding the political edge in the cities and larger towns.  But also being unknown, it became the subject of negative myths and stories.

The greater problem, however, was in the North where a rapidly growing Catholic population was a threat to the economic and political establishments.  The fierce Catholic attachment to the Democratic Party with its ties to labor and its openness to immigrants along with the stories of Catholic involvement in the murder of President Lincoln generated a strong anti-Catholicism in Republican circles.  This often worked against the Republican interest such as in the 1884 Presidential campaign when a Presbyterian Minister, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Burchard in a speech at which Blaine was present, declared: “We are Republicans, and don't propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and Rebellion." Blaine failed to repudiate the statement (he probably had not even noticed it) and it ended up costing him the election and returning the White House to the Democrats for the first time since 1856, before the Civil War. 

Even more acrimonious was the Republican cartoonist Thomas Nast.  Nast, a German Protestant immigrant, is best known for his visual creation of “Santa Claus” drawn for an 1863 illustration of the Rev. Clement Clark Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas”  in Harper’s Bazaar, but he had a pathological hatred for the Catholic Church, accompanied by a particular hatred for the Irish.  Nast depicted the Irish as violent drunks and Catholics as dangerous to American liberty.  His cartoons were carried in scores of newspapers and journals across the country. 

Much of the anti-Catholicism of the period had to do with the huge flood of immigrants sweeping in the United States from the end of the Civil War right up until World War I.  Irish (almost entirely Catholic) and Germans (more than half Catholic) composed the largest number of immigrants, but considerable numbers came also from such Catholic populations as Italy and the Austo-Hungarian Empire, including parts of Poland.  While these immigrants were almost invariably relegated to menial work and the poorest of living conditions, it was clear to the old Anglo-Saxon establishment that America was changing and would soon be nation in which they—the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants—would be a political and economic minority.  This put them in a conflict between their traditional intellectual liberalism and their self-interest.  Social evolution would in time create a more homogenous society where the descendents of the immigrants would “Americanize” but in interim fear and anxiety fed stereotypes and  prejudices. 

The image today is one of Thomas Nast's (1840-1902)  anti-Catholic and anti-Irish cartoons