On Fearing A Foreign “religion”

Francis Cardinal Satolli, menace to America — In 1893, Cardinal Francesco Satolli was appointed by the Vatican as its first representative to the United States. In this 1894 cartoon, he casts an evil shadow across the nation. (Wikimedia Commons public domain)

Here’s a delightful passage about Roman Catholicism from the 1835 work Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States, written by Samuel F. B. Morse (Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale, Class of 1810), painter, co-inventor of the telegraph, and co-developer of the “Morse Code”:

Surely American Protestants, freemen, have discernment enough to discover beneath them the cloven foot of this subtle foreign heresy. . . . They will see that Popery is now, what it has ever been, a system of the darkest political intrigue and despotism, cloaking itself to avoid attack under the sacred name of religion. They will be deeply impressed with the truth, that Popery is a political as well as a religious system; that in this respect it differs totally from all other sects, from all other forms of religion in the country.

Substitute the word Islam for the word Popery and you have a pretty good summary of the argument made by some vocal anti-Islamic zealots today.

On fearing a foreign “religion”