Catholics: The invisible whipping boy
Bashing Catholics is nothing new in Pennsylvania, a professor of religious studies told a standing-room-only crowd at St. Vincent College Thursday.
"The Ku Klux Klan didn't like blacks. The Ku Klux Klan didn't like Jews. But it was formed primarily against Catholics in the 1920s," Philip Jenkins said.
The Pennsylvania city with the highest number of Klansmen in 1920 was Altoona, he said. Westmoreland was the county with the most Klansmen in the state that year, according to Jenkins, a Distinguished Professor of history and religious studies at the Pennsylvania State University.
Today Catholics are under attack from a number of groups, including liberals, feminists and gay rights activists.
It is sometimes subtle, sometimes heavy-handed.
At Halloween, 2001, for instance, a Massachusetts school was concerned that its Halloween event could be used to attack Muslims, Jenkins said. So the teachers screened everyone to make sure there were no costumes that would offend the Muslim community.
"Top prize went to one boy dressed like a Catholic priest and two girls playing the nuns he got pregnant," Jenkins said.
In 1996, actress Alyssa Milano was tagged for taking a slam at Catholicism by Catalyst, an organization that was launched initially to deal with cults. Milano has five tattoos and said they are a bit of a rebellion against her Catholic upbringing.
Princeton University's Bernstein Gallery hosted an exhibition in June that featured naked female torsos arranged in the shape of a cross, a ripped image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and Catholic devotional items linked under the title "Shackles of the AIDS Virus."
This "art" was sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
That kind of activity concerns Jenkins, who authored the book, "The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice," because there is no outrage on behalf of Catholics.
"A swastika on a synagogue will stir anger and resentment," he said. "We have a very large body of law out there that covers every major group, but in practice excludes Catholics."
As recently as 10 years ago, there were large demonstrations against Catholic churches in America that were planned so they could "violate sacred space." That has slipped from memory, Jenkins said.
Three years ago in Montreal, protestors trampled hymnals and communion wafers in Catholic churches. "Local police wouldn't investigate because they said it didn't rise to the level of a hate crime," he said.
Jenkins said the Catholic Church fell from favor after John F. Kennedy's presidency and wound up on the wrong side of a number of political and social issues in the 1970s.
Archie Bunker may not have been Catholic, but he certainly represented what many people in America thought a Catholic was, Jenkins said.
"They were orthodox. They were dumb. They were Catholic," he said.
In the last 20 years, it has been proposed that the Vatican played an organizational role in the Holocaust. "I don't make these things up. I couldn't make this up," he said.
Jenkins has written extensively on religious topics and is worried about sectarian violence, which could pit Christians against Muslims, Catholics against Protestants.
Jenkins notes in his book, "The Next Christendom: The Toming of Global Christianity," that while Christianity is largely stagnant in the United States and western Europe, it is growing explosively in the "global south" of Africa, Asia and Latin America.
He believes most of these new churches will be Pentecostal.
