'No Irish need apply'

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BOSTON — The ambitions of the Kennedy dynasty’s founding father, Joseph Kennedy, had no limits. He would have liked to have been president of the United States.  But that way was barred to him because he was a Roman Catholic.

Joe Kennedy always felt that his failure to join one of the top social clubs at Harvard was because of his religion. He grew up  in an era when Boston’s Irish were still struggling to wrest political control away from the dominant Protestants  and win acceptance. 

He lived to see his son, John, become the nation’s first, and only, Catholic president, and when Ted Kennedy  ran for the senate nearly half a century ago the Kennedy name carried him into office. 

His mother,  Rose, always wanted Ted to be a priest, but the males in her family had other plans for him. When I was at high school with Ted Kennedy in the late 1940s and early '50s it was still thought by many Protestants that Catholics should not be running the country. Now, 60 years later, that barrier has vanished completely. That Ted Kennedy was never president had nothing to do with religion. Today there is no position in this country to which Catholics cannot aspire.

Consider the Supreme Court, once entirely Protestant, to which Catholics and Jews were appointed only sparingly. Today  six out of the nine justices are Roman Catholics and John Paul Stevens, 89, is the court’s only Protestant.

The United States is not the only predominantly Protestant country to drop its old suspicions of Catholics. When the British announced they were reconsidering their 300 year-old ban on the royal family marrying Catholics earlier this year there was no noticeable opposition.

“I think in the 21st century people do expect discrimination to be removed,” said Prime Minister Gordon Brown. In Britain’s case having a Catholic monarch would have to be approved by all the other 15 countries that recognize the queen as their chief of state, but only in the province of Northern Ireland might that be a problem.

With the growth of America’s Hispanic population it may not be long before Catholics are a majority in the United States. But even now any prejudice against Catholics seems antiquated and silly.  It is hard for young people to understand  what it was all about. It is hard to believe now that “no Irish need apply” was ever an attitude of employers, but it was.

The trouble began soon after a Catholic priest, Martin Luther, tacked his theses onto the doors of Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517, challenging his church.  Europe was torn asunder by inter-faith wars for centuries.

The new Protestant religion was as determined to re-define man’s relationship to God as was the Roman church’s efforts to suppress the new heresy.  Today, heresy is considered quaint in Christianity, and one would have to look to Muslim lands to see it taken seriously.

It took a long time for the memory of those inter-faith wars to die, and customs are slow to change. Seventy years ago, in Britain, King Edward VIII had to abdicate his throne because he wanted to marry a divorcee, even though the Church of England was founded on Henry VIII’s divorce. Today Prince Charles being married to a divorcee is no barrier to the throne any more than his being divorced himself.

But for centuries it was dangerous to be either a Catholic or a Protestant  depending on who ruled. Henry VIII, even though he split from Rome,  wasn’t above burning Protestants at the stake. His son burned Catholics, and his daughter was called “Bloody Mary” because she executed so many Protestants.

Being a Catholic in England was akin to what being a Communist later became during the Cold War. You were a potential danger to the state. In 1605, Guy Fawkes was among those caught trying to blow up king and parliament for the Catholic cause. Burning an effigy on Guy Fawkes day every November remains a time-honored custom.

Charles II was a secret Catholic who tried to remove all anti-Catholic laws from the books, but he was forced to accept a decree banning Catholics from public office. His  brother, James II,  Britain’s  last Catholic monarch,  had to flee when his Protestant daughter, Mary, landed from Holland with her Dutch Protestant husband, William, in the 17th century. Their  ban on royals marrying Catholics has been in place ever since,  perhaps to be removed by Gordon Brown.

Fear and distrust of Catholics arrived in Massachusetts with the Pilgrims on the  Mayflower,  and spread across America. The anti-Catholic slur, “rum, Romanism and Rebellion,” in the 1884 election by the Republican candidate's camp, however, was enough to galvanize Catholic voters to  put the Democrat, Grover Cleveland, in the White House. They would have to wait another 76 years before they could elect one of their own.

Ted Kennedy may have been the most secular of politicians, believing deeply in the separation of church and state.  He had his disagreements with his church, especially over divorce, abortion, and women in the priesthood, but he remained a deeply religious man and committed to his faith to the end.

When a reporter, Tom Oliphant,  asked him years ago why he felt so strongly about defending the poor and downtrodden, he said: “Haven’t you read the New Testament?”

As the former head of the Democratic National Committee, Steve Grossman, put it, Kennedy was determined to “tear down the barbed wire of bigotry, ” perhaps remembering the prejudices Catholics and faced in America in earlier times which he had lived to see expunged.

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