Father Andrew Greeley takes umbrage at a naive (?) hot-wiring of the Christian faith by Evangelicals during the primaries. [h/t: New Advent]I'm a Catholic. You got a problem with that? I'm a Christian too. You other guys got a problem with that?My crowd has been calling themselves ''Catholic'' for 17 centuries. The adjective "Roman" added in the American context is a slur, sometimes unintentionally conveyed in the tone of the one using it. It hints that we are somehow foreign and perhaps subversive. It came into use when the ''publics'' started to recite the Nicene Creed and their leaders had to explain that the ''one, holy, catholic and apostolic church'' of the creed wasn't us.
We've been Christians since the beginning. The claim of the evangelicals to a monopoly on the term is little more than a century old. It excludes Mormons, secularists and Catholics. We don't like being excluded, and we might just begin to make trouble about it. We invented Christianity, guys, and your claim to sole rights is historical nonsense -- and bigotry, too.
These outbursts are intended as evidence that the rhetoric of the contretemps in Iowa is profoundly offensive to some of us. The United States is not and has never been a Protestant nation or a Christian nation, despite some of the claims made in the course of our history by Protestants ignorant of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
1 comment:
Fr. Greeley's partially wrong. America has been Prot right from the begining. The folks at Jamestown weren't Catholic and neither were the grumpy Pilgrims. But's that's because the Motherland, England was Anglican. Had Spain been in charge of the 13 colonies things would be different.
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