Minorities and Reconstructive Coalitions

The Catholic Question

Willie Gin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138283237
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351981842
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As with Muslims today, Catholics were once suspected of being antidemocratic, oppressive of women, and supportive of extremist political violence. By the end of the twentieth century, Catholics were considered normal and sometimes valorized as exemplary citizens. Can other ethnic, racial, and religious minorities follow the same path? Minorities and Reconstructive Coalitions provides an answer by comparing the stories of ethnic Catholics' political incorporation in Australia, Canada, and the United States. Through comparative and historical analysis, the book shows that reconstructive coalitions, such as labor and pan-Christian moral movements, can bring Catholics and Protestants together under new identities, significantly improving Catholic standing. Not all coalitions are reconstructive or successful, and institutional structures such as regional autonomy can enhance or inhibit the formation of these coalitions. The book provides overviews of the history of Catholics in the three countries, reorients the historiography of Catholic incorporation in the United States, uncovers the phenomenon of minority overrepresentation in politics, and advances unique arguments about the impact of coalitions on minority politics.

1 The multiplicity of the Catholic past

Growing up in a small Ohio town in the 1950s, I knew the religion of just about every kid in my 600-person high school. […] When my children attended high school in the 1980s, they didn’t know the religion of practically anyone. It simply didn’t matter. […] In my lifetime, Americans have deconstructed religion as a basis for making decisions. Why can’t we do the same thing with other types of diversity?

Robert Putnam¹

Catholic political incorporation has been forgotten. Perhaps the best marker for the unremembered histories of Catholic political incorporation is the film V for Vendetta (2006). In the film, a disfigured revolutionary wearing a Guy Fawkes mask fights a futuristic totalitarian government, chanting, “Remember, remember, the fifth of November.” Unknown to many of the film’s viewers, the chant references the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which Fawkes and his fellow Catholic conspirators planned to blow up Parliament and assassinate the Protestant king, James I. In the past, the ditty to “Remember the fifth of November” invited listeners to recall Catholic treason. During the colonial era in America, celebrations of Guy Fawkes Day featured burnings of the Pope in effigy. Yet, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the makers of V for Vendetta treated the Fawkes mask as a symbol of heroic resistance from tyrannical government, and this association crossed over into real social movements. Protestors donned the grinning visage of Guy Fawkes in the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011. Use of the mask spread among pro-democratization movements throughout the world, compelling authoritarian governments in the Middle East to ban the mask and its transgressive smirk.

How did a symbol of Catholic treason become a worldwide symbol of resistance against authoritarian government? It is not likely that the Fawkes mask has been taken up because of a perception of the link between Catholicism and freedom. Many of the Occupy protestors, for instance, would probably object to the Catholic Church’s stance on abortion and homosexuality. It is more likely that the connection of the Fawkes mask to Catholicism has simply been forgotten. This forgetting is reflected in the fact that there is no name or term readily at hand to describe the once prolific discourse about Catholic fitness for democratic life. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, “the Jewish Question” marked the supposed “problem” of Jewish citizens as political subjects. Today, scholars use “the Muslim Question” to describe the problem of integrating Muslims into liberal democracies. The African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois famously mused, “How does it feel to be a problem?” in response to “the Negro problem.” That there is no comparable remembrance or reflection on “the Catholic question” or “the Catholic problem” points to a significant absence in both scholarship and America’s collective conscience.

This forgetting is surprising because of the powerful hold anti-Catholicism once had in Anglo-American discourse. Nearly every stereotype and suspicion leveled against Muslims today had previously been used against Roman Catholics. Like contemporary Muslim stigma, anti-Catholic discourse was based on ethnic, racial, and religious grounds.² Compared with Protestants who tended to originate in Northwestern Europe, Catholics tended to have ethnic origins in Southern and Eastern Europe. Even Catholics from Northwestern Europe like the Irish and the French were sometimes seen as a different race from Anglo Saxons, with race and ethnicity often conflated in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourse. These perceived ethnoracial differences were often seen as parallel to deeper religious pathologies. Many Protestants accused Catholics of being hierarchical, antidemocratic, and unpatriotic, subject to a Pope who was considered “infallible.” Catholics appeared to have strange, almost pagan beliefs, such as that Mary was born without sin, and that bread and wine taken during communion really did “transubstantiate” into the blood and body of Christ. Max Weber famously argued in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that Catholics tended to not be as economically prosperous as Protestants, and Catholic entrepreneurial and intellectual stagnation was often attributed to their insularity, separatism, and insistence upon educating their children in their own schools. Catholics were also accused of being oppressive of women, and The Awful Confessions of Maria Monk, an almost pornographic story of abuse of a woman at the hands of priests, became one of the nineteenth century’s bestsellers, despite later being revealed to be a fabrication. Political terror became associated with Catholics, in the form of the savagery of the Inquisition, the treason of the Gunpowder Plot’s attempt to assassinate King James I in 1605, and the guerrilla violence conducted by the Irish Republican Army in their struggles against Protestants in Northern Ireland.³ It was as if Catholics and Protestants constituted two distinct cultures – the original clash of civilizations.

