Churches of the West: BoJo Marries and the Comments Fly.

Churches of the West: BoJo Marries and the Comments Fly.: 

BoJo Marries and the Comments Fly.

A Medieval wedding.

Boris Johnson and his longtime girlfriend, Carrie Symonds (now Johnson) married.

So what, you may ask.  Indeed, dulled by the long 2019-2021 parade of bad news of one kind or another, that was my initial reaction, even though there's an obvious Christian point to this story from the onset, as by marrying, they're no longer shacking up, if you will, even though they certainly haven't been shacking up in quarters that could be compared to a shack.  

Frankly, as an Apostolic Christian, I'd normally have probably made a comment at some point about their living arrangements as its clearly contradictory to the tenants of the Christian faith, and even in Europe this would have been poorly regarded in almost any society up until, well right now.  Now, it pretty much produces a yawn, as do the majority of other serious religious tenants shared by all of the Abrahamic religions on a variety of matters related to sex.  I.e., this conduct is regarded as seriously sinful by all the Christian religions, Judaism and Islam.  In the modern world, it seems, Christians, including some serious ones but also a lot of nominal ones, have decided that most of what the Apostles wrote down was elective in nature and that people pretty much get a vote on what is and what isn't sinful.

More on that here later.

That's not what sparked the news, as soon became apparent.  What did, is that Johnson and Symonds married in a Catholic cathedral in a Catholic ceremony.  For people who like to be shocked, amazed, or scandalized, this was shocking, amazing, and scandalous.  And the press all over the English speaking world reacted with a giant "WHAT? How could this be?"  For example, the New York Time ran this headline:

Why Could Boris Johnson Marry in a Catholic Church?

The Guardian, a British newspaper that has made inroads into this US, ran this bizarre historically dim headline:

Boris Johnson’s outdone Henry VIII in having his third marriage blessed by the Catholic church

Apparently the writers at this British paper are historical dimwits.

The Irish Times, less dim on the topic, ran this one, which was actually interesting and informative.

Boris Johnson baptised Catholic and cannot defect from Church, says canon law

And the Times headline gets to the crux of the matter.

That didn't keep, however, an Irish priest from stating that the wedding made a "mockery" of the Church's laws.

Which it does not.

I don't know much about Johnson personally,  Or indeed, hardly at all.  And among the things I didn't know is that his mother was Catholic and he was baptized by a Catholic priest.  His mother raised him as a Catholic as a child, but when he was in Eaton, he was confirmed (rather late, if we look at North American anyhow) by an Episcopal Bishop.

And that makes him an Episcopalian, right?

Well, that depends.

Carrying the story forward, in the 1980s he married Allegra Mostyn-Owen. The couple divorced in 1993 after six years of marriage.  She's currently married to a man 22 years her junior who is a Muslim, which has lead Johnson to put Mostyn-Owen on a Muslim relations task force.  Reportedly, she's given her husband permission to have more than one wife as she is unlikely to be able to bear children and of course polygamy is a feature of Islam, although that would not be legal anywhere in Europe, in so far as I know. ^[1]. 

His second wife was Mariana Wheeler, a childhood friend of Johnson's.  They married twelve days after his first divorce and she was pregnant at the time.  Their marriage lasted seven years.

So, eeh gads, surely this is contrary to Catholic teaching, right?  I.e., his current marriage to Symonds, age 33 (Johnson is 56), just can't happen, right?

To read the press, you'd think so.  I've read everything, however, from this can't happen as Catholics don't allow divorce to this could only happen as Catholics don't recognize the marriages of other faiths.  

That doesn't grasp the interesting religious angle, however, of this at all.

In reality, all of the Apostolic faiths, as well as some of the Christian faiths that are close to the Apostolic faiths and regard themselves as Apostolic, take Christs' injunction against divorce seriously, although they don't all approach it exactly the same way.  Interestingly, and completely missed in all of this, the Church of England doesn't recognize divorce.  The mother church of the Anglican Communion, that is, regards it as invalid, just as Catholicism does, which isn't surprising as High Church Anglicans regard themselves as a type of Catholic, even if the Catholic Church completely rejects that assertion as "completely null and utterly void".

We'll get to more of that in a minute, but perhaps the most peculiar of the approaches to divorce is the Orthodox one.  The Orthodox allow more than one marriage under a vague application of a mercy principal that tolerates, in some cases, up to three marriages.  It's tempting to compare this to the Catholic concept of annulment, and indeed it is somewhat comparable, but lacking in the formality.  The basic approach, however, is that the Orthodox only recognize one valid marriage, but accept that human nature is frail and people goof up, so it applies some leeway essentially as it generally feels that the problem of sex in human nature makes it difficult not to.  I'm not Orthodox, so I could be off on this by quite some margin.

The Catholic Church doesn't recognize divorce at all.  It does apply the principal of annulments where it judges that one of the original marrying parties lacked something to make that marriage valid.  I don't' know what percentage of people who go through the annulment process obtain one, but frankly it seems rather shockingly high, which as been a long criticism of it, and a valid one in my view.  Outside of that, however, Catholics hold that once you are married, its until death.  No exceptions, save for the one noted, which would hold that the first marriage wasn't valid, and therefore wasn't really a marriage.

So how on Earth could Johnson and Symonds marry in a Catholic cathedral?

Well that leads to messy press analysis.

The Irish Times, not surprisingly, had it best. 

Contrary to what some of the press elsewhere would have it, the Catholic church fully recognizes the marriages of non Catholics, and for that matter, non Christians.  If two Muslims marry, the Catholic Church regards them as married.  Married and can't divorce is how the Catholic Church would regard it, irrespective of how Muslims may view it.

And also contrary to what some of the press is claiming, the Church also recognizes the marriages of people who are two different faith, or no faith at all.  Go down to the Courthouse and have the judge marry you, in other words, and you are married.  

So what's the deal here?

That's where you get into Canon Law.

Originally the overwhelming majority of Christians, all of whom were Catholic, married outside of a Church ceremony.  Indeed, it was extremely informal.  People just decided they were to marry, and they were.  No wedding ceremony at all.  

That first began to change with monarchs, as their marriages were also effectively treaties between nations, and they wanted it to be really clear and official in every respect possible.   But also, during the Middle Ages, things began to change with regular people as the need for marriage witnesses arose. This was principally because one member of the couple would claim they were never married, usually the man, leaving he other, usually the woman, in a very bad position.

