Anti-Catholicism, Hypocrisy and Double Standards

As a young Catholic I was unaware of the amount of irrational hatred that was directed toward the Catholic Church and Catholics themselves. Growing up in Los Angeles I was not subject to the Fundamentalist “tracts” being placed on my family car while we were at Mass as I would have been had I lived in the “Bible Belt”. My exposure to people of other faiths was frequent and always positive. The majority of my friends growing were Jewish as were the girls whom I had the honor of dating. My babysitter growing up was Mormon, as was my Paternal Grandfather. My Paternal Grandmother is a Methodist and my Father was an atheist for most of his life. My Maternal Grandfather was a Presbyterian from a family that produced many deacons. However, my Maternal Grandmother was an Irish Catholic and thus my Mother was a Catholic and therefore we were raised Catholic. None of this was seen as a conflict. None of the above people in my family ever acted as though anything was “wrong” with my siblings and I being raised Catholic.

In my college years I essentially fell away from the faith. I still called myself a “Catholic” but had no particular belief in any of the dogmas that makes one a Catholic. I just knew that I was of Irish ancestry and thus was “Catholic”. My beliefs were for the most part agnostic. I thought that true believers were absurd (I included both theist and atheist true believers as absurd).

While in college I heard all about how the Catholic Church was responsible for the Dark Ages, the destruction of the Native Peoples of the Americas, the Holocaust, the Inquisition, pimples on teenagers, Milli-Vanilli and just about everything else that negatively effected anyone anywhere at anytime everywhere. I learned how peaceful and wonderful Muslim societies were and how Christians lived very well under Islamic rule. And how the Crusades were an evil move by a corrupt Pope to throw off that wonderful balance and have a huge land grab for greedy Churchman and Nobles. I heard how nothing good happened in the Christian world and no good men were produced in the Christian world until Marin Luther and later "the Enlightenment". I look back now and marvel at how I remained a Catholic even if it was in name only. All my history professors with their fancy PhDs thought Catholicism was a force for evil in the Western World who was I to disagree? Of course I just went along and got good grades and degrees not really challenging the idiocy that I was being taught.

There I was just a young guy going through life not contemplating the great issues of life and certainly not contemplating being a Catholic when I had the misfortune to meet a Rabbi that was a friend of my wife’s family. During our discussion, the rabbi told me about things that Christians “buy into” like the Trinity and the fact that Jesus was God. I was told that I could never understand Jews and their suffering at the hands of Catholics. I was told that I “would never know what it is to be a Jew or how it feels to have your children forced to sing Christmas carols (oh the horror! the horror!)”. I would never know what it is like to look at someone like me and see the Inquisition and the Crusades. Now, anyone who is not a self absorbed bigot would know that talking to a person who is half Irish and Catholic knows a little something of prejudice and persecution. My ancestors could not own land in their own country. They had to pay taxes to a foreign English master and support his foreign Church that was a parasite on their own land. They had real persecution. If they could have gotten off with simply singing Church of Ireland songs rather than pay taxes to and be persecuted by the British, I'm sure they would have gladly accepted. But why look past ones on victim-hood in order to see truth, when victim-hood is so much more of a commodity in our modern society.

At that point I made a commitment to understand my faith. I would never let someone attack the beliefs of my ancestors as this rabbi did without making a strong defense. My ancestors were willing to be persecuted (the real kind of persecution not the Christmas Carol kind) rather than abandon their faith. The least I could do is understand what they found so important as to endure what they did. Thus starting my journey toward becoming a passionate believer. The irony of a anti-Catholic bigoted rabbi bringing me closer to the truth of Christ is absolutely wonderful.

I started reading books by the usual authors that are sold at Borders and Barnes & Noble like George Weigel. While informative they were, upon reflection, very superficial. However, I happened upon a book called “Catholicism verses Fundamentalism” by Karl Keating. I thought it was simply going to be an analysis of Catholic beliefs versus Fundamentalist beliefs. What I had purchased was a wonderful combination of satire and apologetics. It has become the definitive apologetics book produced in the last 30 years. The title of the book itself mocks Jimmy Swaggarts silly book “Catholicism and Christianity”. Throughout the book I was baptized by fire into the world of anti-Catholicism. I learned about such Fundamentalist writers and “thinkers” as Lorraine Boettner, Alexander Hislop, Jimmy Swaggart, Jack Chick and others. Keating dismantled their arguments so thoroughly that one wonders how these people are not all routinely dismissed even by honest Fundamentalists. Sadly, low rent bigots like Hislop, Boettner and Dave Hunt are still widely read in Fundamentalist circles. Swaggart has fallen out of favor as we all know. Keating opened up a new door to me. I now was ready for the next step and started buying every book by Chesterton and Belloc I could find as they are the greatest apologists for the Catholic faith in the last 100 years.

