The Church at Ground Zero

If history teaches us nothing else, it shows that we’ve been there before. As Thursday’s New York Times aptly notes, the debate over the Islamic center at Ground Zero echoes controversies of an earlier period. On nearby Barclay Street, St. Peter’s Catholic Church is celebrating its 225th anniversary as the first Roman Catholic church erected in New York state. But when the church was founded in 1785, anti-Catholicism was an accepted part of American life. Until a few years earlier, Catholics were barred from public office, and priests (particularly Jesuits) were banned altogether. Catholics were perceived as holding beliefs antithetical to the American way of life. Riots broke out as Catholics exercised their new-found religious freedom. Father Kevin Madigan, the current pastor of St. Peter’s, writes in a letter to parishioners that Catholics “were treated as second-class citizens; we were viewed with suspicion.” He further adds that many “of the charges being leveled at Muslim-Americans today are the same as those once leveled at our forebears.” Therefore, he concludes, Catholic New Yorkers have a special obligation: “The discrimination suffered by their forebears ought to be an incentive for us to ensure that similar indignities not be inflicted on more recent arrivals.”