Catholic Schools back then were regarded as the best in the South and the Church had already founded many great Hospitals to take care of anyone. The feudal society and Tradition of Family, local rule and the South’s devotion to God and country was the main reason that Pope Pius was the only European to recognize the Confederacy as an independent nation, despite that fact that the Church had going back to the 15th century long ago started to reject slavery.
All this should be well known, but it is not. Most people assume that the antibellum South and its slaveowners were identical to the Baptist preachers and trailer-park dwelling welfare cases of today (it's amazing how many people seem to blame poor Southerners for everything and let rich Southerners off the hook).
Much of what we today think of as "Southern" actually originally began in the North and New England--Calvinistic, revivalistic chr*stianity, temperance, anti-Catholicism, Know Nothingism, anti-Masonry; bizarre religious enthusiasms, . . . actually, many Confederates and their apologists today liked to blame "Northern radicalism" on Puritanism. I have read the ridiculous claim that Ted Kennedy was merely the logical ideological descendant of Jonathan Edwards.
Read any honest history book and you will see that it was always the North where convents were being burned, where Know Nothings and Prohibitionists had the greatest political power, where "revivals" and new religious sects where people contorted and bent and twisted were being founded. The "burned over district" was in New York State.
All of these things that were once so common in the North were basically overwhelmed by foreign immigration. The old time Yankees literally no longer exist, having been displaced by Irish Catholics. And so these old Northern attitudes found their last bastion in the no-longer-aristocratic South. In fact, I like to call the Upper South, where I live, Southern New England.
I don't want to travel under a false flag. I am an admirer of New England Puritanism, temperance, anti-Masonry, and much of the old moralistic impulse. I am also (confession time here) known as one of the foremost "anti-Catholic bigots" on this forum, though my primary argument with Catholics is against their turning the Bible into a book of "myths" written by ignorant primitives who didn't know how the world actually works.
Zionist:
Well, you and I at least agree on these points with respect to History. As someone who was born raised and will die in Louisiana, and has travelled extensively in the South and lived for a short time in 2 other Southern States, the ole aristocratic South [High Church Episcopalians], who were the civic, political and cultrual elite of the antebellum South were not anti-Catholic in the hate sense. It was the more rural Protestant South and the more independent Congregationist type Protestants [in the Northeast as well as the Presbyterians, Methodist and Baptist that were then, and to some degree, now anti Catholic. I made the distinction and on that point, do agree with you. And you are also correct that in the Northeast, it was Congregationalist, Calvinist and puritan streams in it and was also very anti-Catholic, and immigration did change the demographics and thus defacto removed the religous anti-Catholicism in those regions as bascially, Protestantism in the Northeast, the congregationalist have collapsed into secular atheism or Unitariansim and thus the anti Catholicism in the Northeast is more of the secularist type directed at orthodox Catholic Bishops who are gradually starting to reappear in that part of the country, i.e. Dolan of NY, Tobin in Rhode Island, etc.
Now as for your comments about Catholics reducing the biblical text and writers to ignorant and myth, I think that is a mischaracterization and is not accurate.
I don't want to travel under a false flag. I am an admirer of New England Puritanism, temperance, anti-Masonry, and much of the old moralistic impulse. I am also (confession time here) known as one of the foremost "anti-Catholic bigots" on this forum, though my primary argument with Catholics is against their turning the Bible into a book of "myths" written by ignorant primitives who didn't know how the world actually works.
You know, I always enjoy reading your replies and our occasional exchanges, but you're very wrong in the first paragraph of yours cited above. Puritans (and Congregationalists, and those ever-so-genteel Anglican Cavaliers) literally drove the Baptists, the Presbyterians, the Methodists and so many other denominations not afforded the luxury of being a State religion, drove them out, drove them up into the Shenandoah Valley and beyond into the backcountry, where these denominations could find some semblance of peace, some semblance of being able to worship God as they chose, in relative peace.
This was occurring well before the Republic was ever born. It continued to some extent afterwards, but the disestablishment of State religions removed the force of law from those who would drive them out. The revivalist zeal of that very manic-depressive genius, Jonathan Edwards, was symptomatic of the deeply held religious views of all the populace in the colonial era, regardless of geography. That such deeply held religious views remain in the south and not in the north as a whole, is indicative more of a falling away elsewhere and not some sort of derivative echo.
In a broad sense, the one region held true to the faith of it's forefathers, and the other did not. That's all you can conclude without attributing some false cause-and-effect that did not and does not exist.
As far as the all too easily flung and all too common charges of "bigotry" against anyone who stands up for literal meaning within the Old Testament, or in your case the Torah, well ... let's just say the Religion Forum occasionally veers into territory that feels very out of place on a conservative, Constitutionalist site such as Free Republic. There are some internalized and very deeply held hard left points of view on inadvertant display at times.