The Holy Spirit has a funny way of working. I became friends with a wonderful guy who happens to be a Fundamentalist Christian. As we would talk he would mention some of the things that Keating talked about in his book. I was informed that Peter never went to Rome and that the Church was founded by Constantine the Great, and that Easter is really “Ishtar” and other scholarly insights that occupy the minds of Fundamentalist writers. I was told all about Catholicism and how it is really just paganism re-written. To his and most Fundamentalists credit, they literally do not know they are repeating lies. These books are sold at Protestant Book Stores and Churches. Also, he informed me of these things out of love as he believed my soul was in peril. So he could not process the refutations that I would make to him and just go on to the next attack. Most Catholics know about this tactic that Fundamentalists use. They will tell us what we believe and how stupid we are for believing it. 99% of the time they are wrong. The problem is that they have been told by Dave Hunt (his bio is from "rapture ready") or James White that the Calumnies that they are stating are Gospel truth.

After a while I began to pick up more and more apologetics material to refute my friends claims. I also decided that I would no longer play defense with him. I would attack his belief in sola scriptura (scripture alone) and sola fide (faith alone). When I would press him and ask about where those teachings are found in the Bible he would have no answer. This lead to his anger that I was asking too much to show me where the Bible taught either one of those Protestant Traditions (Traditions of men, not of God I might add). I would also repeat what he would say to me but re-phrase it to see if he really was willing to stand by it. For instance, he once told me that he was passionately anti-Catholic. I responded “Really? So if I were Jewish would it be okay for you to tell me that you are passionately anti-Jew?” He was taken aback and responded “Of course not!” I then responded “I guess some hatred is acceptable while others is not”. His response….silence. And then move on to the next attack. That is generally the tactic of the anti-Catholic. Never acknowledge that they are wrong, just move on to the next attack until they find something that the Catholic cannot answer. Usually it ends with some obscure Pope from the 7th century that no one knows about.

Anti-Catholicism rots the mind. It blinds people and they become obsessed with the destruction of something that they cannot destroy. People have been trying for 2000 years. Churchmen like Roger Mahoney have done their best. But the Gates of Hell will not prevail against it. So this leads to desperation. Which then leads to all kinds of ridiculous theories and outright lies about what Catholics believe and do. It does not stop with Fundamentalist Christians though. Before we think “well that’s just those weird bible-thumpers” let’s examine some things that people just “know”.

People "just know" that the Catholic Church did nothing in the Americas but persecute the indigenous people and massacre them. We "just know" that Priests never stood up to the Spaniards. Of course this is untrue. It is true that there were Catholic Priests who conducted themselves terribly during colonial times. However, it was Catholic Priests who sought to make life better for the indigenous people. Jesuits armed Indians against the Spanish in Paraguay, Francisco de Vittoria pleaded with the Spanish King in defense of the Indians. Most people in the Americas have never heard of Bartoleme de las Casas. Las Casas, a Spanish Dominican Priest has been called the Father of anti-imperialism and anti-racism. There is also Antonio Montesino who was the first person, in 1511, to denounce publicly in America the enslavement and oppression of the Indians as sinful and disgraceful to the Spanish nation. There of course were villains in the Spanish system but so were there in the American and English systems that were dominated by Protestants. We don’t hear about the brutality of Protestant lands in the US. We hear about those backward Spanish Catholics (who built the first Universities in the Americas) but not about the theocratic police state established in Geneva by John Calvin or the massacres carried out by Anabaptists in Munster.

In some cases anti-Catholicism is not only profitable it can allow for common bullies to slander and desecrate the memory of men finer than themselves without repercussions. Take the case of Daniel Goldhagen. He has made a career out of slandering the Catholic Church. Commenting on Mr. Goldhagens slanderous book A Moral Reckoning, Rabbi David Dalin, described Goldhagens work as "failing to meet even the minimum standards of scholarship.” He went on to say “That the book has found its readership out in the fever swamps of anti-Catholicism isn't surprising. But that a mainstream publisher like Knopf would print the thing is an intellectual and publishing scandal." This statement is absolutely correct. Let us be honest though, Goldhagen simply represents the double-standard that exists in our society. He is a left wing Jew who attacks the only group that it is acceptable to attack in modern American society, the evil Catholics. If a right wing Catholic were to make his living by attacking Judaism and slandering a prominent rabbi while blaming Judaism for the Marxist massacres under the NKVD he would be an out of work “conspiracy kook” and a anti-Semite. He would certainly not be published in the New Republic. Goldhagen has made the absurd statement that Christianity is anti-Semitic at its core. Imagine if one were to say that Judaism is anti-Gentile to its core. They would be isolated as an anti-Semite. The message is clear. A Jewish bigot like Goldhagen gets published by Knopf and the New Republic while his mirror image would be isolated and vilified.