Indeed, even with very early Christian monarchs you can see this at work.  Some early Saxon and English kings, for example, had queens who were subject to this.  Hardecanute is a famous one who married with King of England, but who had a Scandinavian queen before and during that period. What was she?  Harold Godwinson, the last Saxon king of England, had a Saxon queen who was "married in the old style" and a Welsh queen to whom he was more formally married. When  he died at Hastings, it was apparently the Saxon queen, still around, that identified his body.

This presents a series of obvious problems and the Church therefore worked to clear it up, imposing the Canon law that Christians had to be married by a priest.  This served a number of purposes, one of which was that the wedding was therefore witnesses and couldn't be simply excused away.

It would be tempting to think that the current situation came about immediately upon the Reformation, but that would be in error.  Indeed, it's important to keep in mind that at the parish level, while the fact that the Church was in turmoil was obvious, the severance wasn't necessarily immediately apparent in the pews.  All of the original Lutheran priests, for example, had been ordained Catholic priests.  No Bishops followed Luther into rebellion in what is now Germany, so there was no way to ordain valid new priests in the eyes of the Catholic Church there, but in Scandinavia things muddled on in an unclear fashion for some time and the Scandinavian Bishops did follow their monarchs into a series of murky positions.

In England, the situation in the pews was also unclear. All of the original Anglican priests had been Catholic priests and most, but not all, of the Bishops followed Henry VIII into schism.  Edward VI took the country as far from the Catholic folds as he could, but then Queen Mary brought the country back into the Church, although without completely success.  Then Elizabeth struck a middle ground, most likely for political reasons more than anything else.  As late as the Prayer Book Rebellion, 1549, Catholicism was still so strongly rooted in the minds of average Englishmen that they revolted over the introduction of the Book of Common Prayer which the conceived of as too Protestant.

The point of this isn't to introduce a treatise on the history of religion in England, but rather to note that for average people this must have been distressing, but if they were going to get married, they still went to the same place, the Church, and the presiding cleric presided over it.  This is important to our story here as, at least in England, in spite of an outright war by the Crown against Catholicism, the Church did not prohibit Catholics from marrying in a ceremony presided over by an Anglican priest and no dispensation was required for a "disparity of cult".

Indeed, it's widely believed that as late as 1785 the man who would reign as King George IV married Maria Fitzherbert, a Catholic.  The marriage remains really murky in terms of details, as it was conducted in secret, and was arguably invalid because George IV had not obtained permission from George III, which was a legal requirement.  The marriage did not, however, require Fitzherbert to obtain permission from the Catholic Church and its believed it was conducted by an Anglian priest.  Interestingly, while George IV would later deny that the marriage was valid, and their relationship was rocky, it never completely ceased altogether and he asked to be buried with a locket containing her image.  George IV was officially married to his cousin Caroline of Brunswick in what was pretty clearly both an arranged and unhappy marriage that he did wish to terminate.  He died first.

So when, exactly, the current canon came in requiring permission for a marriage outside of a Catholic officiation, I frankly don't know.  It may not have occurred everywhere at the same time, for that matter.  Having said that, it seems to have been first mentioned as a Church law, and therefore a legal requirement binding Catholics, in 1563, so the example given above is problematic.

Note, however, that it binds Catholics.  Not other people, and the Church has never stated otherwise.  

Additionally, it binds Catholics as its a law of the Church.  In order for a Catholic to have a valid marriage, it must be presided over by a Catholic priest or there must be some dispensation.  If that doesn't occur it isn't valid, as to Catholics.

And that's what we have here.  It's not change in the law of the Church in any fashion. Boris Johnson was baptized as a Catholic and so he is a Catholic, the way that Catholics understand that.  Carrie Symonds is also a Catholic, and indeed, press comments about her routinely refer to her as a "practicing Catholic".  Her status in that regard is problematic as she and Johnson have been shacked up, which is contrary to Catholic moral law in a major way, but with their marriage, and presumably with a Confession that preceded it, that's no longer an issue of any kind.  And Symonds' views would otherwise be evident in that she had their son, born out of wedlock (see issue above again), baptized in the Catholic faith.

So, why al the fussing?

Well, for the most part at least knowledgeable Catholics aren't fussing.  Not everyone likes Johnson politically, but Catholics pretty much take a "welcome home" view towards this sort of thing.  So, the past is what its, and Boris is back. All is fine, religion wise.

Of course, some Catholics who don't know the doctrines of their own church, or who simply want to have a fit, are. But its' a pretty misplaced one.

Non Catholics can have a fit if they're predisposed to, as they don't understand the Church's law and they are often surprised to find that the Church retains its original position that as it is the original Church, which is indisputable, all others lack in some fashion. ^[2].  So this serves to remind people that the Anglican Church and the Catholic Church have a lot of similarities, but no matter what the Anglican Communion may maintain, the Catholic Church doesn't regard it as Catholic.  Of course, not all Anglicans wish to be regarded as Catholics, but some of them are offended as the fact that the Catholic Church isn't according them equivalency with the Catholicism is offensive to them.

More than that, however, a long held cultural anti Catholicism that came in with the reformation is still pretty strong in certain Protestant regions of Europe in spite of the decline of their Protestant established churches.   This is very evident in England, and is very strong in Scandinavia.  It's somewhat ironic in various ways, not the least of which is that these regions have become highly secularized and as that has occurred, the Church that has remained strong has been the minority Catholic Church, which has not only survived its long Reformation winter, but which has gained new adherents.

Does this mean that Johnson has fully returned to the Catholic fold and will be at Mass next Sunday?  Well, Catholics should hope so, and frankly so should Protestants as well. And there is some evidence that Johnson, who has lived a fairly libertine life, may in fact be taking his Christianity more seriously than he did in earlier days.  His recent address regarding the Pandemic specifically referenced Christ and his mercy, something that very few politicians would generally do, and European ones even less.

So, while people can have fits if they want to, all in all, they shouldn't.  Indeed, no matter what a person thinks of Johnson one way or another, there's reason to be happy about this development, and not just in being happy for the apparently happy couple if a person is inclined to be such.