Yet, by the end of the twentieth century, the civilizational clash between Protestantism and Catholicism had receded, and Catholics were mostly considered respectable members of the community, and in some cases valorized as exemplary citizens. This is the most likely reason why most don’t remember Catholic stigmatization today. Just as the “losers” of history often get written out of the textbooks, so too do the “winners” – at least, how they got to be “winners.” How Catholic stigmatization was overcome has been obscured, the field left open to myth making.

Precisely because anti-Catholicism has been overcome in democratic societies, however, makes it a valuable case to study. One of the most important developments in the twenty-first century will be the increase in ethnic, racial, and religious diversity of many liberal democracies. The United States, among other countries, is experiencing levels of diversity not seen in its history. White Christians no longer constitute a majority in the United States, and whites may no longer be a majority by the 2040s.⁴ These developments raise questions about whether newer and older minority groups in liberal democracies will integrate easily into the mainstream or be subject to various forms of unequal citizenship and restricted capacities. The more typical story of minority relations is one of frustration and disappointment. The predominant narrative in the academic and mainstream literature is that the relationship between diversity and democracy is deeply problematic, if not outright inimical.⁵ In the United States, race remains a point of deep contention, and the most sophisticated social and political sciences demonstrate that the country is not a “post-racial” society.⁶ In Europe, bans on the veil and minarets, the rise of nativist parties, and the exclusivist reaction to refugees from the Middle East show that diversity and democracy is a problem not limited only to the United States.

Histories, not history

A few commentators have sought general lessons from the overcoming of anti-Catholicism. Ross Douthat, a Catholic writer for the New York Times, suggested that a history of bigotry and prejudice in the United States actually helped speed up Catholic assimilation. Without such pressure, Catholics would have remained more distinct and separatist.⁷ In a blog for the New York Review of Books, historians John T. McGreevey and R. Scott Appleby argued very nearly the opposite, stating that Catholics needed to do more than appear respectable and quietly fit in as “lace curtain” Irish: “If the Catholic experience in the United States holds any lesson it is that becoming American also means asserting one’s constitutional rights, fully and forcefully, even if that assertion is occasionally taken to be insulting.”⁸ Nicholas Kristof, another New York Times columnist, suggested that Catholic behavior was not crucial, and argued that “we have a more glorious tradition intertwined in American history as well, one of tolerance, amity and religious freedom. Each time, this has ultimately prevailed over the Know Nothing impulse.”⁹ Something in American institutions, ideology, and character, Kristof implied, lent itself to a progressive narrative of religious freedom and ethnic incorporation.

The temptation to derive lessons from the U.S. Catholic experience exists not only in the op-ed pages of the nation’s newspapers, but also in academia. The political scientist Robert Putnam, in concluding his study showing that greater diversity tends to be associated with lower social capital, wondered whether the contemporary incorporation of minorities would follow the path of Catholics in the twentieth century.¹⁰ The epigraph at the start of this chapter is from that study. Just a few years later, Putnam and David E. Campbell wrote American Grace, which, among many other things, sought to answer why the religious tensions between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews had disappeared by the end of the twentieth century. One answer Putnam and Campbell found was that increasing social contact and intermarriage accounted for a great deal of the disappearance in tension among religions. Many families, Putnam and Campbell noted, were interreligious, and this would prevent conflicts from erupting along these lines again.¹¹ Other attempts to understand the overcoming of anti-Catholicism comes from whiteness scholars such as David Roediger. Roediger focuses not so much on religion as on race, arguing that it was the ability of Irish, Italian, and other Southern and Eastern Europeans’ ability to assimilate as whites that led to their eventual acceptance.¹²

These attempts to learn from the American Catholic experience, insightful on many points, have several limitations. One is that they look only at the experience of Catholics in the United States. Once one looks outside the United States, one finds not one, but multiple stories of Catholic political incorporation. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, ethnic Catholics of Irish, French, and Southeastern European origin constituted significant minorities in Australia, Canada, and the United States, prompting conflicts with Protestants with Northwestern European origins.¹³ Despite this similarity, the trajectories of ethnic Catholics in these countries diverged, yielding three important comparative stories: about descriptive representation and policies, about the role of parties in incorporating Catholics, and how political incorporation can contribute to the political development of a country.

