Conservative commentator Ross Douthat, who writes opinion pieces for the New York Times largely about Catholicism, once saw fit to tell us in print, in an op-ed I have not succeeded in finding, that his loyalty lies firstly with the Church. Loyalty to the United States comes second. I am mystified as to a) why he seems to think Catholic issues are somehow important to the news-reading public and b) how a person whose confessed loyalty is only secondarily to our polity should have any role at all in the opinion forming media, but I am willing to let those concerns go for now. Here's the thing: such talk hurts Catholics.
I carry no torch for the Church. I can candidly state my views towards it in pithy, Anglo-Saxon terms that you, the reader, really don't need to hear. Fact is, I am the descendant of Italian and Irish immigrants for whom the Catholic faith was a part of their ethnos. Anyone who knew me in the rash days of college would be amazed to hear it, but I am an ethnic Christian, descended from one quarter Catholic “stock”. At any rate, biblical stories about weird-beard folks in djellabas with names like Absalom and Uriah are not something I can identify with. I don't follow any of their fairy tales: it is a matter of identity.
It is this identity that Mr. Douthat puts in jeopardy when placing his Catholicism anywhere near the level of his patriotism. Catholics, like Jews, have been subject to a spectrum of discrimination ranging from insults to violence based on the perception of their split loyalty. In the case of Catholicism, this appears in part based on the very state-like structure of the Church-- a church that does in fact originate in its very own micro-state, the Vatican.
In the basic Know-Nothing scheme of 19th century American xenophobia, Romanism-- an epithet for Catholicism-- was used similarly to how Communism is used today by the American extreme right. As Republicans today sometimes identify basic capital-D Democratic ideas as Communist if ever so slightly left of center, so too did old-time American nativists tar more liberal politicians as “Romanist” if their views did not sufficiently serve to oppress American Catholics.
The Ku Klux Klan also grouped Catholics with Jews. I'll choose this moment to mention that the United States' only Catholic president before Joe Biden was shot to death in a Southern city.
My Catholic ancestors are not hard to find. They rest in the (self-?)segregated Catholic cemetery of Oakland, California, a burial ground dwarfed by the nearby Mountain View Cemetery. A ten-foot tall obelisk announces the surname of one of the first people buried there, Cerini, a name recycled as my mother's given name.
As they lie separated from the "general population" in death, their grave mirrors another kind of social disadvantage they would have experienced in life. There are eleven bodies buried there, just as poor Catholics lived in overcrowded residential conditions, bearing at least 3 different surnames, both Italian and Irish, 2 of them are misspelled in cemetery records, reflecting a kind of bureaucratic apathy.
They are all dead. My connection with them is not. This connects me, in turn, to living Catholics-- to living Catholicism. Whatever discrimination they might have suffered in life cannot be justified as applying to the millions of Catholics I share the United States with.
I have no social connection to any more than a handful of modern, live Catholics. I have only an inkling of who among my friends “actually believes this stuff”, to quote my friends' most effective line against the Jehovah's Witnesses who plagued their porch for a time. My suspected Catholic friends probably just understand that no advocacy of any kind is asked for. Conversely, perhaps my aforementioned strong anticlerical views that I was not polite enough to keep under wraps as a hotheaded adolescent keep them silent.
The few I know-- and the many I don't-- share the ethnic identity of my grandfather's entire family. I have no desire to see them suffer socially for the expression of an opinion writer's divisive claims.