Footnotes

1.  Having said that, I don't know if polygamy is legal in Turkey, which is obviously a Muslim majority nation, and which is in Europe, depending upon how you draw the continental lines.  Turkey has become increasingly Islamic under its current leadership but had years of aggressive secularism, so the status of Muslim polygamist marriages isn't a given, and I don't know the answer as to its status there.

2. The various Orthodox Churches also stretch back to Apostolic origins, which is why the Catholic and Orthodox Churches regard each others sacraments as valid, and also regard their separation as schismatic, depending upon which you are in, rather than an outright rebellion and departure as was the case with the Protestant Churches.

May 16, 1920. The Canonization of Joan d'Arc

A doodle of Joan d'Arc by Clément de Fauquembergue on the margin of the protocol of the Parliament of Paris from May 10, 1429, two years prior to her death.  Clément de Fauquembergue was the parliamentary registrar and the news of the her victory at Orleans had just reached Paris.  The doodle is the only know illustration of her done during her lifetime.

On this day in 1920, Pope Benedict XV canonized Joan d'Arc, the 15th Century peasant girl who lead French forces in a revived effort to recapture lost grounds from the English after hearing voices commanding her to act for the French crown.  She ultimately paid for her efforts with her life, being burned at the stake after being falsely convicted of heresy, a charge now universally regarded as absurd and which was itself reversed in 1456.

Even no less of figure as Winston Churchill regarded Joan as a saint.  That the illiterate farm girl was able to gain access first to the French crown and then the army in the field commander was and is proof of her divine mission. With the army, she offered advice to its noble commanders which was frequently taken and French fortunes against the English in fact reversed and their army started to do remarkably well.

She is believed to have been born in 1412 in a region of Lorraine that retained loyalty to the French crown during the Hundred Years War, a contest between the Plantagenets, the Norman rulers of England, and the House of Valois, the rulers of France, over who should rule France. The house she grew up in and the village church there still stand.  As those who have ready Henry V know, the English long maintained that they should rule both kingdoms and they often regarded France as more important than in England.  That contest commenced in 1337 and featured a long running series of campaigns.  Trouble in the French royal family had been taken advantage of by Henry V who had been able to greatly expand the amount of English controlled territory in the 1415 to 1417 period.  By 1429, when Joan commenced her mission, half of France was controlled directly by England or by French duchies that were loyal to England.

The English commenced a a siege of the FRench city of Orleans in 1428, a town that was a holdout in its region for the French king, Charles VII.

Joan began to have visions in 1425, at which time she was 13 years old.  She identified the first figures she saw as St. Michael, St. Catherine and St. Margaret, who told her to drive the English out of France and take the Dauphin to Reims for his consecration.  At age 16 she made demands upon a relative to take her to see the crown which were received with scorn.  Nonetheless she was taken to Vaucouleurs where she demanded an armed escort to the royal court, which was denied. Returning the following year, she secured the support of two soldiers and their urgings and support she was conducted to the court after she reported the results of a distant battle she had not been at two days prior to messengers arriving to report it.  She as then escorted to the court disguised as a male soldier as it involved crossing hostile Burgundian territory.  At that time she was 17 years old and Charles VII 26.

She secured permission to travel with the army, which was granted.  Everything she used in the mission was donated to her, including the banner that she used.  She never used any weapons in battle but rode under her banner. She did, however, gain access to councils of war and was listened to. As noted, the fortunes of the French reversed in this period.  The siege of Orleans was broken by the French and Reims taken. The Dauphin was crowned as a result in Reims.

After a brief truce between the English and the French she was captured in battle in 1430 and put on trial for heresy.  Heresy being a religious offense, she was tried by English and Burgundian clerics, but the English officers oversaw the trial.  The trial was irregular and conducted without religious authority and without the individual commissioned to find evidence against her being able to find any.  Her conviction hinged on her having worn male clothing when under escort across hostile Burgundian soil.  She was convicted by this tribunal of heresy and burned at the stake in May 31, 1431.  Her executioner later greatly feared that his service in this role would result in his damnation.

In spite of her death, the dramatic reversal in French fortunes continued on and by 1450 the English had been pushed off the continent.  In fact, French borders surpassed their current ones, as France's resulting borders included what is now part of Belgium, a not surprising result given that Belgium is a multiethnic state.

A regular canonical trial to examine the first one's propriety was convened in 1455 and reversed the conviction in 1456.

She's been a popular figure ever since her death and in any age the nature of her mission is hard to deny.  Illiterate and born in a region separated from the retreating French royal lands, she nonetheless managed to convince the French crown and the chivalric leaders of its army that she had a divine mission, something that was aided by her knowledge of things that she could not have known but for her commission.  Under her, in spite of the fact that she was a teenage girl with no experience in military matters, French military fortunes permanently reversed.

It's no doubt her youth and gender that have caused her popularity to remain outside of France, but she is a saint whose nature should cause moderns to pause.

MKTH photograph of the statue of St. Joan d'Arc in Notre Dame de Paris.

She was not, as some no doubt imagine her, as some sort of proto feminist teenage leader in an age of male patrimony and would not have seen things that way.  She was singularly devout and saw her mission as a religious one.  She was known to be opposed to the heresies of her era and Islam. She was intensely Catholic and caused the army she lead to be adherent to the faith.  The war for control of France changed from a contest between two royal families to a war with religious overtones and even, as viewed from a modern eye, as one involving nationalism in an early form.  Her modern fans would do well to take note of her mission and the fact that its impossible to imagine it without crediting the divine voices that she attributed it to.

And indeed, her mission did have impacts on the religious map of Europe in ways that would not be possible to appreciate at the time of her execution at age 19 in May, 1430.  England was pushed off the continent in 1450 by which time Henry VI was king. That same year he was forced to put down a rebellion against the crown in England.  In 1533, a mere 83 years later during a period of time in which events often moved slowly, King Henry VIII would take the formerly devout England away from the Church and marry his pregnant mistress Anne Boleyn, bringing the Reformation to England in a personal effort to generate a male successor through a fertile female. The following acts would result in crown licensed theft of church property, murder and decades of strife and war.  While France would fall to secularism in 1790, its position up until that time remained stalwart.

The Reassessors: St. Ignatius of Loyola

He was ordained a cleric at an early age, but received a release from his vows and became a soldier.  He was noted to be vainglorious in this period.  A battlefield wound lead to a long period of painful books during which his request for books about chivalry was met instead with religious works as the castle he was recuperating in had those and not the former.

