Crookston Times Growing racial tensions in the United States also bring to the surface another long-standing form of discrimination: anti-Catholicism. Unfortunately, today anti-Catholicism is showing its centuries-old racialized roots. In fact, bias, violence, and even laws against Catholicism date back to the British American colonies that eventually became the United States. Despite promises of religious freedom, the newly-founded Republic kept the old attitudes regarding Catholics. In the great immigration of the 19th century, anti-Catholicism went hand-in-hand with anti-immigrant sentiment. Many of the immigrants were of predominantly Catholic origin, such as Italians, Irish, and Poles. There was plenty of bias against immigrants in general, merely fueling the old prejudice against Catholics. Laws began to be passed against Catholics, especially in the form of anti-garb laws targeting Catholic clergy and nuns. That those laws were promoted and supported by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan should give anyone pause for thought before supporting them. Some of those laws were even passed quite recently and persist on the books. North Dakota, for example, passed an anti-garb law in 1948 aimed squarely at preventing nuns from wearing their habits while teaching in public schools, hoping to remove them from state schools altogether. […]
