Anti-Catholicism

This book explores the complex relationship between anti-Catholicism, or anti-popery to use the contemporary term, and the American Revolution in New England. Anti-Catholicism was among the most common themes in colonial New England culture. Nonetheless, New Englanders entered into an alliance with French Catholics against Protestant Britons during the American Revolution. As New Englanders traditionally associated Catholicism with tyranny and oppression, they were able to extend these feelings to the "popish" British upon the passage of the Quebec Act. As a consequence, anti-popery helped enable New Englanders to make the intellectual transition that war with Britain required. During the Revolution, anti-popery became less popular as the American rebels relied on Catholic France for aid. By the end of the revolutionary era, Catholics were extended legal toleration in all of the New England states. The book's conclusion explores the change in religious tolerance and the decline of anti-popery with a study of New England's first Catholic parish.

An old pro on political mischief in the United States gives us an overview of U.S. campaign tactics and ethics from 18th-century pamphleteers to 1990s political consultants and media wizards. Felknor analyzes negative campaigning today within the context of the evolution of our electoral system. He offers a candid report on media's influence on politics and shows how political reforms from the Progressive Era to Watergate have often misfired. This incisive analysis also provides long-forgotten, little-known, and never-told accounts of political lore written in a lively manner.

One of the most intriguing questions in contemporary American Christianity is whether the recent warming of relations between Catholics and conservative evangelicals promises a thaw in the ice age that has lasted since the sixteenth century. American evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics have hated and suspected one another since colonial times. In the twentieth century, however, each community has experienced radical change, and this has led to a change in the relationship between the two. In this book William Shea examines the history of this troubled relationship and the signs of potential reconciliation. His springboard is the recent publicity given to the 1993 document Evangelicals and Catholics Together, in which several well-known figures from each camp, acting as individuals, signed a statement affirming much more common theological and social ground than any other American Catholic-evangelical group had ever done. Looking back, Shea surveys the long and very bitter history of published recriminations that have flown back and forth between Catholics and many kinds of Protestants since the 16th century. He makes the case that Catholics and conservative Protestants reacted along parallel lines to western "modernity" - especially naturalistic evolution and higher criticism of the Bible). That deeper history leads him to the more recent history that has partially overcome the severe Catholic-evangelical antagonisms. Here he focuses on the rise of "neo-evangelicals" associated with Billy Graham and the National Association of Evangelicals and on the changes with the Catholic church since Vatican II. He goes on to offer systematic interpretations of recent evangelical literature on Catholics and Catholic literature on evangelicals. The book ends with some historical, but also theological, social and personal conclusions. This accessible, groundbreaking, and timely study will be indispensable reading for all interested in the religious landscape of America today.

From the time of the Reformation Anglo-Vatican relations have typically been seen as a long history of unending antagonism and mutual suspicion, but this has not always been the case. This book sheds light on one of the most curious episodes in early Victorian history when, around the time of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, a rapprochement almost developed between Britain and the papacy, and British politicians and writers referred to the new head of the Catholic Church, Pius IX, as 'the good pope'.Integrating diplomatic, political, ecclesiastical and social history, Saho Matsumoto-Best traces the factors that brought these two traditionally hostile powers together and the reasons why this rapprochement was doomed to failure. She demonstrates how the desire to support constitutional government in Italy and to curb the activities of the Irish Catholic church led the government of Lord John Russell to build a close relationship with Pius IX, and how failure to understand the Vatican's priorities and anti-papal and anti-Catholic feeling in Britain, particularly in the context of the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in 1850, eventually destroyed this policy.BR>This study is an important and original contribution to the current debate about the nature of mid nineteenth century-Britain and sheds new light on the British role in Italian unification. It will also be of great interest to students of nineteenth-century European international and ecclesiastical history, and of the 1848 revolutions.

The Catholic contribution to English literary culture has been widely neglected or misunderstood. This book sets out to rehabilitate a wide range of Catholic imaginative writing, while exposing the role of anti-Catholicism as an imaginative stimulus to mainstream writers in Tudor and Stuart England. It discusses canonical figures such as Sidney, Spenser, Webster and Middleton alongside many lesser-known writers. Alison Shell explores the Catholic rhetoric of loyalism and apostasy, and the stimulus given to the Catholic literary imagination by the persecution and exile so many of these writers suffered.