Happy St. Patrick's Day

I have deep Irish roots and so today has always been rather meaningful to me. My Mother's father was Irish and an orphan, so he was given up to the Catholic church for adoption. My Father has Scotch-Irish roots as well. Mixed in with the Irish and the Scotch-Irish is a healthy dab of English.


The Irish were persecuted just as much as any immigrant group. If you survey American history, you will find as much xenophobic hateful, fearful rhetoric towards them as you will any immigrant group nowadays. Particularly threatening to the status quo was that many Irish immigrants were Roman Catholic in an overwhelmingly Protestant nation. Our Founding Fathers, as good stewards of the Enlightenment and former British citizens, were fearful of the power of any church and particularly were aware of the power of the Catholic church and its role in both the Spanish Inquisition, The reign of Henry VIII in which England broke from Catholicism altogether, and the fear of popery that characterized The English Civil War, and the establishment of the military dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell.

Yet, the Irish assimilated more or less into society. 100 years ago, Irish would have never considered marrying anyone else other than their own kind. They were stigmatized as hard-drinking, amoral, angry, violent subhumans by many natives. Over time, this subsided. There is still a bias against Catholics in certain parts of the country, even still evident today in the South, though having had the first Catholic president, JFK, seems to have ended the fear that any President's first allegiance would be to his church or to the Pope.

In a speech before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, Kennedy effectively lay aside these doubts in eloquent, but somehow un-empty words.

But because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured -- perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again -- not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me -- but what kind of America I believe in.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the President -- should he be Catholic -- how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference, and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him, or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accept instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials, and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been -- and may someday be again -- a Jew, or a Quaker, or a Unitarian, or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that led to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today, I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you -- until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped apart at a time of great national peril.

The full speech here.