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This Day in History: Georgetown College, the first Catholic university in the United States, was founded in Georgetown, Maryland on this day in 1789.
Historically however, America has has a strong anti-Catholic sentiment. The historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. characterized prejudice against Catholics as "the deepest bias in the history of the American people." The historian John Higham described anti-Catholicism as "the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history".
Anti-Catholic attitudes were brought to the Thirteen Colonies by Protestant immigrants. Two types of anti-Catholic rhetoric existed in colonial society and they continued to exist into the following centuries. The first type, derived from the theological heritage of the Protestant Reformation and the European wars of religion (16th-18th century), consisted of the biblical Anti-Christ and the Whore of Babylon variety and it dominated anti-Catholic thought until the late seventeenth century. The second type was a secular variety which was partially derived from xenophobic and ethnocentric nativist sentiments and distrust of increasing waves of Catholic immigrants, particularly from Ireland, Italy, Poland, Québec, and Mexico. It usually focused on the pope's control of bishops and priests.
This Anti-Catholic sentiment was popular enough that The Menace, a weekly newspaper with a virulently anti-Catholic stance, was founded in 1911 and quickly reached a nationwide circulation of 1.5 million.
Anti-Catholicism was widespread in the 1920s; anti-Catholics, including the Ku Klux Klan, believed that Catholicism was incompatible with democracy and that parochial schools encouraged separatism and kept Catholics from becoming loyal Americans. The Catholics responded to such prejudices by repeatedly asserting their rights as American citizens and by arguing that they, not the nativists (anti-Catholics), were true patriots since they believed in the right to freedom of religion.
With the rapid growth of the second Ku Klux Klan (KKK) 1921–25, anti-Catholic rhetoric intensified. The Catholic Church of the Little Flower was first built in 1925 in Royal Oak, Michigan, a largely Protestant town. Two weeks after it opened, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in front of the church.
Despite all of this, the Catholic Church is the largest Christian denomination in the United States. The top ten list being:
1. The Catholic Church
2. The Southern Baptist Convention
3. The United Methodist Church
4. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
5. The Church of God in Christ
6. National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc.
7. Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
8. National Baptist Convention of America
9. Presbyterian Church (USA)
10. Assemblies of God. Source
See also: A Candid History of the Jesuits - 50 Books on CDrom (or download)
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