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Kathleen Weber's avatar

I was born on December 17 and thus born waiting. December 17 is the day that the great O Antiphons begin in the advent liturgy—crying out in deep pain for the coming of the Lord. It's kind of a spiritual labor, crying out for the birth of Jesus.

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Michael Blissenbach's avatar

Hollywood can’t seem to make any film about the Church without turning it into an anti-Catholic film. I didn’t bother to see Conclave because I knew it would be an anti-Catholic diatribe pushing an agenda and relies on a bunch of standard anti-Catholic tropes dating back to at least the American Revolution (Britain allowing French Canadians to practice their Catholic faith was one of the famous “intolerable acts” by the British government that the colonists cited in their manifesto justifying the Revolutionary War). Anti-Catholicism is pretty much baked into the DNA of the USA, unfortunately, so those of us who live in the USA really have our work cut out for us. In the past 12 years, two different parishes I’ve been a parishioner at here in the southern suburbs of Saint Paul, MN were spray painted with hateful graffiti (either part of the exterior, in the case of one, or a traveling cemetery of the unborn, in the case of the other), and in the case of one of them, that happened in 2012, the blessed sacrament was stuck in the backs of hymnals in a section of the church (a parishioner alerted Father to this and he wept as he discovered the Eucharist stuck in the backs of more hymnals in this particular section of the church.

I and others have also overheard snide remarks about Catholics and Catholic teaching. Glitzy Anti-Catholic books and movies keep being written and made because a lot of our fellow Americans hate Holy Mother Church, we have to be honest about that, and that is especially true of the wealthy ruling class in the USA, what I like to call the “limousine liberals” and the “country club Republicans”.

We need to be aware of that reality in our efforts to evangelize our fellow Americans: it’s not going to be an easy thing to do because of the deeply entrenched anti-Catholic prejudice in American society.

Phillip Jenkins has an excellent book called The New Anti-Catholicism that I highly recommend.

Anti-Catholicism is the one prejudice in the USA that isn’t just tolerated, but, as films like Angels and Demons, Dogma, The Da Vinci Code, The Last Temptation of Christ, and now Conclave show, it’s something that is celebrated, especially by the wealthy ruling class in our society. That’s the ugly truth about anti-Catholicism here in the United States.

We definitely have an uphill battle to evangelize our fellow Americans, and it’s a battle well worth fighting, but we need to be honest about what we’re up against when seeking to do so.

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