Guy Fawkes Day

It's Guy Fawkes Day, so across the pond there'll be bonfires and fireworks, and maybe some effigy burning. Guy Fawkes was a Catholic convert who was part of an early 1600's plot to blow up Parliament in hopes of killing the Protestant king and restoring a Catholic monarch to the throne. The plotters were apprehended and executed, and the date for the failed plot has been observed since.  

I will be not be celebrating.

• I am not a Brit, and Guy Fawkes is celebrated in the UK. (Pre-American Revolution, it was observerd throughout the colonies - including in Boston - where it mostly had an anti-Catholic slant).
  
• However erstwhile, I am  - or was, or something - a Catholic, Guy Fawkes Day has anti-Catholic origins. And still in the memory of some old geezers, the bonfires associated with the event included burning effigies of the pope. (Now if I wanted to burn an effigy of the pope - which I most decidedly do not, especially given the current pope and his predessor, who seem as if they genuinely want (Leo)/wanted (Francis) to make the Church and the world a better place - that would be quite another thing.)

Which is not to say that if I happened to be in the UK, and could look out my window and see the fireworks shooting off, I wouldn't look out my window.

Growing up in Worcester in the 1950's and 1960's, anti-Catholicism was pretty much a thing of the past. During that time, the population of Worcester was over 60% Catholic. My neighborhood was a lot more Catholic than that. 

The nuns used to tell us that we had to behave especially well when we were wearing our school uniforms, because someone - some "other" - might see us behaving poorly and judge the entire Catholic church based on our bad behavior. Even at the time, I was wondering who these judge-y folks might be, as there were virtually no non-Catholics out there to watch throwing snowballs or shoplifting 5 cent plastic toys at Woolworth's. Not that I was going either, but I wasn't blind.

That there was no anti-Catholic sentiment in my neck of the woods doesn't mean that it might not have been encountered, even in my day, in areas that weren't quite so Catholic. And might still be encountered in plenty of places in the USA. Many evangelical Christians harbor profound animosity towards Catholics. 

But even in good-old-Catholic Worcester, there was anti-Catholic sentiment that was experienced by an earlier generation. 

When my father died at the age of 58, a couple of his high school teachers came to his wake, and one told me that he had never forgotten my father because he was the most brilliant math student he had ever taught.

I asked my aunt why said teacher hadn't encouraged my father to go to college. She looked at me as if I had two heads. "Why, all the teachers were Yankees [i.e., Protestants] and they never would have encouraged a Catholic student to go to college." (My father, who was one of the most intelligent people I've ever known, did manage to get some college in via night school, but he never completed his degree, what with the war, and the wife, and the job, and the kids.)

My aunt had her own anti-Catholic story.

In the early 1930's, she and my uncle moved to the Boston area for his job. They had looked at a rental flat in a two-family house in Belmont, a near-suburb. When they were talking details with their potential landlady, my uncle (7/8ths Irish, but with a Yankee-ish sounding last name) asked where the nearest Catholic church was. The landlady drew back, apologized, and explained that, by tacit agreement, no one in her neighborhood rented or sold to Catholics. (Even if my uncle hadn't asked about the local church, that bigoted landlady would have figured it out soon enough once she'd asked where he was employed, which was with the Catholic Order of Foresters, a fraternal benefit society - sort of an insurance company - that had been founded in the late 1800's for Irish-Catholic immigrants who couldn't find beneficence or insurance elsewhere.)

And so it went...

A bit before my father and my aunt were dissed for being Catholics, there was a crazily outrageous anti-Catholic episode that took place in Indiana.

Sure, there had been crazily outrageous anti-Catholic episodes throughout American history, perhaps most notoriously the 1834 burning of the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts by a crowd of Know Nothing thugs. But this early 1920's one was completely, crack-pot crazy. 

It was rumored that the pope was traveling by train through Indiana. A mob of Klansmen, armed with a rope, met the train and confronted a traveling corset salesman who was able to convince them that he wasn't the pontiff. Phew!*

At about the same time, a pitched battle was fought in South Bend between a gathering of Klansmen and a bunch of Notre Dame students. Go, Fighting Irish!

American anti-Catholicism has never held a candle to its anti-semitism and racism, which have coursed through our country's veins since the jump and never seem to be going anywhere. But anti-Catholicism does seem to have mostly died down, and is a relic of the past. (What with anti-immigrant sentiment and violence growing, it may yet again rear its big ugly head, given that so many Hispanic immigrants are Catholic.)

Personally, I'm not a big fan of organized religions. But I'm also not a big fan of those who are anti-[RACE/RELIGION/SEXUAL-identity goes here], refusing to hire, sell to, rent to to those who they're anti. And sometimes far worse. (Think Dylan Roof massacring nine Black folks attending a Bible study group at Emanuel AME Church. Think the dozen souls murdered at Tree of Life, a Pittsburgh synagogue. Think the recent killing of four attending Sunday services at a Michigan LDS chapel. Etc.) 

Me, I wouldn't want to rent an apartment in my home to, say, snake handlers. But I wouldn't go out there hunting for them, either. And I def reserve the right to sneer (quietly, mostly in private) to some of the ludicrous beliefs that so many religions hold to be true. (It's no accident that the Unitarian Church is chocked full of ex-whatevers, including ex-Catholics.)

Anyway, in honor of Guy Fawkes Day, I thought I'd take this little wander through anti-Catholicism.

Meanwhile, oddly enough, the stylized Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta is now widely used in protests of all stripes (but largely anti-government). If it becomes more dangerous to show my face at protests, I may have to get me one. 

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*Sadly, I can't actually track down the ur source for this story. But I'm a believer.

Image Source: Gia'zilo