Ash Wednesday

[Terrance]

Dave Monroe wrote:
> 
> Almost forgot what day it is, i.e. ...

How could one forget round these parts? What with all those black
crosses on their skulls? 

Looking back now, say to V. and to GR,  and the anti-Catholicims in both
novels, the  Anti-Jesuit and Anti-Catholic paranoia of M&D,  I am
reminded of Melville again. No? Yes, one could certainly attempt to
attribute the anti-Catholicism in Melville's novels (confusing a a harsh
critique of missionary activities for anti-Catholicism) to the author.
However, this would be a mistake. Pynchon, a Catholic if our reports are
correct, seems to be, as was the case with Melville, playing on the
reader's prejudices and the historical nativism of America. 

M&D is an American novel and it deals with American Labor, and all these
Irish and Germans about, remind us, that M&D takes on American
anti-Catholicism. 

One particular form of American nativism was and is anti-Catholicism.
Anti-Catholicism has proved to have uniquely integrative powers in
organizing nativist perceptions. It has brought together large numbers
of American Protestants to attack at once immigrants, who have been
mostly Catholic in much of American national history, and the
immigration and naturalization laws that allowed them to become
established; a belief system deemed foreign and dangerous; and a
powerful, foreign-controlled, transnational institution. 

Conceptions of Catholicism as religious heresy and superstition, and of
the Roman Catholic church as a vast conspiracy dedicated to subverting
Protestantism and its allied state structures in Protestant lands, were
a product of the sectarian and national rivalries resulting from the
Reformation. 

These took root in Britain's North American colonies, where it was never
illegal to be Catholic, but where local law and crown-ordered
proscription often limited Catholic rights. Even in Maryland, founded as
a haven for English Catholics, there was a battle over Catholic rights
that ended in the establishment of the Anglican church, disfranchisement
of Catholics, and outlawing of sectarian schools. 

Legal proscription was complemented by popular prejudices, especially in
Calvinist New England, where annually effigies of the Catholic pontiff
were the target of popular abuse on "Pope's Day." Prejudices were
deepened by the presence of the hostile French and Spanish along the
borders of the colonies. Catholicism did not prosper in this milieu. 

M&D is also a novel about time and labor and in these chapters,
capitalism and time. In Pynchon novels, decades, and even centuries
collapse into a dream space-time. Are our boys looking into the future?
They are certainly looking at the past. We can look up and see stars in
the sky that died before we were born. 

But we should keep our eyes focused on the facts of history and the
apparent present of the novel. When Dixon and Mason were drawing their
Line, there there less than  thirty-five thousand Catholics among the
nearly four million Protestants, Half of these Catholics were  in
Maryland. Yet, if not welcome, this small Catholic population was not an
abiding preoccupation. Conflicts between Protestant sects were much more
intense than those between Protestants and Catholics. 

The Revolution and the subsequent period of constitution-making proved
the start of a new era for  Catholics. The Founding Fathers wished to
check sectarianism as a source of division, to remove  religion from
public life, and to provide privileges to no one faith. The Roman
Catholic church was then  on the defensive in the revolutionary Europe
of the Enlightenment and seemed unlikely to recover  sufficiently to be
a threat to Protestantism. Devout Protestants feared deism and
rationalism more. The  federal Constitution contained neither political
nor religious tests for office; the First Amendment  guaranteed that no
sect would be established at the expense of others, and that religious
freedom would  be protected. After a decade of struggle induced by fears
of subversion from Europe and partisan  political wrangling, Congress
settled on generous terms for citizenship and naturalization for all 
immigrants, including Catholics. National legislation would be
paralleled in the coming decades by state
laws, which were even more generous in conferring political, civil,
commercial, and property rights on  aliens. Catholics seized the
opportunity to become more visible and organized. The Catholic clergy 
grew; male and female religious orders were established; schools,
colleges, and seminaries were  founded; and after the election in 1789
of John Carroll as the first bishop, an American hierarchy began  to
form. 

Unsettling currents of suspicion lurked below the surface of these new
opportunities and suggested the  likelihood of conflict, particularly if
the Catholic population were to grow. A fear of aliens had already 
emerged as an ideological reflex among many Americans. Washington
himself, in his often quoted  "Farewell Address (1796)," called for
vigilance against foreign influences. Anxieties about such  influences
and about immigration had already established the boundaries within
which the nationality question would be debated. 
Those such as John Jay offered the Anglo
conformist view of the American as a New World Englishman and advocated
rapid, complete immigrant assimilation. In contrast, Thomas Paine and
the naturalized French essayist J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
conceived of America as a melting pot for all European peoples. 

