Old (Anti-)Catholic Stuff

A bogus Knights of Columbus oath was circulated in the early 1900s as an anti-Catholic tactic designed to inflame Protestants and others. Although branded by a US Congressional Committee in 1913 as a fake used by American bigots, the bogus oath was used against Democratic candidate Alfred E. Smith in the 1928 presidential campaign and again against John F. Kennedy in 1960 in the West Virginia Democratic primary. The fake oath reads:

“I do promise and declare that I will, when opportunity presents, make and wage relentless war, secretly and openly, against all heretics, Protestants and Masons, as I am directed to do, to extirpate them from the face of the whole earth; and that I will spare neither age, sex, nor condition, and that I will hang, burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle, and bury alive those infamous heretics; rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women, and crush their infants’ heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race….”