A Catholic in a Protestant Country

 In the aftermath of the truly horrendous school shooting in Minneapolis yesterday, the nation is already dividing—in all-too foreseeable partisan ways—over how to make sense of the tragedy. Liberals will perceive in these events another cruel illustration of the dangers of widespread access to guns—and I agree with them. Trump's MAGA coalition, meanwhile, will exploit the tragedy to stigmatize people and continue their increasingly hysterical war on crime. Shame on them for doing so. 

But meanwhile—I don't think it's off-base for the Right to interpret this massacre as the latest incident in a long history of anti-Catholic persecution in this country. Obviously, there's a lot we still don't know about the motive behind this shooting. But everywhere Catholics have been in the minority, they have suffered repression and violence. There's no reason to think that our society has transcended this longstanding bias today—any more than we have antisemitism or the other forms of ancient bigotry.  

"It happens like that all over the world," as a character observes in a Graham Greene novel; "A few Communists can always be found, like Jews and Catholics." In other words—these are the groups that stand out as visible minorities—making them convenient scapegoats for demagogues. 

Of course—Greene was well aware that Catholics (like the Communists, for that matter) had persecuted others historically in their turn, in the places where they held state power. But we don't live in a Catholic country; we still live in a Protestant-majority one. And as such, it's the responsibility of ethically-minded people to take the minority's part—to practice the "virtue of disloyalty," as Greene once put it—that is (he wrote), to be a "Protestant in a Catholic society, a Catholic in a Protestant one[.]"

Perhaps the best historical exemplar of this was Lord Byron. Peruse any of his writings on religion, across his whole career, and you would be hard-pressed to find a line of theology that would be acceptable to the Vatican. He was truly a relentless heretic and questioner of religious pieties. Yet—living as he did in a Protestant country that had long repressed Catholics' worship and excluded them from public life—he fought earnestly for Catholic emancipation and the restoration of their civil rights. 

In his mockery of Robert Southey's shamelessly toadying and power-worshiping poem about King George III's entry into heaven—for instance—Byron dwelled on the irony of Southey using Catholic imagery to applaud the political career of the same King that had discriminated against Catholics. Byron's counter-blast to Southey—his version of the "Vision of Judgment"—depicts a Saint Peter before the pearly gates who does not look so kindly on the British monarch's exclusion of Catholics from civil life. 

[...] Cold
Must be your souls, if you have not abhorred
The foe to Catholic participation
In all the license of a Christian nation.

And as Byron wrote in his equally caustic satire on the King's visit to Ireland—it was ironic that anyone in the long-suffering Isle—with its Catholic majority—would welcome him there—whilst "the chains of the Catholic clank o’er his rags." 

I worry that all too few liberals today will follow Byron's example (that is, in speaking up for the rights of Catholics, even though he disagreed with their theology). I worry that liberals will try to downplay the role that anti-Catholic bigotry may have played in the shooting. But they (we) shouldn't. Whatever else the horrific tragedy yesterday tells us—it was a direct violent attack on the freedom of Catholics to pray and worship as they choose. As such, it was a threat to freedom of thought everywhere.