Note: These articles are a raw riff. They will have grammatical and spelling mistakes. How it works, I read the book for my bookclub. I sit down, riff, then publish. I’m also trying something new, the first part is for everyone, free and paid subscribers. The second part is only for my paid subscribers, the bookclub is for paying members. Also, no video again, the situation with my family back in Boston makes my phone ring off the hook at random, so until that settles down, no video riff.
Papists are idolaters. They worship Mary, the mother of Jesus, and they have this whole weird thing with saints and angels. They believe in miracles, and the worst are the miracles they believe in after the Bible was written. The Catholic Mass is not worship, the Rosary is not prayer, and the Catholics need random people on social media to finally make that one post that totally destroys the Catholic Church and destroys all the Catholics.
I’ve returned to my Catholic faith. I’m a cradle Catholic. I went to St. Sebastian’s School, a private Catholic school in Needham, Massachusetts, from seventh grade to tenth grade. I transferred to The Governor’s Academy. I won’t share why I transferred. I was a good student, I love my parents, I was a well-behaved kid (I had zero detentions), and I liked St. Seb’s a lot. But it was important for me to get out of the house, and it was a tough decision to leave. I grew up Catholic, and being Irish in the Boston area, I considered myself an Irish Catholic, like all my other Boston-Irish Catholic brethren. Nana, my grandmother on my dad’s side, was hands down the most devout Catholic in my family. She went to Mass almost every day. She was super involved in the Church, she frequented a few churches, and she tithed a considerable amount of money. She visited the Vatican a number of times, along with visiting Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and a variety of famous holy sites all over the world.
My wife grew up in Douglas County, Nebraska, which is Omaha proper and the immediate surrounding area. She’s Catholic and grew up in a deep Catholic community in Omaha. She went to Catholic schools. She didn’t meet her first non-Catholic until she went to college.
I haven’t run into anti-Catholic sentiment since I moved away from Boston back in 2010. Boston had, and I believe still has, various Protestant neighborhoods and institutions that outright disdained the Catholics. If St. Sebastian’s came up, or if someone could easily spot that I was Irish (my dad and Nana were real easy to spot as Irish), the old Anglo disdain would come out. I noticed it most in country clubs. My family, particularly my dad’s family, belonged to a few different country clubs in the Boston area, Charles River Country Club being one such club. And Charles River Country Club was for the wealthy Irish Catholics. The Country Club, America’s oldest, didn’t allow Catholics. And part of the reason it was built was to be an enclave free of those lowly Italian and Irish Catholics. At some of these clubs, if they spotted your Irish face or if I said, “I go to St. Sebastian’s,” instantly that good old-fashioned Yankee Protestant snobbery would come out (it also came out when they heard my last name. We were considered new money).
The opening paragraph of this musing and my family background have a point. America’s earliest colonists were Protestants, Protestants who detested Catholicism. Where I’m from had the New England Brahmins, the New England WASPs, the Peabodys, the Saltonstalls, the Cabots, the Adamses, and so on. Names and families still ingrained in the Boston area. Mostly they were Congregationalists, Unitarians, and Episcopalians. Each faction had its own flavor. And these New England factions were far different from the southern Protestant colonists. The southern Protestants were never Puritan in nature. They were far more agrarian in style, and various factions had different flavors. And some were tolerant of Jews yet were vehemently anti-Catholic.
Maryland was the only Catholic colony, and was an experiment in Catholic tolerance, but the number of Catholics there was minuscule compared to the rest of the population in Maryland and in the rest of the colonies. At the time of the American Revolution, something like 13 priests, total, were in America. Catholics were banned in the colonies for the most part, and various American Founders, or big influences, were staunchly anti-Catholic and tried to enforce it.
