Short Shrift for Protestants

The most controversial religious book of the year was published last week.* Written by Theodore Maynard, an ex-Congrega-tionalist who is now a well-known Catholic writer and lecturer, it is the first full-length popular history of the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. Much of it is bound to make Protestants see red. Sample Maynard polemic:

"The time is ripe for a momentous Catholic effort in the U.S. . . . Protestantism -- especially American Protestantism --is now so doctrinally decayed as to be incapable of offering any serious opposition. . . . Except for isolated 'fundamentalists' -- and these are pretty thoroughly discredited and without intellectual leader ship -- Catholicism would cut through Protestantism as through so much butter." Dr. Maynard is an old hand at stirring up churchmen. As a 19-year-old English man he came to the U.S. in 1909 to study for the Congregational ministry, was promptly fired from his first pulpit for preaching a sermon on "Silly fools, stupid fools and damned fools" which his hearers considered much too personal. Converted to Catholicism four years later, he now writes with the full fervor of the oath he took on abandoning Protestantism to "detest and abjure every error, heresy and sect opposed to the said Holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church."

Protestant Exterminators. Polemicist Maynard starts his cracks at Protestants with the coming of the first Protestant settlers. After praising the "notable humanity"of various Spanish conquistadores, he declares that "the policy of [Indian] extermination had to wait for the coming of English Protestants," reflects sadly that "all the Indians . . . might have been won for Christ . . . had not the Protestant settlements undone the work of the Spanish and French missionaries."

But not all his comments on the Catholic missionaries are enthusiastic. In New Mexico the Franciscans soon "did not want to be disturbed in their comfortable sloth" In California a decade before U.S. annexation "the Indian converts drifted away ; the churches were falling into ruins ; few priests were left." And despite the undoubted heroism of the French missionaries among the Iroquois, they "snatched no more than a few individual souls for salvation."

Jefferson Aquinas. Many historians have argued that U.S. democracy is the direct outgrowth of colonial Protestantism, with its emphasis on individual responsibility, but Dr. Maynard has a different theory: "Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers [considered] Locke's Two Treatises on Government as the Bible of the Revolution. . . . Now Locke's thought was formed by Hooker, and Hooker's thought was formed by St. Thomas Aquinas." Furthermore, most U.S. Catholics supported the Revolution "because the principles of the Revolution were so closely consonant with Catholic political philosophy."

Elsewhere, however, Dr. Maynard pays tribute to that "really remarkable Pope," Leo XIII, whose denunciation of Freemasonry also denounced most of Freemason Jefferson's political principles. Said the indignant Pontiff: "They [the Masons] teach that men have all the same rights, and are perfectly equal in condition; that every man is naturally free . . . that it is tyranny to keep men subject to any other authority than that which emanates from themselves. Hence the people are sovereign; those who rule . . . can be deposed, willing or unwilling, according to the wishes of the people. [They teach that] the origin of all rights and civil State, duties which is is in ruled the people according to or in the the new principles of liberty. They hold that the State must not be united to religion."

Apologist Maynard's history of American Catholicism since the Revolution is more plausible, no less colorful. The first U.S. Catholic bishop, John Carroll of Baltimore, found only 24 priests and 25,000 communicants in 1784 in a country of over 3,000,000 people. Some 250,000 other Catholics had lapsed because of preRevolutionary restrictions. Carroll, too, found good priests hard to get. European bishops "regarded America as a convenient dumping-ground for rubbish," and he grew "weary of eccentric Frenchmen and quarrelsome and bibulous Gaels." Another lively chapter is devoted to the Know Nothings and other anti-Catholic movements of the mid-19th Century, when the great flood of Catholic immigrants first stirred the Ku Klux instinct. By 1860 Catholics were one-seventh of the U.S. population instead of 1/120th as 80 years before. In the 80 years since, despite immigration, they have risen only to one-sixth.

Nunnery Inspection. Typical Know-Nothing absurdity: encouraging the revelations of fraudulent ex-nuns "who had escaped from convents after discovering them to be brothels in which nuns bore to priests children who were strangled at birth and sent blissfully winging to paradise." Such tales so stirred up Massachusetts that a nunnery inspection committee was appointed to nose out conventual enormities. It found none. Some convents and churches were burned by anti-Catholic mobs, and in St. Louis "the medical school conducted by the Jesuits was barely saved from attack. The cadavers used in the anatomical classes were supposed to be bodies of the Protestant martyrs put to death in exquisite tortures by the local Inquisition."

Dr. Maynard devotes two glowing chapters to the greatest leader U.S. Catholicism has produced, James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, who felt that "the Catholic religion was safer under the American flag than anywhere else." And he does not skimp the intermittent struggle of French, Irish, German and Italian prelates for supremacy -- the Irish generally won. In 1889, when Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul was given two suffragan bish ops, neither of them a German, "he was so overjoyed that he struck the table with his dished fist the and Dutch!' " roared, 'Thank God, we've dished the Dutch!'"

On World War I, Dr. Maynard makes two further assertions that will raise Protestant eyebrows:

1) The number of Catholics under arms "exceeded population" their largely proportion because of "the the Catholic general emphasis upon . . . chastity may be supposed to have preserved a higher percentage of them from venereal disorders." (There are no official statistics to back up these claims.)

2) "Even Protestant officers . . . openly . . . wished they could have none but Catholic chaplains. It is patent that one who is out to save souls will accept any risk in the fighting line, whereas there was not much point in a chaplain who was a superior sort of entertainer putting his skin in danger." (U.S. chaplain mortality in World War I: one out of every 96 Protestants, one out of every 118 Catholics.)

But Dr. Maynard knows how to give good advice if not to take it. His counsel to journalists: "Merely to expose Protestant bigotry is an endless process, the cutting off of the Hydra's heads, and accomplishes nothing. It is about time that we learned that the most effectual way of making other people Catholics is by ourselves becoming Christians."

*The Story of American Catholicism (Macmillan: $3.50).

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