{"id":29124,"date":"2016-10-11T17:00:42","date_gmt":"2016-10-11T22:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/?p=29124"},"modified":"2016-10-11T17:00:42","modified_gmt":"2016-10-11T22:00:42","slug":"an-old-example-of-liberal-protestant-anti-catholicism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/2016\/10\/11\/an-old-example-of-liberal-protestant-anti-catholicism\/","title":{"rendered":"An old example of liberal Protestant anti-Catholicism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

When my Mom died a couple years ago, as we were sorting out her stuff to give to charity, I went through her boxes of books and pulled out some for my own library.\u00a0 My mother was a great reader, and she helped nourish my own love of books.\u00a0 We never read many of the same things:\u00a0 she was a big fan of mysteries and (later in life) romance novels, and I am pretty much a fantasy and science fiction reader when I am not plowing through some weightier tome on philosophy or theology.\u00a0 But I did grab some of her mysteries that she had shared with me.\u00a0 I got a complete set of Harry Kemelman<\/a>\u2018s Rabbi mysteries.\u00a0 They are great stories and I learned a lot of things about American Judaism from them.\u00a0 (I would not call him definitive, but especially in his earlier books he captures a lot of nuance about conservative Judaism.)<\/p>\n

I also picked up a few of the Reverend Randollph mysteries by Charles Merrill Smith<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 Smith was a Methodist minister and later bishop, and his satirical critique of mainline Protestantism, How to Become a Bishop without being Religious<\/em> is quite funny in parts.\u00a0\u00a0 The Reverend Randollph mysteries are about a minister in an unidentified Protestant denomination (though I suspect from some details it is intended to be Methodist), a former pro football quarterback and professor of church history at a seminary.\u00a0 He is recruited to run a socially prominent congregation in Chicago by his bishop.\u00a0 The stories are interesting, though all in all I do not think they are as good as the Rabbi novels.\u00a0 But worth a read, I think.<\/p>\n

However, as I started re-reading them recently I was somewhat taken aback by a passage that was rather surprising in its anti-Catholicism.\u00a0 The setting is the funeral of the murder victim, and while leading the service he notes that the police detective in charge of the investigation is in the back.\u00a0 This leads to the following internal monologue:<\/p>\n

And Lieutenant Michael Casey, barely noticeable in a shadowed corner, here not as a mourner but as an observant bloodhound, did he believe in God?\u00a0 Was it a conventional Catholic God who granted special favors to Catholics, especially Catholics who were faithful at mass and confession and refrained from practicing artificial birth control?\u00a0 No. Casey would be more likely to reflect Teilhard de Chardin or Maritain or Hans Kung or even Paul Tillich on God, Randollph guessed.\u00a0 Casey was a college man, as he had so carefully informed Randollph.\u00a0 He might go through the prescribed Catholic motions out of habit or to please aged and devout Irish parents or prompted by his knowledge of Chicago police politics (a good word from his pastor dropped in the right place could make all the difference in a policeman\u2019s career).\u00a0 But Casey wouldn\u2019t be taken in by the hocus pocus.\u00a0 Case would know that you can\u2019t tickle God\u2019s fancy by devout posturing or wheedle His cooperation with candles and novenas.\u00a0 Casey was sharp.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now to be fair, the author also has a low opinion of traditional Protestant piety:\u00a0 the hero and the various Protestant divines who appear favorably in the story are all much too sophisticated for that sort of thing and they readily voice their (i.e., the author\u2019s) opinions on the subject.\u00a0 But this passage really stood out to me for the rather casual way it repeated one of the classic anti-Catholic tropes of post-Enlightenment Protestantism:\u00a0 that Catholics are trapped by superstitious mummery and that they lacked the knowledge and education to realize this.\u00a0\u00a0 The novel was written in 1974, well past Vatican II, but it clearly reflects a pre-Vatican II Protestant sensibility in its contempt for Catholicism.<\/p>\n

I do not mean to cast any particular opprobrium on the author:\u00a0 originally, I only wanted to share it as a relic of a different age.\u00a0 But as I was trying to wrap up this post, I realized that it was also a useful reminder to us that this sort of thing was considered quite acceptable not that long ago.\u00a0\u00a0 Anti-Catholicism has changed in America, but it has not gone away.\u00a0 There are probably lots of liberal Protestants today who do not like Catholics, but the reasons behind their dislike have changed considerably, and are more in tune with the secular left\/liberal critiques of Catholicism.\u00a0\u00a0 But I think it would be worth examining the evolution of anti-Catholicism since the 1950s to see in what ways historic Protestant fears have been incorporated into the secular rhetoric. La plus ca change<\/em>\u2026.I don\u2019t have any particular thoughts at the moment, but would be happy to bat this idea around in the comments.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When my Mom died a couple years ago, as we were sorting out her stuff to give to charity, I went through her boxes of books and pulled out some for my own library.\u00a0 My mother was a great reader, and she helped nourish my own love of books.\u00a0 We never read many of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2931,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[605],"tags":[908,1672,1673,1674,1675],"class_list":["post-29124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-david-cruz-uribe","tag-anti-catholicism","tag-charles-merrill-smith","tag-harry-kemelman","tag-liberal-protestants","tag-reverend-randollph"],"yoast_head":"\nAn old example of liberal Protestant anti-Catholicism<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"When my Mom died a couple years ago, as we were sorting out her stuff to give to charity, I went through her boxes of books 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