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The History of Anti-Catholicism
By Jimmy Akin

One of the most tenacious problems a Catholic apologist encounters is anti-Catholicism. In order to effectively counter it, we need to have some appreciation of its history.

In a sense, anti-Catholicism can only exist if there is some other group of Christians to contrast Catholics with. Hostility toward Christians in the earliest years would not be anti-Catholic since at that time there were no non-Catholic churches. Soon, however, some local churches did acquire unorthodox beliefs and practices that resulted in their separating themselves from the worldwide Christian Church. The resulting groups were commonly named after their founders, the locations where they arose, or their most distinctive doctrines, practices, or traits. The Montanists were named after their founder Montanus. The Cataphrygians were named after the land of Phrygia. The Docetists were named after their claim that Christ only seemed (Greek, dokein) to be human, and the Quartodecimians were named after their insistence on celebrating Easter on the fourteenth of Nisan even if it did not fall on a Sunday.

By the second half of the first century there were enough separate, particular groups in existence that there needed to be a way to refer to the universal body of Christians constituting the original Church that Christ founded. The term that came into use for designating this all-embracing body was kataholos, which is brought over into English as “Catholic.” Though it is often somewhat loosely translated as “universal,” it means “according [kata-] to the whole [holos].”

By the early second century, the term “Catholic” was in common use as a designation for Christ’s Church. A belief or practice was said to be Catholic if it if it was in accord with what Christians as a whole believed or practiced, not just what was taught or done by some particular group that had split off from the Church. Christians who preferred their own views to those of the whole Church were known as heretics (roughly, “opinionated ones”) and those who separated from Catholic unity for non-doctrinal reasons were known as schismatics (roughly, “divisive ones”).

In the early Church, anti-Catholicism per se was essentially confined to the heretical or schismatic bodies that split off from the Catholic Church. Naturally, they tended to be hostile to Catholicism on some level, or they would not have left. However, on the whole non-Christians were not aware of the divisions within the Christian community, and so they tended to think favorably or unfavorably of Christians as a group.

This changed with the advent of Protestantism, which, as its name suggests, arose as a protest against Catholic beliefs and practices. A new explosion of sects occurred, and again they tended to be named after their founder, place of origin, or their distinctive belief, practice, or trait. (Lutherans are named after their founder, Anglicans are named after their country of origin, and Episcopalians and Presbyterians are named after their forms of government.)

Before the Protestant Reformation, when sects split off from the Church it was normally over only one or two points, and the sects remained largely faithful to historic Christian belief and practice. However, the leaders of the Protestant sects largely took an approach that discarded everything and reformulated the Christian faith from scratch using Scripture alone. The result was that the new sects diverged more widely from historic Christian belief and practices than almost any that had appeared since the first two centuries (Gnosticism would be the exception).

Despite their level of divergence, the new sects grew quickly because they encouraged regional and national governments to break with the Catholic Church and in its place embrace their sect. To obtain more political and financial autonomy, many governments did this and as the state church the new faith was imposed on the populace, who were now told that they were no longer Catholics and must now worship at the new, Protestant services.

To justify breaking away from what was, to almost everyone, the Christian Church, and to justify the social and political convulsions that followed, Protestant preachers had to paint the Catholic Church as something evil, repressive, and abominable—something that wasn’t a Christian Church at all. Only by believing this could one believe that one was not, in fact, leaving Christ’s Church. Thus anti-Catholicism experienced a rebirth...

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