I would like to wrap up with some other observations. All Catholics are told endless stories about Catholics persecuting people. Generally it starts with a Catholic King who orders the persecution of a group and despite the Bishops or Pope condemning it, "the Catholics" are to blame. An example of his would be during the Crusades when Crusaders massacred Jews along the Rhine. That was “the Catholics” despite the local Bishops hiding and protecting Jews. When a Protestant barbarian like Oliver Cromwell slaughters Catholics at Drogheda and sells the women and children into sex slavery or sacks Wexford that’s not “the Protestants”. That’s just Cromwell.

Much is made about Hitler being a baptized Catholic by ignoramuses like Dave Hunt. Other bigots like Goldhagen argue that Nazism was an extension of Catholic bigotry through the ages. Yet these people do not mention that Karl Marx was a Jew and that the ranks of the NKVD, some of the greatest murderers of all time, were filled with Jews. By using Goldhagens logic should we not attack Judaism and Jews? If we Catholics are and our faith are responsible for a former Catholic who later went so far as to persecute the Church, should not Jews be held responsible for Karl Marx and Genrikh Yagoda and the fact that some of greatest murderers of modern times were Jewish. The answer is of course not. Your Jewish neighbor has likely not heard of the NKVD, Yagoda let alone support what he and they did.

As I wrap up my thoughts on this I should say thank you to all of the people that I mention above. Especially the Rabbi who started my journey. Had he not been a self absorbed bigot, he would not have angered me and I would not have explored my own faith. I would have continued in my ignorance and would not have understood the faith that built Western Civilization and sustained my ancestors. I would not have understood the faith that Christ taught to the Apostles, that was passed on to their successors, our Bishops. I would not truly know the joy of being a Catholic. His ignorant statements brought about my reversion back to the true faith and my wife’s conversion to it. For that, I will literally be eternally indebted to him.

Theistic evolution means that it is evolution guided by God, Who is the sole Creator of the world from nothing. This is an allowable doctrine, but it is not the only allowable doctrine. A Catholic is free to not believe in any evolution at all, and generally take the Bible as literally as he wishes to. I happen to not believe in eveolution from species to species, for example, and I am an informed Catholic in good standing. In other words, your position is peculiar in that you argue for one Catholic teaching against another Catholic teaching, while not being a Catholic at all. This is a bit comical.

We further believe that Adam and Eve were physical historical parents of all mankind. This is a mandatory belief for a Catholic. If you want, I can research with greater precision what exactly the parameters of Catholicism are in this regard, -- I remember seeing several bullet points, but that would be offtopic for this thread. Or you can look it up yourself in the Catechism.

We do not teach that the Bible is mythology, that is solely allegorical. We believe that the Church interprets the Bible, and that the Bible contains poetic or allegorical language as well as concretely descriptive language. We also allow a wide berth in some scriptural interpretations and less so in others. As regards the first chapters of Genesis, I just outlined what is and what is not permissible Catholic interpretation.

We believe that the Bible is inerrant inasmuch as it pertains to the questions of faith. It may get geological, historical, or biological facts wrong inasmuch as the inspired author never meant the Bible to be a manual of geology, history or biology.

Anyone who wishes to interpret the creation account literally in every detail -- an extreme literalist as you seem to be -- is welcome to the Catholic Church with this belief intact. His condition will be no different as a Protestant creationist's condition is now vis-a-vis the less fundamentalist as a whole body of Protestants.

Despite the author's attacks on liberalism, he sounds like a coastal elite leftist when he attacks the Bible Belt and Fundamentalists

Good job on attacking the messenger. Someone that you do not know and have no idea what he stands for. The fact of the matter is that Catholics for years have had to walk out to their cars and find really stupid "tracts" on their windshields that attack their beliefs. Generally those tracts are put together by people who are either ignorant or liars. One does not have to be a "coastal elite leftist" to see this.

Oh boo freakin' hoo. Catholics leave church and find tracts under their windshield wipers. Call Amnesty International! Haul the perpetrators before the UN! Outlaw Protestant proselytization as a "hate crime" (since Catholics don't proselytize, they have no stake in the matter, do they?). I tell you, it must be hell being a Catholic in bad old Protestant America, especially in the rural hinterlands where people marry their cousins and don't know how to read. And how dare I point out the similarity between this attitude of so many Catholic and that of leftwing coastal elites?

