Why did the Ku Klux Klan attack the Catholic Church? I thought it was the foreign Pope, but an

[shain from kane]

excerpt from a letter to the editor offered a different reason.


"Kathleen Parker's column pointed out that the Ku Klux Klan attacked the Catholics at Notre Dame. Why would the Klan attack Catholics? Because the Catholics were the ones educating the blacks. The Catholics welcome all races."

[YOY]

1. That's possible but you forget who the secondmost lynched group of folks were...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States

Guess what religion most Italians belong to?

[Warpy]

2. Oh, they had dozens of reasons, but racism was probably

one of the more important ones. Another was that the south, while first settled predominantly by Catholics, had become predominantly Protestant by the time of the Civil War, probably because Catholic priests didn't defend slavery as vigorously as the large landowners would have liked. There was a huge culture clash between the opulent and ritualistic Catholics and the ascetic Protestants. Add to this the fact that a lot of the Union army was formed from the ranks of chronically unemployed potato Irish and thus Catholic, and you have the reasons the Klan hated them so much and why, to this day, such fine southern institutions as Bob Jones U. continue to deny that Catholics are even Christian.

[Lasher]

3. Klan members are exclusively Protestant.

Catholics are 'not their kind'.

[peace frog]

4. Look no further than the virulent fundie John Hagee

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/02/28/donohue/index.html

John McCain yesterday happily received an endorsement from, and then expressed lavish gratitude towards, one of the most hateful and radical evangelical ministers in the country, Pastor John Hagee. As documented in that post, Hagee has a history of making some of the most extreme and twisted statements of any religious figure in the country towards multiple groups of Americans.

Among the many groups which McCain's new associate has targeted for hateful bigotry are Catholics. As a result, The Catholic League today issued a statement -- entitled "McCain Embraces Bigot" -- which pointed out that Hagee:

has waged an unrelenting war against the Catholic Church. For example, he likes calling it "The Great Whore," an "apostate church," the "anti-Christ," and a "false cult system."

[moggie]

9. I like the idea of William Donohue calling Hagee a bigot

That's very much a pot/kettle hue situation.

[enlightenment]

5. One of many cartoons from the Reconstruction period when

the Klan got their start . . . it wasn't just the Klan who had a problem with Catholics, though. See Lady Liberty being led to the gallows on the clifftop and the black family cowering against the cliff in the background? Nasty stuff. Makes us look downright civilized (even in GD-P) ;)

[OHdem10]

6. Catholics were in the crosshairs of the Klan just as were Jews

and blacks.

[MountainLaurel]

7. Lots of churches teach that Catholics aren't Christian

Churches of the fire-breathing fundie variety, though some major denominations like the Southern Baptists can be included in that.

Generally, this attitude has to do with the fact that Catholics don't believe that one must accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior in order to get your ticket to heaven. Throw in beliefs about the pope, idol worship, saints behing considered gods, Mary worship, heaven through good works, and a lot of other ignorance, and there you go. The fact that Catholic immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s were often darker skinned Eastern and Southern Europeans didn't help them with the Klan, or for other Protestants for that matter. Into the 1960s in my mother's hometown in WV, if you bought a house in certain neighborhoods, you signed a covenant swearing that you would not sell the house to an Italian.

[shain from kane]

8. Thanks for the information. It confirms what I thought. However, the writer indicated

that the KKK opposed Catholics, because they tried to teach blacks to read and write.

I figured that the KKK rationalized themselves to enough reasons for hatred, without linking Catholics and blacks.

[kwassa]

11. It was simply Protestant anti-Catholic bigotry ....

a reflection of the divisions in Great Britain and the religious conflicts there, transferred to American soil through immigration.

Catholics didn't treat blacks any better; there were plenty of Catholic slave holders in the world.

[knitter4democracy]

10. Catholics still educate everyone.

I taught in Catholic schools after I graduated from college (only teaching jobs I could find with no contacts), and they were serious about dealing with racial and socioeconomic issues and making the schools right for everyone. I taught in college prep schools, and we had kids from the projects, from some of the worst neighborhoods in NE Ohio, and we had kids from rich families, too. White, black, latina, Filipina, you name it. Everyone was welcome, and we worked hard to make sure that everyone was respected and got an equal chance at college.

In fact, some of my white students complained about how many black ("ghetto" was their term) students were in "their" school at the second one I taught in. I set them straight on that, and they knew not to talk like that in my classes ever again.

[kwassa]

12. other reasons

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan

One characteristic of the second Klan was that it was an organization with urban members, reflecting the major shifts of population to the cities. In Michigan, for instance, more than half of the state's membership lived in Detroit. Most Klansmen were lower to middle-class whites who were most in competition for jobs and housing with the waves of newcomers to the industrial cities: immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, who tended to be Catholic in numbers higher than earlier groups of immigrants; and black and white migrants from the South. As new populations poured into cities, rapidly changing neighborhoods created social tensions.<49>

[HamdenRice]

13. Watch the film, "Gangs of New York" for your answer

The Klan was part of a longer tradition of anti-immigrant movements. As Kwaasa points out, a great deal of that resentment was economically based -- immigrants tended to be willing to work for less and thereby brought down wage rates.

The first really vast immigrant wave from Europe was the Irish Catholic immigration during the potato famine of the 1840s. By the turn of the century, waves of Italian Catholics and German and eastern European Jews came and were treated to similar anti-immigrant resentment by native born Protestants. The Klan had its origins as an anti-reconstruction movement, but it drew on older anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic ideas.

Gangs of New York is a very good, if melodramatic, depiction of pre-Klan anti-Irish sentiment.

[enlightenment]

14. But not the best history.

It mixes up a lot of historical fact with fiction for dramatic effect.

Interesting film, taken with a grain of salt (as most "history" should be)!

[katherine20]

15. Klansman's Dream

I once spoke to a Lebanese-American gentleman from Birmingham, Alabama. He said the locals considered the Lebanese to be racially Black, religiously Catholic (they are Maronite Catholics) and ethnicly Semitic. A Klansman's dream of a target!