Word: church
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Protestants - whether separatist Puritan, Scottish Presbyterian or Cavalier Anglican - brought with them. Almost every colony harassed "papists," and some excluded Catholics entirely; priests were liable to arrest in Massachusetts. The Dudleian Lectures were established at Harvard in the early 18th century partly to expose, as their founder said, "the Church of Rome as that mystical Babylon, that woman of sin, that apostate church spoken of in the New Testament." In New York in 1741, two Catholics were executed, one for being a "professed papist," the other for being a "popish priest...
Despite these expressions of prejudice, the Catholic Church grew into the most powerful religious body in the U.S. After World War II, Catholics through determination and force of numbers exerted pressures for public aid for parochial schools and hospitals; they interjected themselves into debates on legalized birth control. Such campaigns seemed to give credibility to Paul Blanshard, prolific anti-Catholic pamphleteer. His widely read American Freedom and Catholic Power (1949) declared, "The Catholic people of the U.S. are not citizens but subjects in their own religious commonwealth. The secular as well as the religious policies of their church are made...
...antipathy to Catholicism in America was based largely upon an idea of the church as a powerful and tightly disciplined monolith presided over by a spiritual despot in Rome. But the profound cultural changes of the last generation, a new liberalism and tolerance, have altered not only the American people but also the church and therefore the prejudice against it. The church in America now is often seen not as imposingly monolithic but as beleaguered and fragmented. Its members have become selective and of them a la carte Catholics who ignore their prelates' guidance on birth control, divorce...
...Second Vatican Council did much to remove what was for non-Catholics the ominousness of Catholicism. In 1964 Vatican II abolished the absolutist doctrine that "error has no rights," and instead accepted the right of all religions to worship as they will. Church Latin, unintelligible and sinister to many, gave way to the vernacular, and even some times to a rather cloying liturgical sweetness: guitar strumming around the altar, folk songs, the priest rigged out in sunburst vest ments that proclaim HERE COMES THE SON. Gone are the Legion of Decency, which prescribed and proscribed movies, and the censorious Index...
Some of the most effective anti-Catholics have been writers who were raised in the Catholic Church and left it, sometimes paroxysms of guilt. James Joyce's splendidly horrific descriptions of a Catholic boyhood in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man lent a certain romance to apostasy. In his novels Principato and Farragan 's Retreat, Tom McHale displayed a minor genius for the atmospherics of oppressive ethnic Catholicism. Among certain intellectuals, it is faintly disreputable to be a believing, practicing Catholic; a Catholic becomes spiritually interesting only in his repudiation of the faith...