Catholics in the early republic were a largely foreign, non-Anglo-Saxon
population, mostly French and  Irish, but they were unobtrusive and few
in number. Several simultaneous developments, however, joined to revive
anti-Catholicism. Without a doubt the most important was a vast increase
in the immigration of Irish and German Catholics that reached epic
proportions after the mid 1840s. This immigration indelibly stamped
"alien" on American Catholicism at the very moment the institutional
church was expanding, and becoming increasingly visible, to meet the
needs of its newly settled adherents. 
Catholics and their clergy now vigorously raised a number of
issues which have been sources of abiding conflict. Should the
Protestant (King James) Bible be used in public schools as a source of
moral education? Should Catholics pay school taxes to support public
schools their children did not attend? Should Catholic schools get those
Catholic tax dollars? These would remain emotional public issues
throughout the nineteenth century. 

These issues were being debated in a political and social context that
did not lend itself to calm dialogue. The Roman Catholic church not only
had expanded in the United States, it had staged a resurgence in Europe,
where in alliance with reactionary forces, it seemed the enemy of
liberty.

Moreover, large numbers of Americans were left feeling vulnerable by
the massive socioeconomic changes associated with the expansion of the
scope and scale of markets, rapid urban growth, the early stages of
industrialization, and international and internal migrations. Many felt
society was in danger of a radical departure from the Founding Fathers'
vision, and perhaps even of destruction. These fears took on particular
colorations from place to place and group to group, but were as
pervasive as the processes that gave rise to them, and they would remain
a fixture of American life throughout the modernizing transformation of
the next century. During much of that time appreciable numbers of
American Protestants found in the Roman Catholic church an explanation
for all the derangements they encountered in daily life. 

Fueled by notions of a vast Catholic conspiracy emanating from the
Vatican and sending filaments of treachery into every American parish,
the highly charged atmosphere exploded in riot and violence. The
emotional issues of Catholic institutions as havens of subversion led
Americans to torch an Ursuline convent school at Charlestown,
Massachusetts, in 1834, and of Bible reading in the public schools led
them to attack Catholic churches and Irish neighborhoods in Philadelphia
a decade later. No less bloody
was the response to a visit to Cincinnati in 1853 of the papal nuncio,
Archbishop Gaetano Bedini, the personification for many of the
reactionary, antirepublican politics of the European church because of
his role in the brutal repression of republican insurgents at Bologna in
1848. At the Cincinnati cathedral, 1,200 mostly German "Forty-eighter"
refugees, with some American sympathizers, clashed violently
with police. As the incident suggests, throughout the history of
anti-Catholicism, American nativists effected unlikely alliances with
zealous anti-Catholic, foreign-stock Protestants because their fears of
the church were at times even greater than their dislike of foreigners. 

Violence was not, however, the predominant mode of nativist response,
then or later. Effecting a stunning synthesis of their political,
social, and cultural needs, nativists combined anti-Catholicism with the
existentially sustaining masculine sociability, evocative rituals, and
material rewards of fraternalism.

These nativist fraternal groups served political ends, offered welfare
benefits, provided instruction (through ritual and self-governance) in
the attitudes and bearing appropriate to urban, industrial manhood, and
established networks useful to occupational and business advancement.
Secrecy sustained solidarity and, while not ideologically consistent
with republicanism, was justified as necessary to fight the ruthless,
secretive Catholic enemy. he work of its public political wing. 

Nativism and Anti-Catholicism 

Bennett, David H. The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New
Right in American  History (1988). A very comprehensive survey. 

Billington, Ray Allen. The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860: A Study of
the Origins of American Nativism (1938). The classic work on the rise of
anti-Catholicism in the early republic. 

Blee, Kathleen M. Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s
(1991). An analysis of the roles played by women in the politics of
nativism and racism in Indianain the 1920s. 

Carnes, Mark C. Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (1989). 

 Chalmers, David. Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan
(1965; repr. 1980). 

 Davis, David Brion, ed. The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American
Subversives from the Revolution to the Present (1971). A collection of
documents with
incisive commentary and introduction. 

 Goldberg, Robert Alan. Hooded Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Colorado
(1981). 

Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism,
1860-1925 (1955; 2d ed. 1975). The classic work in the literature of
American nativism. 

Jackson, Kenneth T. The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930 (1967). 

Kinzer, Donald L. An Episode in Anti-Catholicism: The American
Protective Association (1964). 

 Kraut, Alan M. Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and "The Immigrant
Menace" (1994). A comprehensive study of the role of the fear of disease
and contagion inthe rise and growth of American nativism