This lead to a profound conversion, lead an austere life, dedicated himself to study, and ultimately returned to the clergy.  He founded the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits.

The Royals. M'eh

According to the Canadian news paper the National Post about 60% of Canadians hope that Prince Harry will become the next Governor General of Canada.

The Governor General is the representative of the Queen, and we've discussed the Queen in Canada once before.  Indeed, that topic was once one of the most favorite ones here:

Queen Elizabeth II in Canada

This is a young Queen Elizabeth II in Canada, but what else does it depict?  I frankly don't know.  Its a photo from my mother's collection, and unfortunately, I no longer know the story behind it.

Does anyone stopping in here know?

Anyhow, the National Post had this headline the other day:

'Celebrities': Will Prince Harry take over the post of governor general? Canadians are hopeful, poll says

Here's hoping there isn't a next Governor General at all and that the Windsors simply fold up shop and become private citizens.

Something I don't mention here very often is that I'm a dual citizen of Canada and the United States.  Now, I'm a resident of the US and have been my entire life, but I hold dual citizenship because my late mother was from Quebec and only became a US citizen late in life.  Indeed, my father had already passed at the time.

I guess that gives me somewhat of a right to comment on this as a subject of Queen Elizabeth II, but only somewhat.  While I may hold Canadian citizenship I'm not going to pretend that I'm Canadian in the same way that somebody who really lives in Canada does.  It's a legal oddity, I guess, in my case but I will confess that I do feel a closeness to Canada in a way that most Americans are not likely to.  I have a large collection of Canadian relatives and my mother was always very Canadian.

Indeed, in a sort of way, Canadians like me, who hold citizenship because of an ancestral connection, are remnants and reminders of what Canada is and was perhaps more than current residents are, which is probably both instructive and irritating to current residents of the country.  I don't appreciate it when people whose grandparents once lived in my home state feel free to spout off in the local letters to the editor section about the way the state ought to be and I doubt born and raised Canadians appreciate being treated in the same manner. 

None of which keeps me from occasionally commenting on Canadian affairs. .  . or Commonwealth ones.

Which is what this is.

Canada is of course a fully independent nation but it's also part of the English Commonwealth and the Queen is the sovereign of the country.  The Queen of England, that is.

This is somewhat of a confusing topic for people who aren't in the Commonwealth but, to reduce it to the point where it's probably deceptive, the British Empire recognized at some point after the American Revolution that not eventually establishing political independence for colonies was a bad idea and made the residents of them very crabby.  It therefore established a dominion status for them at some point which meant that what had been colonies, like Canada, were converted into self governing dominions.  In that system, those dominions governed their internal affairs completely while their external affairs were largely governed by the United Kingdom, the mother country.  The jurisprudential concept was that there were lots of English dominions but only one Empire.

In the late 19th Century this view became highly developed and there was a lot of talk of Empire in sort of a glorified fashion, in which it was imagined that one big happy British Empire would exist with lots of happy smaller British states.  An English Commonwealth of Nations.  Naturally the mother Parliament would continue to govern foreign affairs, as it was the Parliament of the empire.

Well, this started to really fall apart after World War One.  The UK had declared war for the entire Empire in 1914 so countries like Canada and Australia, both dominions, went to war because of that. They didn't do it themselves.  They raised their own armies, to be sure, along with other dominions like New Zealand and South Africa, but after the war the obvious problem of a nation asking its sons to die in a titanic conflict that they had no say about getting into caused the British Parliament to loose that extra national status.  The Commonwealth was still real, but it became more of a cultural union with strong international economic, immigration and emigration benefits for the members.

The Commonwealth took an additional blow when Ireland basically disregarded its dominion status in the Second World War and refused to enter into the conflict.  India showed little interest i dominion status after the war.  Lots of nations joined the Commonwealth after World War Two as they became independent, but the economic advantage evaporated when the UK entered the European Community.  Ironically, it's just left.

Maybe that'll give a boost to the Commonwealth again, which had real economic features to it.

At any rate, because of this history Canada retains the position of Governor General.  That's because the Queen remains the sovereign.

What's that mean?

Well, Queen Elizabeth II has the constitutional right as the sovereign to act much in the same way, indeed beyond the same way, that the President of the United States can. She calls the Canadian Parliament into session and she approves or disallows the legislation it passes.  Therefore, she can veto any Canadian bill.

The Governor General holds the powers of the sovereign in her stead.  Queen Elizabeth, as with all the royals, has no real desire, I'm sure to open the parliaments of all fifteen Commonwealth countries nor to preside in some fashion over the legislative process of all of them.  Indeed, in modern times the Crown has been careful not to really become involved in politics anywhere, including in the United Kingdom, quite wisely.

Indeed, no modern Governor General has ever denied ascent to a bill of the Canadian parliament.  A provincial one (yes, there are provincial ones) last operated to do so in 1961 in Saskatchewan.  It'd be phenomenal if any of them did so now, although the thought of it occurring in the form of an act by Prince Harry is amusing.

It's amusing as royalty itself is sort of amusing.

The current Governor General is Julie Payett, who was appointed to that role by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.  They serve at the Queen's pleasure, but in practice it tends to be a five year appointment.  So the PM could choose to appoint Prince Harry to the role after Payett runs her course in 2022.  The Queen, for her part, could turn Harry down, but that would be odd and he's in need of a job.

Does any of this make any sense in the modern world?

Well, it makes a little, but none of that does anything to remove the fact that royalty is really odd and the English monarchy is quite odd, as an institution.

People really like to imagine that the English Royal Family and all its impressive majesty and ceremony date back to ancient times.

That's because they haven't studied it.

In reality, the early English monarchs were from different royal lines, although supposedly the current Queen is a distance ancestor of one of the very first monarchs, but that's only because huge numbers of the English now are.  Early on, simply being king didn't mean you'd occupy the position until death, and death tended to come pretty early for them. Some made it into what we'd now regard as old or at least late middle age, but of the early ones, more than a few died in their 30s. 

And more than a few had to constantly fight other claimants, as it was recognized that the heads of strong families had just about as much right to the thrown as any one occupant.  About the time of Ethelred the Unready (which meant "ill advised") the practice started of trying to incorporate sacred oaths into the process of choosing an heir to the thrown so that powerful men, subject to those oaths, wouldn't take a run at the crown, but that was only partially successful. 

