Anti-Catholicism

I don't know how much he was raised in Catholicism, but enough for him to know that in his view, Catholicism was just empty religion, man-made traditions.

And his, we'll just call it anti-Catholicism worldview, was baked into a lot of the other things he talked about with his biblical teaching.

So there was a lot of talk about, we have freedom in Christ, not legalism like the Catholics, or we have, you know, we trust in Jesus alone for our salvation, not in our works like the Catholics, you know, all the things.

So when this girl told me she was Catholic, I'm like, I got to save her.

They were using the ca- catechism of the Council of Trent in an English translation.

So it was adapted for the, the particular situation that American Catholics found themselves in, largely under the gun in terms of a lot of anti-Catholicism and, you know, Irish need not apply.

From the 1840s on, there was a, a really strong strain of virulent anti-Catholicism that was common in the United States.

So the, um, the Baltimore Catechism as it was originally promulgated was really good and helpful, but it had to be updated.

Not doctrinally, of course, but updated with a view to the current circumstances as they changed.

But earlier we were talking about the Ark, so maybe just a minute, because I thought that that was really instructive, and maybe that'll be your last word, and then I can talk a little bit about what we're offering.

Yeah, so we can see the growth and maturation of American Catholicism from the early days overcoming anti-Catholicism and then this explosion of Catholicism in the United States on population, but also just the sheer strength of American Catholicism, the vitality of it.

And so he is, in many ways, the heir to all of that, in particular, in a place like Chicago, that was one of these great bastions of Catholic life, thanks to Mundelein and others.

And that flourishing of Catholicism, especially in his family, you can trace that line all the way back to Junipero Serra, to John Carroll, to Mother Cabrini, to Catherine Drexel, and all of those who contributed to the life of the faith in America.

I think, I mean, first of all, is it okay in a generic sort of sense, the church would say, if you're going to observe, you know, you're not participating, you're not taking part in anything.

Reluctantly, the church would say yes, but I would say it's not a good idea at all because the Seventh-day Adventists are virulently anti-Catholic.

In fact, Ellen Gould White, the founders of that religion, Her whole big thing was that the Catholic Church is the whore of Babylon and that Sunday worship is a sign of the Antichrist system and that the Catholic Church is, you might say, the personification of the Antichrist.

So for that reason, I would not personally sit through that nonsense and hearing that preached attacks against the church that Jesus established and which the Seventh-day Adventists do all the live long day, I couldn't stomach it and I wouldn't stomach it.

Certainly Cromwell's sympathies were not for the church favored by the monarch he supplanted and were much with the Independents.

If he was a Socinian, we can easily understand how the secret society of Vicenza could have attractions for one of his anti-Catholic and ambitious sentiments.

He gave its members in England, as Monsignor Segur tells us, the title of Freemasons and invited the allegory of the Temple of Solomon, now so much used by Masonry of every kind, and which meant the original state of man supposed to be a commonwealth of equality with a vague deism as its religion.

This temple, destroyed by Christ for the Christian order, was to be restored by Freemasonry after Christ and the Christian order should be obliterated by conspiracy and revolution.

Catholicism has a life much more tenacious than that.

It has seen the most implacable, the most terrible adversaries, and it has often had the malignant pleasure of throwing holy war on the tombs of the most enraged.

Let us permit, then, our brethren of these countries to give themselves up to the sterile intemperance of their anti-Catholic zeal.

Let them even mock at our Madonnas and our apparent devotion.

Annapolis over a century ago.

And not just anti-Semitism, Peter, I could point you to Joseph Kennedy Sr., not to make this a bash Harvard podcast, but Joe Kennedy Sr.'s Harvard class in 1912 and what drives him, anti-Catholicism on campus.

Remember, he couldn't get in the Porcelain Club because he belonged to wrong faith.

So again, my point is, you see these problems existing in colleges decades earlier, a century earlier in this case, but are universities reflecting the modern times or is this just a thread in university life?