Hollywood can’t seem to make any film about the Church without turning it into an anti-Catholic film. I didn’t bother to see Conclave because I knew it would be an anti-Catholic diatribe pushing an agenda and relies on a bunch of standard anti-Catholic tropes dating back to at least the American Revolution (Britain allowing French Canadi…
Hollywood can’t seem to make any film about the Church without turning it into an anti-Catholic film. I didn’t bother to see Conclave because I knew it would be an anti-Catholic diatribe pushing an agenda and relies on a bunch of standard anti-Catholic tropes dating back to at least the American Revolution (Britain allowing French Canadians to practice their Catholic faith was one of the famous “intolerable acts” by the British government that the colonists cited in their manifesto justifying the Revolutionary War). Anti-Catholicism is pretty much baked into the DNA of the USA, unfortunately, so those of us who live in the USA really have our work cut out for us. In the past 12 years, two different parishes I’ve been a parishioner at here in the southern suburbs of Saint Paul, MN were spray painted with hateful graffiti (either part of the exterior, in the case of one, or a traveling cemetery of the unborn, in the case of the other), and in the case of one of them, that happened in 2012, the blessed sacrament was stuck in the backs of hymnals in a section of the church (a parishioner alerted Father to this and he wept as he discovered the Eucharist stuck in the backs of more hymnals in this particular section of the church.
I and others have also overheard snide remarks about Catholics and Catholic teaching. Glitzy Anti-Catholic books and movies keep being written and made because a lot of our fellow Americans hate Holy Mother Church, we have to be honest about that, and that is especially true of the wealthy ruling class in the USA, what I like to call the “limousine liberals” and the “country club Republicans”.
We need to be aware of that reality in our efforts to evangelize our fellow Americans: it’s not going to be an easy thing to do because of the deeply entrenched anti-Catholic prejudice in American society.
Phillip Jenkins has an excellent book called The New Anti-Catholicism that I highly recommend.
Anti-Catholicism is the one prejudice in the USA that isn’t just tolerated, but, as films like Angels and Demons, Dogma, The Da Vinci Code, The Last Temptation of Christ, and now Conclave show, it’s something that is celebrated, especially by the wealthy ruling class in our society. That’s the ugly truth about anti-Catholicism here in the United States.
We definitely have an uphill battle to evangelize our fellow Americans, and it’s a battle well worth fighting, but we need to be honest about what we’re up against when seeking to do so.
The country club Republicans became Democrats in 2018 because of their hatred of Donald Trump and his opposition to their use of abortion to keep down the number of minorities. But one must include the mainstream American press in the general condemnation of anti-Catholics. If they weren't too lazy to read the Catechism or too stupid to understand what it says they would be able to properly interpret the Pope's comments in their appropriate Catholic context, but they aren't. Just another form of anti-Catholicism.
Not just the USA, but the English-speaking world at large...English language literature has a lot of anti-Catholicism baked right into it. And despite the flashy contemporary repackaging of it all, the tropes are old and tired. I'd even argue that it created a blindspot regarding the abuse crisis. The claim that Catholic clergy and religious are all sexual deviants with pathological personality disorders is old hat and you can see it going back to polemic from centuries ago. We're so used to tuning it out as just another anti-Catholic canard that reports of genuine abuse were probably dismissed as being part of the same smear campaign. Priests using convents as their personal harems? Yawn...try coming up with something CREATIVE next time you're making up ragebait stories, why don't you? And then we have cases like Marko Rupnik or the priest who abused the Daughters of St. Paul which are actually true.
Books could be written about the effect of an anti-Catholic culture on Catholics and the abuse crisis. I'm not going to write one here, so this is the end of my inane, long-winded comment.
Hollywood can’t seem to make any film about the Church without turning it into an anti-Catholic film. I didn’t bother to see Conclave because I knew it would be an anti-Catholic diatribe pushing an agenda and relies on a bunch of standard anti-Catholic tropes dating back to at least the American Revolution (Britain allowing French Canadians to practice their Catholic faith was one of the famous “intolerable acts” by the British government that the colonists cited in their manifesto justifying the Revolutionary War). Anti-Catholicism is pretty much baked into the DNA of the USA, unfortunately, so those of us who live in the USA really have our work cut out for us. In the past 12 years, two different parishes I’ve been a parishioner at here in the southern suburbs of Saint Paul, MN were spray painted with hateful graffiti (either part of the exterior, in the case of one, or a traveling cemetery of the unborn, in the case of the other), and in the case of one of them, that happened in 2012, the blessed sacrament was stuck in the backs of hymnals in a section of the church (a parishioner alerted Father to this and he wept as he discovered the Eucharist stuck in the backs of more hymnals in this particular section of the church.
I and others have also overheard snide remarks about Catholics and Catholic teaching. Glitzy Anti-Catholic books and movies keep being written and made because a lot of our fellow Americans hate Holy Mother Church, we have to be honest about that, and that is especially true of the wealthy ruling class in the USA, what I like to call the “limousine liberals” and the “country club Republicans”.
We need to be aware of that reality in our efforts to evangelize our fellow Americans: it’s not going to be an easy thing to do because of the deeply entrenched anti-Catholic prejudice in American society.
Phillip Jenkins has an excellent book called The New Anti-Catholicism that I highly recommend.
Anti-Catholicism is the one prejudice in the USA that isn’t just tolerated, but, as films like Angels and Demons, Dogma, The Da Vinci Code, The Last Temptation of Christ, and now Conclave show, it’s something that is celebrated, especially by the wealthy ruling class in our society. That’s the ugly truth about anti-Catholicism here in the United States.
We definitely have an uphill battle to evangelize our fellow Americans, and it’s a battle well worth fighting, but we need to be honest about what we’re up against when seeking to do so.
The country club Republicans became Democrats in 2018 because of their hatred of Donald Trump and his opposition to their use of abortion to keep down the number of minorities. But one must include the mainstream American press in the general condemnation of anti-Catholics. If they weren't too lazy to read the Catechism or too stupid to understand what it says they would be able to properly interpret the Pope's comments in their appropriate Catholic context, but they aren't. Just another form of anti-Catholicism.
Very good point! And Phillip Jenkins talks about that in his book The New Anti-Catholicism too. It’s an excellent and insightful read.
Not just the USA, but the English-speaking world at large...English language literature has a lot of anti-Catholicism baked right into it. And despite the flashy contemporary repackaging of it all, the tropes are old and tired. I'd even argue that it created a blindspot regarding the abuse crisis. The claim that Catholic clergy and religious are all sexual deviants with pathological personality disorders is old hat and you can see it going back to polemic from centuries ago. We're so used to tuning it out as just another anti-Catholic canard that reports of genuine abuse were probably dismissed as being part of the same smear campaign. Priests using convents as their personal harems? Yawn...try coming up with something CREATIVE next time you're making up ragebait stories, why don't you? And then we have cases like Marko Rupnik or the priest who abused the Daughters of St. Paul which are actually true.
Books could be written about the effect of an anti-Catholic culture on Catholics and the abuse crisis. I'm not going to write one here, so this is the end of my inane, long-winded comment.
See the "Black Legend" for a lot of info on it. Very interesting stuff, for sure.
Yes. I highly recommend that as a place to start for anyone looking to to get [whatever color is relevant to anti-Catholicism] pilled.
Incense pilled?