This whole process went on seemingly forever and even the seizure of the thrown by the Normans in 1066 didn't stop it.

King Henry VIII, the Vandal.

During the Reformation the entire process took on an odder twist when King Henry VIII, not intending to make England a Protestant country, separated from Rome to establish what he naively thought was something like the Catholic Church of England.  Henry, who was constantly distracted by the topic of what babe ought to be in his bed chambers, listened too much to some of his Protestant advisers and the country went into prolonged religious strife during and after his death.  While the Church of England was established and slid around between being quite Protestant and not so much Protestant, while being challenged by the more Protestant and while suppressing the actual Catholics, the Crown itself was worn a couple of times by Catholic monarchs, who had the embarrassing role of also being head of head of the Church of England.  Ultimately the Parliament imported the really Protestant William of Orange from Holland, who had nothing else to do, and made him king.  For this reason the current family occupying the thrown had a really, really German last name (and a pretty good German bloodline) up until World War One, when they changed their last name to Windsor.

By the Great War the powers of the Crown had been reduced to a largely ceremonial role.  Indeed while Americans still like to claim they rebelled against King George in 1774, they really rebelled against the Parliament as by that time the King's role was vague and it was really Parliament that held real power.  Indeed, Parliament held real power by the time of the English Civil War in 1642-1651, as that was the original point of the war, before it began to feature a strong religious element to it.  The Crown reclaimed some  powers during the Restoration in 1660, but by that time it was pretty clear who was really running the country.

King Charles II of England.  He got the crown back his father had lost, but he made the Parliament nervous by his heavy partying, crypto Catholic ways (ironic in light of the former) and deathbed formal conversion to Catholicism.

After World War One the Crown went into a real crisis when King Edward VIII, who was an oddball who also complained about the heavy burdens of being a prince before he was King, abdicated when he became king in order to marry Wallace Simpson. We've dealt with that elsewhere, so we're not going to here.

Okay, with all that, what's going on now?

Well, I don't really know but of all the royal families in Europe the English royal family really gets the attention. There are other royal families. Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands all have them.

But no nation needs one now and frankly the history of royal families is embarrassing.

If you follow reddit you can find the surprising communities of people who are enamored with monarchy.  Indeed, there's more than one blog dedicated to following old royal families and imagining a return to an extremely conservative social order if only they had more of a role in the world.  

But that's baloney.  In truth, monarchs tended to be just as likely to be weird and icky as they did noble and saintly.  In modern royal families its easy to find the history of affairs and scandal.  And some born into it, like Harry, don't like being captive royals.

And why would we imagine otherwise?  This collection of people is born into vast wealth with no real obligations.  Idle if they wish to be, the roles they fill are only filled by the pressure of their own families or by increasingly limited constitutional roles. And some of those roles should have caused eye rolling from the onset, such as the retained English one of being head of the church in England.

So now, Prince Harry, who seemingly has never done well with being a royal, basically wants out.  But in wanting out, because he's a royal, he gets privileges that other people do not.  He may be entitled to a share of the family's vast private wealth.  He and his wife get to move to Canada simply because he's a royal.

Well, let him out, but do away with the whole absurd charade.  Having a royal family hasn't made sense for well over a century, maybe two centuries.  The English aren't defined by their royal family anymore and Canada having one, given its current culture, is flat out odd.  

There's no reason not to make Queen Elizabeth II the last royal.  The Parliament should declare it and start working on sorting out what is really theirs as opposed to Britain's. They'll still be rich.  When she dies, she should be the last one.  Everyone else can go get a job, or not.

And the American Press can focus on something else.  We haven't had a royal since the Declaration of Independence. Why the close attention to them here?

Thanksgiving Reflections

Puritans on their way to church.

It's become sort of an odd tradition in the US in recent years to either criticize a holiday in general or to lament how weakened its become in the modern observance of it. The two are diametrically opposed feelings of course, but they seem to be equally present.

In regard to Thanksgiving, the trend has been by some to comment on how we just don't grasp how the very first Thanksgiving is misunderstood.  This commentary takes the form of the mild, in noting that the Mayflower immigrants and their Indian guests were just as likely to have had deer on the table as they were to have turkey (although there's frankly no reason not to suppose they had turkey. . . or maybe goose), to hardcore comments on their being nasty colonialist.  The commentary on the early menu is historically interesting but latent prejudging of their overall natures is seemingly rarely done accurately and opens up moderns to criticism as well.

Of course, this website itself hasn't been immune to that as we've noted more than once that the "first Thanksgiving" wasn't that.  Thanksgiving feasts are common feature of every society that farms, which means almost every society.  Those feasts are, it should be noted, uniformly religious in nature.

We noted all of that in our first posts here, in 2012, that dealt with the holiday:

When we were kids were taught, back in the old days, that the holiday was thought up by the Pilgrims, those Puritan colonist who landed at Plymouth Rock, as an original day, celebrated with their Indian neighbors, to give thanks for their first harvest.  That's not really true.  I'm sure it's true that they celebrated a Thanksgiving, but then they would have for a variety of reasons. The most significant of those would have been that a Thanksgiving was the European norm.

Thanksgiving was a universally recognized religious celebration recognized in every European country.  The holiday gave thanks to God for the harvest.  At some point in Europe the celebration came to be formally recognized in the Catholic Church, centered date wise around the harvest in southern Europe, by a few days of fasting prior to the Church recognized holiday.  How the Reformation effected this I do not know, but I am certain that the Puritan colonists would have celebrated Thanksgiving in England and in Holland prior to every having celebrated it in the New World.  Indeed, as is sometimes missed, not all of the Mayflower passengers were Puritans by any means, and this is no less true for the other passengers on that vessel. They all would have come from a relatively rural English background and they all would have been familiar with a Thanksgiving Day.