A Patriot’s History of the United States is what I’m currently reading for my book club, the topic of that book club being America. Authors Schweikart and Allen show just how anti-Catholic the early colonists were. It struck me. I knew a bit from the culture I grew up in, that the Catholics were seen as lowlifes, as trashy, and maybe the best painting of the sentiment is portrayed at various points in the iconic comedy Caddyshack. The character Danny, his Irish family being large to the point that Danny’s father has no clue that his nephew is eating breakfast with him. Or the bishop he’s caddying for asking if he’s Roman Catholic, and then turning him away. Most of the caddies are Italian and Irish, and most Catholic, as you can see the crosses. Even the concept of them coming from large families is taken as sexually lewd (also portrayed in the famous Life of Brian movie by Monty Python).
Yet the American colonists truly despised the Catholics. Certain writings of various laws excluded Catholics from having rights. The American Founders and most of their circles disliked the Catholics. The First Great Religious Awakening occurred when the colonies had established themselves. American ideals, the dynamism of the American economy, that dynamism’s flavor of either urban or agrarian, influenced American Protestantism and its various factions. New factions arose, and the classic fire-and-brimstone sermon emerged. The sermons discarded piety, and we see the nondenominational church theatrics common today in this first awakening. Some sermons were plays intended to frighten the audience. The audience bursting with random emotional outbursts, which is still common today among various Protestant sects, first surfaced. The Second Great Religious Awakening occurred around the time of Andrew Jackson. This awakening is fascinating in that we see its influence, and not even influence but outright following of its formula, not just in religion but even in hustle culture, or the self-development world. This awakening fomented a belief that a person could attain or should seek perfection on earth, and that perfection was attainable. Groups like Christian Scientists first emerged, and they had the belief, and still do, that spiritual health was all mindset. The self-development world most are familiar with today, the Tony Robbins, the James Clear, the habits, biohacking, much of it has its influence and outright modeling on groups in this era. Diet tricks, lifestyle hacks, all with the aim of living sin-free and becoming a perfect being.
Turning back to religion, the second awakening, we see more of a cementing of what is found today with evangelical churches, nondenominational, Baptist, Methodist, and other Protestant denominations. The songs, the popular fashion with how they’re sung, traveling preachers, the entertainment-style sermons, and sermons that adhere more to popular fashions, politics, and current trends than to tradition or traditional religious observances.
With all of these new sects, a distinct element held. Even those stodgy old New Englanders, while they scoffed at the theatrical aspect, and while many sects differed in their biblical views, they were all tolerant of each other. That tolerance was not found in the rest of the world. But as tolerant as they were, and as novel as this tolerance was, one group was excluded from this tolerance: the Catholics. Not the Jews, not the atheists — the Catholics. Catholics do not evangelize like nondenominational churches. Catholics are much more reserved. But Catholics expanded in their own way. They built churches in areas. And they conducted missionary activity with the Native Americans.
What fascinates me is that if you go online, Jews get blamed for everything. And on X, someone will write a self-referential pseudo-essay, or “take” as it’s called, about how a group of Jews controlled banks or something else, long before anyone, and it’s why we have cultural rot or Bonnie Blue or why a city has fallen or how that event led to the killing of Charlie Kirk. It’s all nonsense. Yet to me, it’s wild to see in A Patriot’s History and also detailed in The Last King of America, which I’ll cover below, that Catholics were the center of conspiracy. Insert most of the crazy conspiracies you know of Jews, and in America’s early days, Catholics were accused of it.
On X, Catholic bashing exists. Personalities seem to make it their identity to reply-guy or troll certain posts under a belief that they will own the Catholics and perhaps make the entire Catholic Church fall. That’s about the only Catholic bashing I sense. In my neighborhood’s men’s Bible study, which I love, it’s obvious at times I’m the lone Catholic. When I returned to my faith, I tried different churches. Mainly nondenominational churches. As I said, I was shocked at the pop music and the motivational element. But learning about American Protestantism in A Patriot’s History has deepened my understanding of my faith and my Catholic faith. And it’s especially made me see more colors in the American fabric.
Enough of this ramble. Let’s look a little more inside A Patriot’s History.