The KKK hates Catholics too

In my Twitter feed the other day, someone said to me that “extreme Catholics are just as evil as the KKK.”   I replied that Catholicism is pure goodness, and that it is impossible to be extremely Catholic, and at the same time, evil.

Neo-Nazis stance against non-white people is well known, and only more so in recent days due to the events last weekend.    Their stance and hatred for Jews is well known, as well.   However, less well known, and less publicized, is their equal hatred for Catholics.   The following is a short article by Stephen Wynne of the website Church Militant.   I will have a few comments afterward.

Founded by disbanded Confederate soldiers on Christmas Eve, 1865, the secret fraternal society quickly transformed into a paramilitary group bent on fighting Reconstruction and the advancement of African-American, Jews and Catholics.

The KKK's decidedly anti-Catholic bent appealed broadly to Protestant America. Philip Jenkins, Baylor University professor of history, writes, "The Klan was above all a Protestant movement, whose events were accompanied by beloved hymns like 'Onward Christian Soldiers,' but its trademark anthem was 'The Old Rugged Cross.'"

Protestant leadership, in fact, were prominent figures within the Klan. "Protestant clergy were prominent in the leadership of this 'crusade,'" he observes, "'consecrated beneath the fiery cross of militant Protestant Christianity.' Every lodge had its kleagle or chaplain who was always a Protestant minister."

The KKK's anti-Catholic bigotry sprang from a broader antipathy toward the Church. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. describes U.S. anti-Catholicism as "the deepest bias in the history of the American people."

Again, Jenkins explains:

Partly, the Klan inherited the very powerful nineteenth century tradition of militant anti-Catholic bigotry, which presented the Church as a vehicle for tyranny, paganism, immorality, persecution and every anti-Christian force. The Klan rehearsed the ancient charges of American nativism about Catholic evils, including the Inquisition, the seditious secret oaths taken by the Knights of Columbus and the conspiratorial nature of the Jesuit order. So much was familiar — but from the 1890s the U.S. experienced a mass immigration largely derived from Eastern and Central Europe, and newer groups were heavily Catholic and Jewish in character.

The KKK underwent rapid growth during the 1910s. By the early 1920s, its membership had swollen to more than 5 million, and its journal, The Fiery Cross, had a readership of 400,000.

Contrary to common perceptions, at that time the Klan was not primarily a Southern phenomenon — its greatest support was rooted in the North and Midwest. Pennsylvania alone counted more than 423 Klan lodges.

At the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York, Catholic Al Smith became a leading contender for the party's presidential nominee. Hundreds of Klansmen delegates responded by disrupting proceedings, shouting calls for violence against African-American and Catholics and defiling effigies of Smith. Democrats came within one vote of adopting a Klan platform plank voting against it 543 to 542.

In one notorious case in Birmingham, Alabama, Fr. James Coyle was murdered by a Klansman, shot in the head on the porch of his rectory by E.R. Stephenson — a Southern Methodist Episcopal clergyman. Months before Stephenson murdered Fr. James Coyle, his daughter Ruth had converted to Catholicism. Catholics were, in fact, subjected to acts of violence during this period.

The Ku Klux Klan paid for Stephenson's defense, and four of his five attorneys were Klansmen. Not surprisingly, Stephenson was acquitted.

Alabama, for instance, is home to half a dozen KKK affiliates and several other white supremacist organizations. In fact, the state has been bucking a national trend with a recent rise in such groups. In recent decades, overt Klan activity has become less visible, owing to overwhelming rejection of its bigotry. But the organization is still very much alive. Though fewer in number and comparatively more covert, its members remain active across the South. In the 1950s, the KKK experienced another revival in response to the Civil Rights Movement.

Well into the 1960s, the group was burning crosses in front of Catholic churches across the South.

Cullman County is the site of the Shrine of the Blessed Sacrament, established by EWTN's Mother Angelica in the late 1990s. Reportedly, it also nurtures persistent, anti-Catholic sentiment.

After Mother Angelica began her activities in Hanceville, Alabama, the KKK sought to intimidate her by lighting bonfires and holding meetings along the Mulberry River, opposite the nuns' enclosure.

Even today, anti-Catholicism manifests subtly but surely. Last year in Cullman County — on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday — the Klan distributed fliers recruiting new members.

In Hanceville this spring, the mayor and city council erected directional signage, pointing the way to almost a dozen different Protestant houses of worship. The one church omitted: St. Boniface Catholic Church — a 100-year-old mission located less than three blocks away.

In the town of Cullman, reportedly there is even a clogging group proudly calling itself "The KKK."

So, we can see why I, and many others, fight back when radical Catholics are equated with the KKK.   They have absolutely nothing in common.

This article may seem to put Protestants in a bad light.  Make no mistake, the majority of Protestants during the KKK heyday, and today, are against the KKK.  However, the fact remains the leadership of the KKK was (is)  Protestant, not Catholic, and its platform was (is) intentionally anti-Catholic, even though, unintentionally, it is a repudiation of all authentic Christianity.

Mother Angelica, mentioned in the article above, and whom I also did write a blog post about when she passed away last year, moved from Ohio, and established a monastery in the South, in part, to be a witness against the racism prevalent there, and to court black vocations.   This did not sit well with the local KKK.    Here is more on this from an article in America magazine written by Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S.J.:

Once she raised the money for a down payment and bought some land in Irondale, new difficulties arose. The Ku Klux Klan liked Catholics no more than blacks, so they drove by and shot up the house the sisters were using as a temporary convent. Even after they built a proper convent and chapel, a motorcycle gang attacked the place early in the morning, breaking in one door after another as the sisters kept retreating inside. A passerby noticed the motorcycles parked outside the convent and helped chase them away just before they broke down the last door.

So, as we explained in the last post, racism is in no way compatible with Catholicism, and therefore, neither are any of the stances of white supremacist groups.   Radical Catholics and radical KKK are definitely not the same.

Joseph most just, pray for us.