Thanksgiving remained a generally recognized religious based holiday in North America well before it was established as a national holiday in the United States, and in Canada (on a different day).  In the United States, the first Federal recognition of the holiday came during the Civil War, during which time Abraham Lincoln sought fit to note it, in the context of the terrible national tragedy then ongoing.  While that may seem odd to us now, there were real efforts even while the war was raging to try to fit what was occurring into context, which would eventually lead to Decoration Day and Memorial Day (essentially the same holiday). During the war, noting what was occurring on Thanksgiving seemed fitting.  The holiday was seemingly moved around endlessly for many years, and even as late as Franklin Roosevelt's administration new dates for it were fixed, all generally in November. States got into the act too, such as Wyoming, with governors occasionally fixing the date.  The current date stems from a 1941 statutory provision.

We also noted there, regarding its religious nature:

It's interesting to note that up until the mid 20th Century the norm was to take a turkey home alive, and dispatch it at home.  This is rare now, as people have become somewhat delusional and wimpy about food, with some even going so far to believe that if they abstain from meat entirely, that they're not killing anything, a delusion which demonstrates a complete lack of knowledge of any kind of farming or food transportation (more animals die smacked by trucks on the road than most can begin to imagine).  That meant that the turkey was no doubt pretty darned fresh, as well as tasty.

Man bringing home Thanksgiving dinner.

Boy with plucked Thanksgiving dinner.

Connecticut farmer plucking turkey for sale.

Outside of a big gathering, for many people a church service was part of Thanksgiving, and for quite a few it still is.  Other than that, activities that occurred were, according to what I've read, games.  Various types of games seemed quite popular for such gatherings.  Thanksgiving football goes back amazingly far in the United States, and I've seen a poster advertising a college game that dates back to 1903.  If it dated back to 1903, I'd presume it went back somewhat further than that.

What all of this tells us, as noted before, is that the observance of the holiday has been incredibly consistent for an extremely long time.

Efforts to formalize it as a national holiday, only dealt with in part, really came about during the Civil War and it was clear right from that time that effort, which built upon an already existing civil custom, were both familial in nature, tied to the harvest, and had an emphasis on giving thanks to God.

Indeed, on that latter point, Thanksgiving is one of those days like Christmas that frankly makes no sense whatsoever outside of a religious context.  While I'm well aware that there are people who don't make it a religious observation and have the holiday anyhow, it seems weird and even hollow if they don't.  I've been, for example, to Thanksgiving dinners in which no prayer of thanksgiving was done and they seem really lacking. And not only is something lacking, but it's obviously lacking.  Be that as it may, in spite of feeling that way, I come across poorly as I never make a personal attempt to intervene and offer one.  I say one to myself.

Anyhow, with this in mind it strikes me for an odd reason how this holiday, celebrated across the US and in every culture, is one that is really carried over from a distinctly Protestant tradition, and indeed a tradition within a tradition.  I'll not go into it too deep, but its associated with the Puritans for a reason.

The "Pilgrims" as we used to hear them called more often, where Calvinist Puritans who had very distinct and strict religious views.  They didn't practice religious tolerance whatsoever, although at that first English Thanksgiving in North America they no doubt had to as they were a religious minority at the time, something rarely noted about them.

Indeed, the English colonist who came over on the Mayflower were buy and large not Puritans, a religious sect that had grown up in the early English Reformation and which was hostile to the Church of England, with the Church of England being in turn hostile to it.  The history of the early English Reformation is something we'll not deal with here, but we'll note that the early Church of England reflected a schism, rather than an outright separation, from the Catholic Church.  The first Bishops and Priests of the Church of England had all been ordained as Catholic Priest and they all had Catholic theology as their primary view in spite of following Henry VIII into schism on the question of his claimed right to head the church.  Indeed, it's really doubtful that many of them took his claims all that seriously, quite frankly, and the Church of England as a Protestant Church didn't really come about until some time later.  Henry had advisers who were Protestant in their views right from the onset (at least one lost his head for heresy) and he had one wife, if I recall correctly, who was hardcore Protestant, so the door was open.   But he no doubt went to his death in 1547 at age 55 thinking he was a Catholic.

After that the period of turmoil he'd unleashed in his country really ramped up and as we've addressed elsewhere the Elizabethan Religious Settlement ultimately came about through the imposition of certain views by Queen Elizabeth I.  The degree to which she herself agreed with them is open to question, at least one unconformable story holds that she rejected her own clerics on her deathbed as being false clerics, but the settlement was only partially that. While England would become rabidly anti Catholic in later years, that would take years and years and it would have at least two Catholic monarchs after Elizabeth's death, thereby making her sister Mary not the last one.

Oliver Cromwell, Puritan Lord Protector.

One party that didn't accept the settlement was the Puritans.  With no really definable origin, they came up originally as a party within the Church of England that was steadfastly opposed to all of its retained Catholic nature.  Hitting their high water mark during the dictatorship of Puritan Oliver Cromwell, they fit in with the group of British Protestants who were darned near opposed to every sort of religious and even civil custom that the English had. That operated to make them really hated and when the Restoration came about not too surprisingly they were suppressed by an English population that was sick to death of them.  That caused some to relocate to the Netherlands which had religious tolerance due to a religious split existing in that country between a Catholic and Protestant population, but even the Dutch grew sick of them pretty darned quickly.

Mary Dyer, Puritan evangelist, going off to execution in Boston in 1660.

And that caused them to relocate to North America.  Or more properly, for some of them to undertake to do that.

As this isn't a history of the Puritans in North America, we'll basically stop their history there, other than to note that they became really unpopular in the colonies as well. So much so, that even some female Puritan evangelist were executed for returning to a colony from which they'd been earlier expelled.

Anyhow, all of that is noted for a simple reason.

The Puritans were amazing opposed to almost every form of human celebration as we'd recognize it.  Religious holidays that were deeply ingrained in Christianity and which Protestant religions kept right on observing after the start of the Reformation were banned in Puritan regions, including all of England while the dictatorship was ongoing.  Attendance at church on Sundays was compulsory and omission of attendance was punishable as a crime, but Christmas and Easter were banned and actually outlaws.  Sports on Sunday, an English tradition, was also banned.  Certain sorts of sports were completely banned.  May Day was banned.

But Thanksgiving, a day of thanks for a bountiful harvest, never was.  And that's really remarkable.

Thanksgiving was a feature of England's Catholic culture that survived the Reformation and continued to survive into the Puritan era.  It seems to be the one pre Reformation religious observation they were okay with, perhaps because it was a custom, rather than a Canon.

