How Should We Respond to Catholic Prejudice?

After our conversion to Catholicism, when my wife and I told people we were members of a Catholic church in Conroe, Texas, a few non-Catholics in our community suggested that we attend a Catholic church in The Woodlands. My wife and I realized, however, that the suggestion had more to do with social elitism than with charity: the Conroe church served poorer parishioners and more minority parishioners. The belief was that my wife and I would be happier among wealthier people in The Woodlands, which sadly reminded my wife and me that social elitists in America have complained for centuries about the Catholic Church’s practice of welcoming immigrants and the poor.

Examples of Catholic prejudice occur in all kinds of settings, even among the so-called “intelligentsia.” When Flannery O’Connor posthumously won the National Book Award in 1972, an intellectual in attendance whispered doubts about her victory: “Are you sure she’s a good author? She’s such a Roman Catholic” (Gioia). And in popular culture, Christianity, in general, is often caricaturized and slandered. For instance, a hypocritical Christian character, often portrayed as self-righteous yet bigoted and sexually immoral, appears in many movies and tv shows, like Angela in America’s beloved, show The Office.

However, I like The Office as much as anyone, and Christian hypocrisy, which has existed as long as Christianity itself, should rightfully be mocked, so despite my awareness of our culture’s anti-Christian bias, I am slightly ashamed to admit that I often ignore it. I raise my kids. I love my wife. I attend Mass. I pray. I work. I listen to music. I read and study. My habits are my earthly joy.

But recently, as I drove my family home from a summer vacation in the Smoky Mountains, as sunlight sparkled and flashed through oak trees along a Mississippi highway, my wife, who has recently returned to college, was reading a textbook for her sociology class and asked me to listen to her read aloud a questionable passage about the Catholic Church:

From the 4th century through the 19th century, the Catholic Church was the seat of power from today’s Turkey in the east to western and northern Europe, including the British Isles…[which] gave the Catholic Church the power to maintain its own traditions and safeguard them from the influence of people practicing other religions. If any social patterns challenged any belief of the Church, those practitioners were massacred, burned at the stake, or labeled heretics (Introduction to Sociology).

The passage goes on to slander the church further without any remorse, as though villainizing and caricaturizing a diverse 2,000-year institution is intellectually and morally acceptable. Even though I am aware such prejudice against the church exists, I was a little stunned when my wife read the passage. After all, its ideas are incredibly fallacious. It claims, for instance, that Catholic traditions were safeguarded from other religions as if no dialogue ever occurred. Such broad generalizations, as any academic should know, can easily be dismissed if a single fact contradicts the generalization. So here are multiple facts out of thousands of others I could cite: Thomas Aquinas famously dialogued with, read from, and borrowed ideas from Muslim thinkers, Jewish thinkers, and Ancient Greek thinkers. In Dante’s Inferno, a masterpiece of world literature that was written in the Middle Ages, two famous Muslim thinkers exist with dignity in the limbo canto alongside Aristotle and other Ancient Greek thinkers.

The sociology passage implies that the church never tolerated dissenters, but even in Dante’s Inferno, the poet does not hesitate to place corrupt popes and bishops in hell. The church never banned the book, even though Dante ridiculed some of the church’s corruption. Similarly, in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Pardoner is a corrupt Catholic official who willingly and enthusiastically abuses his priestly duties for personal profit, but the book was not banned nor was its author burned at the stake. In fact, the book has always been popular, and though the book was written and is set during the Middle Ages, which the sociology passage above believes to be a dreadful period of history, it is an exuberant book full of characters who love life.

What about all the positive contributions of the church, like hospitals? As the acclaimed author, David Bentley Hart, argues in The Story of Christianity, in Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece, deformed and sickly people were often killed or tortured for crowd amusement. The idea that these people had dignity and should be helped was not a common idea in the ancient world, but Christianity brings the message of Christ, which means, among other things, the love of God and the love of neighbor, so hospitals for all people, regardless of status, begin with Christianity and the Catholic Church. The sociology passage simply ignores so much of what our society has inherited positively from the Catholic Church and the Gospel message.

Sin existed within the church’s members, of course, but how could supposed intellectuals today write such an absurd reductionist passage that villainizes the Catholic Church as sophisticatedly as my daughter villainizes the plastic T-Rex she uses to terrorize her village of barbie dolls?

