And the recent pedophile priest scandal, he shows, has revived many ancient anti-Catholic stereotypes."--BOOK JACKET.

Tales about treacherous Jesuits and scheming popes are an important and pervasive part of European culture. They belong to a set of ideas, images, and practices that, when grouped under the label anti-Catholicism, represent a phenomenon that can be traced back to the Reformation. Anti-Catholic movements and sentiments crossed boundaries between European countries, contributing to the early modern consolidation of national identities. In the nineteenth century, secularist movements adopted and transformed confessional criticism in a new internationalist dimension that was articulated across the whole Western world. A variety of liberal, conservative, secular, Protestant, and other forces gave shape to this counter-image, taking on the function of a pattern from which one’s own ideals and beliefs could be chiselled out. The contributions to this volume show how different national contexts affected the proliferation of anti-Catholic messages over the course of four centuries of European history, and demonstrate that anti-Catholicism constituted a powerful European cross-cultural phenomenon.

Winner, 2017 Ragsdale Award A timely study that puts current issues—religious intolerance, immigration, the separation of church and state, race relations, and politics—in historical context. The masthead of the Liberator, an anti-Catholic newspaper published in Magnolia, Arkansas, displayed from 1912 to 1915 an image of the Whore of Babylon. She was an immoral woman sitting on a seven-headed beast, holding a golden cup “full of her abominations,” and intended to represent the Catholic Church. Propaganda of this type was common during a nationwide surge in antipathy to Catholicism in the early twentieth century. This hostility was especially intense in largely Protestant Arkansas, where for example a 1915 law required the inspection of convents to ensure that priests could not keep nuns as sexual slaves. Later in the decade, anti-Catholic prejudice attached itself to the campaign against liquor, and when the United States went to war in 1917, suspicion arose against German speakers—most of whom, in Arkansas, were Roman Catholics. In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan portrayed Catholics as “inauthentic” Americans and claimed that the Roman church was trying to take over the country’s public schools, institutions, and the government itself. In 1928 a Methodist senator from Arkansas, Joe T. Robinson, was chosen as the running mate to balance the ticket in the presidential campaign of Al Smith, a Catholic, which brought further attention. Although public expressions of anti-Catholicism eventually lessened, prejudice was once again visible with the 1960 presidential campaign, won by John F. Kennedy. Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas illustrates how the dominant Protestant majority portrayed Catholics as a feared or despised “other,” a phenomenon that was particularly strong in Arkansas.

Farrelly uses America's early history of anti-Catholicism to reveal contemporary American understandings of freedom, government, God, the individual, and the community.

Anti-Catholic sentiment was a major social, cultural, and political force in Victorian England, capable of arousing remarkable popular passion. Hitherto, however, anti-Catholic feeling has been treated largely from the perspective of parliamentary politics or with reference to the propaganda of various London-based anti-Catholic religious organizations. This book sets out to Victorian anti-Catholicism in a much fuller and more inclusive context, accounting for its persistence over time, disguishing it from anti-Irish sentiment, and explaining its social, economic, political, and religious bases locally as well as nationally. The author is principally concerned with determining what led ordinary people to violent acts against Roman Catholic targets, violent acts against Roman Catholic petitions, joining anti-Catholic organizations, and reading anti-Catholic literature. All too often, English history, and even British history, turns out to be the history of what was happening in the West End. One of the special distinctions of this book is that it shows the interplay between national issues and their local conditions. The book covers the period ca.

This study of anti-Catholicism in 18th-century England demonstrates that the "no Popery" sentiment was a potent force under the first three Georges and was, on occasions, manifested in the hostility of significant sections of the middle and upper ranks of society, as well as the populace at large.

Anti-Catholicism forms part of the dynamics to Northern Ireland's conflict and is critical to the self-defining identity of certain Protestants. However, anti-Catholicism is as much a sociology process as a theological dispute. It was given a Scriptural underpinning in the history of Protestant-Catholic relations in Ireland, and wider British-Irish relations, in order to reinforce social divisions between the religious communities and to offer a deterministic belief system to justify them. The book examines the socio-economic and political processes that have led to theology being used in social closure and stratification between the seventeenth century and the present day.

One of the most important books in religion this year is a tour-de-force of new investigation, scholarly rigor, storytelling, and humor. In this authoritative work, the author reveals how American Catholics' distinctive way of viewing the world is constantly misunderstood--and attacked--by outsiders.

This edited collection brings together varying angles and approaches to tackle the multi-dimensional issue of anti-Catholicism since the Protestant Reformation in Britain and Ireland. It is of course difficult to infer from such geographically and historically diverse studies one single contention, but what the book as a whole suggests is that there can be no teleological narration of anti-Catholicism – its manifestations were episodic, more or less rooted in common worldviews, and its history does not end today.

"Covers the key people, movements, institutions, practices, and doctrines of Roman Catholicism from its earliest origins."--Résumé de l'éditeur.