America Once Feared Catholics

In a recent newspaper article, the author gives us a small history lesson. She indicates that in the 1920s, America once feared [Roman] Catholics. She gives some fairly frightening descriptions of the persecution Catholics went through at that time. The insinuation is that we persecuted Catholics at that time because they were different from us thinking they were going to overthrow our government by taking orders from the pope. 


This is happening today, according to the author, when we fear Muslims. They too, we say, are staging an overthrow of the government. However the difference between the Catholics of the 1920s and those who follow Islam today is that you never had Catholics blowing themselves up all over the world. Catholics did not kidnap and kill their captives. They got along well with their neighbors and were a general benefit to the societies in which they lived. Can we say the same for those who follow Islam? Certainly not all or even most Muslims are violent. However to say that we have nothing to fear from them and should treat them in a similar fashion as we do Roman Catholics is naive and dangerous. We need to see the threat as real and stop deceiving ourselves.