Catholics, Freemasons, and the GOP, by Peter Wolfgang

By Peter Wolfgang, Catholic Culture, Sept. 20, 2024

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. …

There is a story about the political affiliation of Catholics in 20th century America with which you may be familiar. It goes something like this.

Most Catholics in the United States are tied, in one way or another, to the immigrant experience of our country. Many are Irish, their ancestors having come here in the 1800s to escape the Great Potato Famine. Many others are of either Southern or Eastern European descent.

Their arrival in such large numbers sparked a nativist anti-Catholicism in what had largely been a homogenous White Anglo Saxon Protestant nation. There were riots, attacks on convents, the “Know Nothings”, the Ku Klux Klan, public school attempts to Protestantize the children of those swarthy Catholic immigrants, the Blaine Amendments forbidding government funding of Catholic schools and so forth. …

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