ah but what I also meant to say, following on someone else who mentioned JFK, is that when the Catholic Church instructs its flock to disobey secular law, then don't be surprised when the Protestants in Northern Ireland for example don't want to be a minority in a Catholic country because they fear that Catholic not secular law will be imposed upon them, just as many Arabs don't want to live in Islamist theocracy, where the rights of the minority are not respected in the least......
hey if Israel can remain a Jewish state in a sea of Muslims...you can understand the Irish Protestant position...
This is precisely the point I was alluding to: claims of this sort bring up all of the visceral (especially Anglo-Saxon, German and Scandinavian) distrust of the Roman Catholic Church that led to discrimination against Catholics. It has not been so many years that Catholics were considered outside the mainstream of American public life, except in the Northeastern cities.