“Rome”, “Roman”, and the source of “anti-Catholic bigotry”

Walls, Collins, and “Rome”

The charge has been raised that because Walls and Collins use the abbreviations “Rome” and “Roman” for “the Roman Catholic Church” (instead of simply calling it “the Catholic Church” all the time), that some kind of “anti-Catholic bigotry is behind it.

In titling their work “Roman but Not Catholic”, authors Ken Collins and Jerry Walls have staked out some property amidst two different and competing concepts, that are not altogether accepted (it seems) by Roman Catholics. I’ve already mentioned Turretin and his complaint that by claiming the title of “The Church”, he said, “[Roman Catholics] think they can, as with one blow, beat down and settle the controversy waged against them …” by simply “hiding themselves under the specious title of the antiquity and infallibility of the Catholic church” (Turretin, “Institutes”, Vol 3. pgs 2-3).

This is how the Roman Catholic Church seeks to win arguments: by co-opting the meanings of words. And for sure, both of the words, “Roman” and “Catholic” (the latter also being available with a small “c”) have generated their fair share of contention. So defining them is going to be very important.

“Anti-Catholicism” fueled by Liberal Roman Catholics

Over the weekend, one of my new friends at the Catholic-Protestant Debate group on Facebook posted the following:

Prejudice against the Catholics is "the deepest bias in the history of the American People" - Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.

"Catholic baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberals" - Conservative writer Peter Viereck

Anti-Catholicism is "the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history" - Historian John Higham

Discuss the relative truths revealed by these quotes.

I Google’d the first phrase, and don’t you know, this article from New Oxford Review came up, a review of the work “The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice”, by Philip Jenkins, Oxford University Press. Perhaps he wanted to pin me (and perhaps others) with a kind of “current manifestation” of the kind of “anti-Catholic bigotry” that “came to America with English colonists”:

Jenkins convincingly demonstrates that modern attempts to blacken the teaching and history of the Catholic Church are related to the contorted rantings of Swift and Foxe in the 1700s, now tricked out in new attire. Jenkins reveals how smears, at one time limited to the Ku Klux Klan’s attempts to play up American fears of “kikes, koons, and katholics,” have now become lucrative sources of revenue for ordinary individuals and companies.

That portion of the story is fleshed out with allusions to NY Governor Al Smith “digging under the Atlantic to Rome” and a 1960 book that “denounced John F. Kennedy, warning that voting a Catholic into the presidency would bring the pope to Washington and destroy American freedoms”.

But the real “anti-Catholicism” that has taken place since 1960 is the result of Vatican II progressives: