The two groups that the pre-Civil War “Know-Nothings” most hated were immigrants and Roman Catholics. Not all contemporary immigration restrictionists continue that tradition. There are reasonable men in their ranks who make rational (albeit IMHO mistaken) arguments for closing the U.S. to most newcomers. Then there are those like Donald Collins, a board member of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (“reform” here being a synonym for abolition), writing in the Pittsburgh Tribune:
Despite the new pope’s encyclical disclaimer about trying to influence public policy, Rome and these bishops have been hard at work trying to shape U.S. public policy for decades. And, to a large degree, they have succeeded. Let me illustrate.
We now have five male Catholic justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. Most Catholics, particularly women, with whom I talk are highly displeased with this concentration of power and the likely rightward course of women's rights under the newalignment. . . .
Those who occupy chairs in the citadels of religiosity are naturally covetous [sic] of the “true faith” they embrace – not because it represents the truth but because it represents temporal power of the most useful kind. That, for example, the world’s richest institution, the combined resources and property of the Catholic Church, exposes the obvious basis for its biases on contraception, abortion and male-only priests as a means of flock control – particularly over women but also in a much broader sense over the American body politic. [Try diagramming that last sentence.]
The one question that was not raised at the Alito hearings was whether he felt that the activities of his church were legal under current statutes.
On Nov. 20, 1975, the American Catholic bishops issued their Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities. This plan is a superbly detailed blueprint of the bishops’ strategy for infiltrating and manipulating the American democratic process at national, state and local levels. It called for the creation of a national political machine controlled by the bishops. In large measure, this machine has, dragging along its unwitting evangelical brethren, taken over the Republican Party.
Colgate University political science professor Timothy Byrnes calls it the most “focused and aggressive political leadership” ever exerted by the American Catholic hierarchy. So much for respect for the American constitutional principle of separation of church and state. [emphasis added]
Mr. Collins’s innuendos are slightly quaint, rather like reading a less literate Paul Blanshard. As John J. Miller observes,
Infiltrating and manipulating? Because Catholics have decided to promote pro-life causes through conventional politics? I don’t particularly care for the agenda of the Collins’s Federation for American Immigration Reform, but I wouldn’t accuse it of trying to subvert our country’s democracy because it pursues a political agenda in Washington. But I might accuse its leaders of coming dangerously close to trafficking in anti-Catholic bigotry.
Reading the same sorts of comments from a writer who was writing to our fanzine, a few years back, I was wondering what would happen when she finally discovered _The Awful Disclosuers of Maria Monk_? (The famous "expose" of convents as harems.)
Posted by: Joseph T Major | Saturday, February 25, 2006 at 05:51 AM