So we now have a civil holiday in the United States with deep religious roots. A Catholic origin, but Protestantized, and proving resistant to real secularization.

With that noted, one thing that's interesting in addition to note is how its a Western tradition, by which we mean that came up in the Latin Rite of the Church as a cultural institution, but not in the Eastern one. And that really shows as its in November.

Having the holiday in October, which Canada does, would actually make just as much sense as having it in November.  Maybe more sense actually.  Most places have actually harvested by late October at the latest.  When I used to have a large garden, which I continue to think I'll do again every year, I'd harvest anything not already harvested on the opening day of deer season, which is in early November.

In the West, the Christmas Season really opens up with Thanksgiving.  Indeed, the setting of the holiday in its current calendar setting was partially influenced by the Christmas shopping seasons.

The time leading up to Christmas is, of course, advent.  This year Advent starts on December 1.

In the west, Advent has become a time of celebratory anticipation of Christmas, and this custom is the case everywhere in the west.  Advent also exists in the East, but the focus is really different.

Indeed, in the East, the forty days prior to Christmas is a second Lent featuring a Nativity Fast.  For Byzantine and other Eastern Rite Catholics as well as the Orthodox that is going on right now.

The rigor of the fast varies by Rite and location and I'm not qualified to really comment on it.  As I understand it, and I may not understand it correctly, in the U.S. the fast basically applies to Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  Like other Eastern fasts, its more strict than the ones that have come to exist in the Latin Rite.

This expresses the view that "there is no feast without the fast", a quote that I'm sure others know the source of but which I do not.  There is a lot to it. Father Michael O'Loughlin, of Catholic Stuff You Should Know fame, holds that the cycle of fasting and feasting puts things in order.  And indeed it might.

Cycling back to Thanksgiving, the Puritans, in spite of their hostility to all things Catholic, and the nation, during the tragedy of the Civil War during which the holiday was first somewhat instituted as a national holiday, got that.  Indeed, both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, in taking steps to institutionalize it on the nation's civil calendar, got that as well.  It's not an accident that all of those event took place during periods during which there was something equivalent to a vast national fast going on.

Something to consider.

The Feast Day of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.

Today, May 4, is the liturgical Feast Day of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.

The forty martyrs are the forty English Catholics who refused to ascent to the King Henry VIII's severance of the church in England from Rome and his declaration that he was the head of the Church in his domains.  That act in 1534 was followed by the dissolution of the monasteries and the suppression of those faithful who refused to go along with Henry's assertions that he held the rights to the mission of the Church in England and Wales.

I'm posting this here today due to their example, but perhaps not in the way that might seem to be immediately obvious.  Prior to King Henry VIII England was an intensely Catholic country.  Had Henry VIII not been king, there's every reason to believe that this would have continued on to the modern age.  Henry's bedroom troubles sent him in another direction that his immense powers of rationalization, combined with his immense power, allowed him to do, and the long term results were monumental.  Indeed, his rebellion against the Church can potentially be regarded as the act that assured the success of the Protestant Reformation in general and certainly the act that lead to its success on Great Britain. That revolution would also ultimately, and indeed even rapidly, lead to the rise of individualism and all that entails, and to relativism as its natural byproduct, which ironically has lead to a decline of religious observance in the west which is very notably marked in the decline of the Anglican Communion in the northern hemisphere.

All of that is an historical observance, of course, but the reason we note this is that the history of the English Reformation makes it extremely obvious that at the parish level, the population remained Catholic and would actually rise up against the Reformation in the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549.  But that act was extraordinary.  Most people simply went along, objecting in their minds, but not so much in their acts.

Cardinal John Fisher, who paid for his loyalty to the Church with his life.

Indeed, of the Catholic Bishops who were in office at the time, only Cardinal John Fisher refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of Henry's acts even though its almost certain that the majority of them did not agree with Henry personally.  Fisher paid for this with his life almost immediately, being executed in 1535, as did jurist Thomas Moore.

St. Thomas Moore, who likewise lost his life due to his adherence to his beliefs in 1535.

A person should note that a person being killed for being associated with a set of beliefs is not as uncommon as we might wish for it to be by any measure.  Indeed, members of the Church of England would be quick to point out that Bishops Ridley and Latimer, and Archbishop Cranmer, all of whom had been Catholic clerics prior to 1534, lost their lives during the short reign of Queen Mary.  Having said that, their executions had a strongly political nature and its hard to see how they would have not occurred in any event.  Indeed, Cranmer recanted at least twice prior to his execution, and only recanted his prior recanting at the moment of his execution.  In other words, no matter what a person may feel about them, Ridley's, Latimer's and Cranmer's fates were fixed prior to their being any point to whether they held fast to their beliefs or not.

Lots of people took the view of the English peasants, which was one in which they held "the Old Religion" close to their hearts and indeed did not really even recognize that the dispute going on in London directly impacted them, although it clearly disturbed them.  At the Parish Priest level its well known that many Priests just flat out ignored the Bishops and continued to view themselves as fully Catholic in every respect.  And indeed, the first years of the English Reformation caused a schism, not a real severance as it soon would.  That day arrived in the 1540s and resulted in full rebellion, as noted.

But our point in all of this is this.  Everyone always imagines themselves holding fast to their beliefs when pressure comes.  But most people, at all times, everywhere, just go along with whatever is going on.  Most of the English Bishops in 1534 probably felt that Henry was really out on a limb, to say the least (Latimer may not have as he was on record prior to 1534 with views that would have loosely supported Henry's position), but they went along anyway.  Most of Henry's Catholic advisers no doubt did feel that he was all wet, but they wanted to keep their offices, so only the rare person like St. Thomas Moore went to the ax.  Some likely came round to Henry's views, but the question then is whether the situation revealed what they then regarded to be the truth, or that they modified their definition of the truth to fit the situation.

Many well off English Catholics did in fact refuse to ascent and indeed Catholic noble families remained all the way until the rights of the Church were ultimate restored two centuries later.  Some notable dissenters, once the order was imposed that all had to attend the services of the Established Church went, but sat in the back, kept their hats on, and refused to stand or kneel at the appropriate times, a really bold move frankly in a country in which being a Catholic could cost you your life.  But most people just blinded themselves to the dispute in and in a generation or two their descendants no longer recalled or even know that their grandparents hadn't agreed with what occurred.