My wife and I immediately thought of young Catholic students who might see this passage and feel guilty or confused about their faith, and we realized that if this passage is in the sociology textbook, similar passages or ideas must appear in other textbooks, in other classes, and in the beliefs of numerous professors, which would make it difficult for a young Catholic to maintain his or her faith during college. Again, I knew all this beforehand, but sadly, it took a passage like this one to rattle me out of my spiritual apathy.

After discussing the problems with the passage, my wife and I started to discuss the complicated question of our son and daughter’s education, a subject for another essay, but a few weeks after we returned from vacation, anti-Catholic and anti-Christian bias confronted us again; this time it involved my twelve-year-old son.

My son had returned home from a trip to a waterpark with his friend. His friend’s father had kindly offered to take the two boys. When my son returned home, I asked him about the trip. He said it was fun, but he also appeared sad. I had to pry a little, but he finally told me that his friend and the father mocked his faith and mocked Christ himself. Christ was, according to the father, “just an ancient middle-eastern hobo.” I initially laughed. Sometimes you have to laugh at the sheer absurdity of reductionist religious hatred. The “hobo” claim sounds like the rhetorically humorous but substantively vacuous idea of an atheist writer like Christopher Hitchens. One could, of course, offer a snarky comment in reply, like isn’t it strange that the Gospel message of that hobo and his small band of disciples has spread throughout the entire globe, outlasting the Ancient Roman world where it first appeared and continuing to shine forth over 2,000 years later?

But I admit that my knowledge about how to respond humorously or intellectually to such negative prejudice has its limits. If a father and son, who are normally quite decent people, feel it is okay to slander a twelve-year-old’s faith to his face, then all the spiritual wisdom in the world will not prevent anti-Catholic and anti-Christian prejudice from confronting believers, so the question is: how does one respond when the prejudice inevitably occurs?

My initial instinct was to become a protective papa bear, force my son never to see his friend or his friend’s father again, and call the father and ask him how he could be so incredibly rude and callous and ignorant about someone’s beliefs, but I, thankfully, didn’t. Instead, grace overcoming nature, I prayed and asked myself how I could model the proper Christian response for my son.

So first I hugged my son. Then we calmly discussed why someone would make such a comment; we discussed why the comment stems from ignorance and a willingness of many people to follow the crowd of modern secular culture; we discussed how my son, in the future, could politely and intelligently respond to such terrible remarks, remarks he is bound to hear again from other people; importantly, we discussed how Christ would want us to respond, so we reviewed the scene in Matthew’s gospel where Peter asks Christ if he should forgive his neighbor seven times. Christ, of course, replies, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven” (Matthew 18: 22).

As a result, my son understood how important it is to study the faith and how our Christian duty is not to hate and avoid those who disagree with us but to instead model our faith to them. The hope for me and my son is that our forgiving behavior and charitable actions will do more to change the attitudes of others than any words of hatred or anger, and our plan of action has brought us closer together, so the slanderous words of his friend’s father have had a wildly different impact from its initial intention.

Recently I have been reading Saint Augustine’s City of God. In it, he writes a lot about suffering and trials. Augustine ponders Christ’s statement that “the rain will fall on the just and the unjust alike,” and Augustine writes with a typical depth of the proper Christian response to trials, especially compared to the typical responses of those without hope in Christ. Well, the sociological passage and the deplorable comment made to my son are examples of the rain and the trials, but with grace, my family and I accepted the rain and responded accordingly, and I pray that we respond to our next inevitable trial with the same grace, the grace that helps and emboldens, or as Saint Augustine says in The City of God, the grace that “helps the good in the midst of the evils of this life precisely so that, the more faithful they are, the more they will be able to endure these evils with a brave heart.”

Notes

The negative comment about Flanner O’Connor is cited from Dan Gioia’s essay “The Catholic Writer Today”: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/12/the-catholic-writer-today

The sociology passage occurs in Introduction to Sociology: third edition. OpenStax, 2021.             Augustine’s quote appears on page 122 in The City of God: Selections and Introduction by Hans Urs von Balthasar. Ignatius Press, 2021.