Religion: Are Catholics Different?

• Share

Author Paul Blanshard (American Freedom and Catholic Power) has written with some vehemence that the Roman Catholic Church is a mortal foe of democracy in the U.S. and elsewhere. Six months ago, he went to Dublin for some field research, to see how the people of the Irish Republic (90% of them Catholics) could have managed to keep a democratic government for the last 30 years. From his headquarters in a flat on Dublin's fashionable Fitzwilliam Street, he discussed the question long and earnestly with politicians, journalists and churchmen, both Catholic and Protestant.

Last week Blanshard thought he had found, in Dublin, a good object lesson of how Catholicism conflicts with the obligations of U.S. citizens. He called at the U.S. embassy with a petition to the State Department, demanding that the U.S. citizenship of Archbishop Gerald P. O'Hara, papal nuncio to Ireland, be revoked. His reason: Archbishop O'Hara, a native-born American whose diocese is Savannah-Atlanta, Ga., is violating the McCarran Act by serving as an agent of a foreign power. Said Blanshard, in a press conference over his action: "Americans believe that no American can be a good citizen whose loyalties are divided between his own state and a foreign state."

His action brought some Catholic replies: In Dublin and in Rome, church authorities restated the Catholic position that a nuncio does not represent a temporal state, but "the spiritual power of the Pope." Irishmen, both Protestant and Catholic, were irked by the controversy (said a Protestant vicar: "Let these Americans squabble at home"). Some representatives in the Dail, Ireland's parliament, asked the government to take action against Blanshard. But Minister for External Affairs Frank Aiken, a better democrat than they, retorted: "It is not worth noticing."