You want to talk about double-standards? I'll tell you about double-standards. How about all the rhetoric about stupid "redneck" Protestants when your own membership during the Middle Ages was hardly made up of people qualified for Mensa? I will never understand why poor whites are needled and attacked ceaselessly for not being intellectuals whereas barefoot illiterate medieval Belgian peasants are held out as the absolute standard of piety. Has it ever occurred to you that our "rednecks" are merely our version of your illiterate medieval Belgian peasants? Or that your church during he Middle Ages would have done something much more drastic to heretics than putting tracts under their windshield wipers?

For some reason the ignorance of poor rural American whites is a vice while everyone else's is a virtue! There's your double-standard!

(not to mention the whining about the persecution of his "indigenous" ancestors by big bad Anglo-Saxons; that gets old too).

Yes, pointing out that the British were barbarians in Ireland is so passe. We should all know about every single instance where a Catholic misbehaved but we must never show where Protestants that they have behaved themselves more like Muslims toward their conquered subjects than Christian. That's just "old".

Ees de 'ow you say de eempeereealeesm! Ees de 'ow you say de coloneealeesm! We make de 'ow you say de rewolution! Sure wish I was "indigenous!"

And why is it all right for Catholic states to treat heretics like slime? Merely because in American Catholics are sophisticated ethnic urban immigrant Democrat union goons who are "victims" of the bigotry of poor barefoot hillbillies, right? Wow. What a deal!

Let the Catholic Church stop teaching that the Bible is mythology and a great deal of my own hostility will end.

Could you show me in the Catechism where the Catholic Church teaches that? If not, retract it and admit that you are doing exactly what the author describes. It is hilarious how people describe "what Catholic believe" and then attack what they say Catholic believe.

Whatever the catechism may say, Catholic books, literature, and Bibles (with the imprimatur) have taught evolution and the documentary hypothesis for decades. Do you deny this? I will not retract my statement because it is true, and your claim that if it isn't in the catechism it isn't "official" is like the John Birch Society claiming as long as the anti-Semitic content of their magazines isn't in their Bulletin then it isn't official!

Have you ever heard of Karl Keating? Have you ever heard of Fr. Peter M. J. Stravinskas? Do you have any idea what these highly visible Catholic apologists teach about total Biblical inerrancy? (They're against it!) How many Catholic children are taught by their bishops, priests, and religious that events of the Bible are nothing more than didactic parables? Where in the entire United States is a parochial school that doesn't teach evolution? This is how the Catholic Church teaches in the real world. Your "it has to be in the catechism" charge is dishonest in the extreme.

And as for the Catechism (which I've had quoted to me enough times on this forum, btw), its words on Biblical inerrancy are weasel words that can be interpreted either as teaching total inerrancy, or only theological inerrancy, according to however the reader wants to interpret it. Too bad the one true original church doesn't have the courage of tiny little rural Protestant sects who aren't afraid to come right out and defend total inerrancy, even if it offends intellectuals!

Catholics have been hit over the head with the Bible by Protestants for so long that they've come to distrust it.

Please provide an an example of this or retract your statement and admit that you are full of it.

Why don't you go to Donal Anthony Foley's Catholic creationist web site and read where he ascribes the Catholic affinity for evolution to a "distrust" of the Bible that entered the church at the time of the Protestant reformation? Or why don't you ask wideawake, since he's admitted this is the case for a majority of American Catholics?

Why are most of your co-religionists on this forum evolutionists and deniers of total Biblical inerrancy? You probably fall into these categories yourself, which makes you a hypocrite for protesting.

Now they've convinced themselves that total inerrancy is merely an adjunct of "sola scriptura" so now they're against it.

I say this in all charity. You have absolutely no idea about the topic you are speaking of. Your understanding of Catholicism is so far off that it is almost laughable. Please read up on the topics and when you have an understanding of Catholic teaching (the real kind not the Dave Hunt version) you can add serious commentary on Church issues.

And I say this to you in all charity: you are an ignoramus. I spent six years in your "unchanged and unchanging" church. To do so I had to reject a lifetime of beliefs and instincts, and every prejudice I ever had about Catholicism was confirmed in those six years. And as for Dave Hunt, so far as I know people like that are still harping on the Papacy and confession; how many Fundamentalist Protestants even know how liberal the Catholic Church really is? If they did, then they'd have some real ammunition!

I ask all members and moderators of this forum once again: what is the difference between the hostility of our urban coastal liberal elites towards the Biblicism of the American Heartland and that of our Catholic "friends" and "allies?" What is the difference between Al Sharpton's or Louis Farrakhans view of the "crackers" and that held by so many American Catholics?

Unfortunately, as members of a historically discriminated against minority group American Catholics behave the exact same way that the rest of them do. And that is obvious from reading this forum.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.