Looking at differences in the descriptive representation of Catholics and policies associated with religion in Australia, Canada, and the United States helps unlock these multiple stories of political incorporation.¹⁴ There are two broad patterns of variation that need to be explained. The first pattern consists of the trajectory of Catholic political incorporation from 1890 to about the mid-twentieth century. By the time of the Great Depression, Catholic political incorporation had proceeded much more favorably in Australia than in the United States or Canada. By 1929 Catholics were overrepresented in the prime ministership, cabinet positions, and the House of Representatives – a striking feat for a minority group that trailed Protestants in income and wealth. Catholics achieved this feat largely as members of the Labor party, and this success prompted competing parties to be more favorable toward Catholics as well. As early as 1940, Robert Menzies, who later became leader of the center-right Liberal–Country party coalition, indicated his willingness to break with long-standing commitments not to fund Catholic schools with state money, and during his prime ministership in the 1950s he helped orchestrate incremental steps in providing federal funding to Catholic schools, leading to the breakthrough in 1963, when state aid for parochial schools for science education was passed.

By contrast, in the United States, a Catholic president was not elected until 1960 and Catholics did not constitute nearly as large a percentage of cabinet positions even during the Great Depression, when Catholics comprised a substantial part of the New Deal Democratic coalition. Catholics did reach relative population parity in the House of Representatives during the New Deal, but there was not as significant overrepresentation as in Australia. Polls revealed that the South remained significantly anti-Catholic, even though Southerners were united with Catholics in the Democratic coalition. In terms of policy, literacy tests in voting made it more difficult for more recent and foreign-born populations of Catholics (such as Italians and other Eastern European groups) to vote. In terms of funding of parochial schools, many state-level Blaine amendments forbid state governments from directly providing funding to religious educational institutions. Supreme Court decisions like Everson v. Board of Education also made direct funding constitutionally difficult, though some indirect public funding for parochial schools came in 1965 with the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Catholic incorporation in Canada by 1960 also does not compare favorably with Australia. Canadian Catholics have constituted 40 to 45 percent of the Canadian population, approximately double that of Australian Catholics. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Canadian Catholics were doing better in descriptive representation compared to Australia and the United States. Catholics were chosen as prime ministers and constituted much more significant blocs of both cabinet members and lower house parliamentarians than in the other two countries. State funding of Catholic schools existed in Quebec and in some of the other provinces. Despite this more favorable start, Catholic political incorporation stalled, with Catholic representation in cabinets and the House of Commons remaining slightly underrepresentative, especially in the western provinces and Ontario. Australian and U.S. Catholic representation in the lower legislative chambers surpassed that of Canada by the 1930s. By 1963, state funding for parochial schools was not available to all Canadian provinces, whereas such funding existed in all Australian states.

The politics concerning Catholic minorities did not stop after achieving population proportionality in descriptive representation. For both Australia and the United States, Catholic incorporation was driven largely through representation in the Labor and Democratic parties. It was only much later that Catholics achieved population proportionality in right-leaning parties. In addition to this lag between the parties, a second distinctive feature of contemporary Catholic political incorporation is the existence of valorization of Catholic identities. The politics of minority standing does not end with normalization but can continue if that minority becomes overrepresented and is praised and elevated to a position of symbolic privilege. Conservative Catholics and Protestants ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series editor’s foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The multiplicity of the Catholic past
• 2 Transubstantiating the body politic
• 3 Catholic incorporation from 1890 to the mid-twentieth century
• 4 Working with Catholicism in Australia
• 5 Catholicism at arm’s length in the United States
• 6 Provincializing Catholicism in Canada
• 7 Catholic standing in the latter half of the twentieth century
• 8 Realigning Catholicism and Protestantism at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States
• 9 The limits of pan-Christian coalitions in Australia and Canada
• 10 The Catholic past as prologue?
• Appendices
• Selected bibliography
• Index