In 1942, Catholic priest and apologist Ronald Knox remarked:
A quite new hatred of the Catholic religion is growing up within my own lifetime – a hatred of its strict principles on certain points, which our neighbors … dislike as being a criticism of their own conduct, and a criticism which in their heart of hearts they know to be just.
Accordingly, as if to turn the table on Catholics, the critics of the Church have often invented great lies about Catholics and stirred up hatred against them, as the following account shows.
The KKK may have likely been the propagators of a phony ‘Knights of Columbus oath’ for new members, circulated in the early 1900s as anti-Catholic propaganda designed to inflame anti-Catholic sentiment. The oath was alleged to read in part:
I do promise and declare that I will, when opportunity presents, make and wage relentless war, secretly and openly, against all heretics, Protestants and Masons, as I am directed to do, to extirpate them from the face of the whole earth; and that I will spare neither age, sex, nor condition, and that I will hang, burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle, and bury alive those infamous heretics; rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women, and crush their infants’ heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race….
Although investigated and branded as a fake oath by a U.S. Congressional Committee in 1913, the bogus oath was later used to discredit two famous Knights of Columbus: Democratic candidate Alfred E. Smith in the 1928 presidential campaign, and John F. Kennedy in the 1960 West Virginia Democratic primary. But an aspect of this story that interests us here concerns a Knights of Columbus Council in Lubbock, Texas.
In 1948 the newly formed Knights of Columbus Council No. 3008 took its first fire from a West Texas critic. A small town newspaper near Lubbock, The Ralls Banner, reprinted the bogus oath with the following editorial comment: “Readers may think ‘it can’t happen here,’ but it does – and right here in Texas. The following excerpt from the Congressional Record of February 15, 1913 proves it. It is part of the oath taken by the Knights of Columbus…to be signed in the member’’ own blood drawn with a dagger. It is recommended reading for those following the Banner’s frequent articles on ‘Who are the Un-American?’”
Lubbock’s Knights of Columbus Council flew into action and sent the editor the full text of the Congressional Record defending the Knights with the following remarks:
… in view of the fact that you have, by printing this scurrilous and libelous attack upon the Knights of Columbus and all Catholics, circulated falsehood and wounded the feelings of 25,000,000 loyal Americans, we, the undersigned … demand a full and detailed explanation of this matter to your readers and a public apology to the Knights of Columbus.
The explanation and the apology never came. Instead, the editor served up some pious pabulum about the right of free speech, with no admission whatever that the article was false and libelous. (The Ralls, Texas incident is well documented in The Knights of Columbus in Texas by William Oberste, pp. 136-37).
As thinking Catholics we need not assume the authentic truth of any hateful remarks against the Church, no matter how powerful or impressive their source. We need to demand truth in documentation, and very specific truth at that. Failing to do so, we can easily be dismayed by the lies told by historians for centuries about the Catholic Church, including many falsehoods and exaggerations written about the Crusades and the Inquisitions.
As Archbishop Fulton Sheen put it: “There are not over a hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church—which is, of course, quite a different thing.”
More Recent Slander
None of the above is meant to gloss over the pedophile wrongdoing revealed in recent years by individual Catholic clergy. Since the wrongdoing in so many cases is real, it is not slander to speak of it. However, that wrongdoing is no part of Catholic policy, and only proves that Christ was prophetic when He warned His apostles that wolves would come to them hungry to devour. Just as the faith of the apostles survived a certain wicked wolf among the Twelve, true Catholics will survive with undying faith every wolf among the sheep.
These wolves come in many guises. Often attacks against the Church are motivated largely by the moral doctrines taught by the Church. For example, the prohibition against sodomy is well developed both in the Old and New Testaments, and is upheld by Church teaching as a frustration of both God’s law and the law of nature; not only did Moses, but both Plato and Aristotle among the Greeks and many cultures worldwide have spoken strongly against the practice of sodomy. The spread of sodomy in the West (and among some Catholic clergy) puts the Church’s teaching in the cross-hairs of those who would revise traditional morality in favor of open acceptance of sodomy, even to the point of celebrating it in literature, the movies, public parades, and political action.
It is largely to be expected, then, that the same kind of slander as that against the Knights of Columbus will be energized against Catholic clergy with many falsely accused, such as Cardinal Joseph Bernardin (later cleared) and the more recent case of false charges for which the accuser was required to pay the legal costs of the diocese defending the priest. David F. Pierre’s book Catholic Priests Falsely Accused is one of the best documentations of this trend. A recent Catholic University study reports that 82% of American priests “regularly fear being falsely accused of sexual abuse.”
It is worth repeating, the wisdom of Ronald Knox in 1942:
A quite new hatred of the Catholic religion is growing up within my own lifetime – a hatred of its strict principles on certain points, which our neighbors … dislike as being a criticism of their own conduct, and a criticism which in their heart of hearts they know to be just.
Yes indeed, such slander is a perennial pastime.