Jeffery N. Bunker, 5 April 2016

Our thoughts determine our destinies. We must keep our thoughts clean and pure.

My dear friends, I am here today because I believe the friendship of the Latter-day Saint and Catholic communities is important. The better we know each other’s stories as religious minorities in this country, the better we can support each other in pursuing some of the vital issues we share. And that serves not just our beliefs and concerns but the health of our entire nation. I want to begin by giving you some background on the Catholic experience in this country. I will do that through the lens of a particular Catholic bishop—me. I don’t claim to speak for all or even most Americans who describe themselves as Catholic, but my comments do reflect the views of many Catholics who rank their Catholic faith as the most precious thing in their lives—and actually live that way. Our Task as Believers in America Let me start with a simple fact: Catholics have never entirely “fit” in America. We have tried, but the results are mixed. In fact, some years ago Stanley Hauerwas, the distinguished Protestant theologian, said that not only do we Catholics not fit in America, but we also know we don’t fit in. And because we know, we are doubly eager to prove that we are more American than anybody else. For Hauerwas, the proof is obvious. He wrote: All you need to know . . . is that the FBI is made up of Catholics and Southerners. This is because Catholics and Southerners [need] to show they are more loyal than most Americans, since Southerners have a history of disloyalty and Americans fear that Catholics may owe their allegiance to some guy in Rome. That is why the FBI is given the task of examining graduates of Harvard and Yale—that is, high-culture Protestants who, of course, no longer believe in God—to see if they are loyal enough to be operatives for the CIA.1 Hauerwas was writing with a dry sense of humor, but what he said is largely true. America’s roots are deeply Protestant and Americans are historically suspicious of Catholics. America is a child of the Refor­mation and the Enlighten­ment. Neither event had much use for the Catholic Church. At the time of the revolution, out of three ­million or more colonists, fewer than 25,000 were Catholics. In practice, Catholics were often tolerated because their numbers were so small. And some, like Charles Carroll, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, were well educated and quite successful. But prejudice against Catholics was nonetheless widespread. The really ugly anti-Catholic bigotry—church burnings and looted convents—came later, in the nineteenth century, and it was linked, predictably, to the waves of poor immigrants who arrived from Catholic countries in Europe and the social strains they caused. Reading the official documents of America’s Catholic bishops from the 1830s to the 1950s is revealing. They tell us two things: first, the bishops were determined to protect their people from public hatred and violence, and second, they were committed to proving their loyalty as […]

Charles J. Chaput, Archbishop of Philadelphia, 22 March 2016

Jennifer Rockwood, 15 March 2016

We must always seek for the light as well as light the way for others.

Larry R. Lawrence, 8 March 2016

Larry R. Lawrence, 8 March 2016

Christian Smith, 23 February 2016

The text for this speech is not available, but please enjoy the audio and video through the links provided.