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Anti-Catholicism in America: The Last Acceptable Prejudice. By Mark S. Massa, S.J. (New York: Crossroads. 2003. Pp. x, 245. $24.95.)
Fordham University professor and Jesuit priest Mark Massa's provocative title implies that North Americans tolerate anti-Catholicism despite denouncing irrational biases, such as racism, sexism, and homophobia. Several others, such as historian Philip Jenkins and William Donohue of the Catholic League, have made similar accusations. Yet contemporary political debates about same-sex marriage, capital punishment, abortion, and stem cell research reveal significant moral differences between Catholics and other Americans. Massa's book successfully contributes to an important discussion about interfaith relations by distinguishing legitimate questions about Catholic culture from unfriendly bias against Roman Catholicism.
Where does Massa find objectionable anti-Catholicism in the United States? In the eyes of both seventeenth-century Puritans and twentieth-century secular intellectuals, Catholics owed loyalty to an institutional hierarchy that repressed individual autonomy. The Know-Nothing movement and the Ku Klux Klan employed similar arguments to justify opposition to both Catholic immigration and New York...