The other day I was at an event at which a speaker stated an opinion several times that's radically different from what the majority of Americans believed even a short time ago.  Most people wouldn't have gotten all up in arms about it at the time, but they wouldn't have accorded it as being their opinion in an endorsed fashion either.  Probably a very high percentage of Americans still do not, and maybe a majority, if in a place where no criticism could be personally directed at them, do  not currently.  But because of the shifting wind, its no longer the case that people will debate the topic outside of their own immediate circles so the speaker obtained the support of applause, with only a few souls taking the old "hat on in church" approach demonstrating their view by declining the applause.

That's the way people work in general.  When big shifts come, and we look back at the historical record and imagine ourselves standing up and saying "No", "Nein", "Nyet" or whatever, we're largely fooling ourselves.  Most just think those things, like the protagonist in Brecht's Maßnahmen gegen die Gewalt and only get around to "No!" when its safe, if ever.


And that's why the Feast Day of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales is worth noting and honoring for everyone.  A few, albeit very few, actually will say No.

"‘Great War’ brought Catholics, bishops into mainstream of US society"? Not so much.

‘Great War’ brought Catholics, bishops into mainstream of US society

So claims the headline for a story in the website of   The Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau

The Roman Catholic Church of Southern Missouri.

Well. . .

I don't really think so.

One of the temptations when you study a certain era of history, or write a lot about it, or even look into it, is to attribute things to it that exceed the boundaries of where you ought to go.

Now, don't get me wrong, war brings about a lot of first.  Indeed, we've maintained here that War Changes Everything.  And that's true. But it doesn't change as much as we might think.

What this article touches on is something that we tend not to think a lot about today, even though it is still with us, that being the strong prejudice against Catholics that once existed in the United States.

On that, a little background. There was once a vast amount of prejudice against Catholics in the United States.   I've touched on this elsewhere, but the United States wasn't founded by a culture that wasn't tolerant of Catholicism in the first place, even if one of the colonies was, for a time, a refuge for English Catholics.  Indeed, contrary to what we tend to imagine about the founding of the American colonies, they weren't religiously tolerant in general.  England had gone from being a highly Catholic country prior to the reign of King Henry VIII (who no doubt always imagined himself to be a loyal Catholic of some sort in spite of everything) to being one that endured a long period of religious strife which broke out occasionally into open warfare.  By the time that the English planted their first colony in North America, the English were officially Protestant but it was still whipping around from one Protestant theology to another.  As noted, King Henry VIII basically thought of himself as the head of the Catholic Church in England, but still a Catholic.  More radical Protestant reformers were vying for position and would soon come into control with his passing, but not before the nation became Catholic again under Mary, and then ostensible reached a "religious settlement" under Elizabeth. Even that settlement wasn't really one. Things were muddy under King James I as a struggle between Calvinist and Anglicans went on during his reign over England and Scotland.  Puritans would come to be oppressed and flea to the Netherlands where they'd prove to be annoying and end up leaving later.  Various English colonies were strongly sectarian, so much so that Puritans coming down out of Rhode Island later would be tried and executed.  Religious tolerance was somewhat lacking early on.

Remains of the early church at Jamestown in the 1870s.  This was an Anglican Church, as the settlers at Jamestown were all members of the Church of England.  The Puritans (only part of the "Pilgrims") were not however, and in their Plymouth Rock settlement their church was not an Anglican one.  The two groups did not get along.

Anyhow, while Catholics were present in the colonies early on (and Catholics remained in varying stages of being underground in England but very much above grown in Ireland. . .and then there's the story of English crypto Catholics which I'll not go into as it complicates the story further) they were always a minority and knew it.  That might be, oddly enough, why the small Catholic population of the Colonies supported the Revolution in greater percentages than other colonists, in spite of the anti Catholic rhetoric of the Intolerable Acts.  Catholics remained looked down upon in the new nation even as it adopted a policy of prohibiting a state religion which morphed into officially accepting religious tolerance (the two aren't really the same).  And this continued on for a very long time.

Now, let me first note that it would be absolutely the truth to state that war, or more correctly wars, changed the view of a segments of American society and sometimes all of American society towards Catholics. But World War One wasn't really one of those wars. 

The Mexican War was.  By the time of the Mexican War, which ran from 1846 to 1848, lots of Germans and Irish were immigrating to the United States.  Indeed, the Irish were also immigrating in large numbers to Canada and some of them from Canada to the United States.  The Irish Great Famine (potato famine) commenced in 1845 and was driving millions of Irish from Eire causing a population that was already religious oppressed and living in primitive poverty to enter other lands where they were truly alien.  Political conditions in Germany were in turmoil which would break out in the revolutions of 1848, something that saw large-scale Catholic emigration out of Germany as Catholics sought to avoid living in a Prussian Germany.

A large number of Catholics therefore ended up serving in the American forces during the Mexican War as enlisted men, many of whom were Irish born or born in one of the various German states.  They were treated abysmally by their Protestant officers and particularly by Southern officers, who tended to detest Catholics.

They generally fought well however and their numbers caused the appointment of the first Catholic clerics to the U.S. Army.  That helped bring about a new relationship between the Army and Catholics, but what really did it is that the appalling abuse of Catholic enlisted men lead a group of them to desert and join the Mexican army, which formed its own artillery unit made up of American deserters.  That shock caused the Army to reevaluate what it was doing, and Catholics, particularly Catholic immigrants, found a home in the Army thereafter.

Mass hanging of captured members of the San Patricio's. The penalty for treason was death, but this would be the last act of its type and bring to an end outward discrimination against Catholics in the enlisted ranks of the U.S. Army.

That was built on during the Civil War, during which you can find several examples of very senior Catholic officers, such as Phil Sheridan.  Sheridan is notable in this context as he entered West Point in 1848, hard on the heels of the Mexican War, which shows how quickly things were changing.  By the time of the Civil War Catholics, and in particular Irish Catholics, were common in the Army.  The enlisted career Irish sergeant was a fixture in the American Army by that time.

Philip Sheridan, one of the most famous American officers of the Civil War and a Catholic.  By this time the oddity of having a Catholic general officer was gone. For that matter, William Sherman was married to a devout Catholic which is something that would have been held against him in an earlier era but was not, and he had converted to Catholicism but was not observant and sometimes disclaimed it.  His son would become a Jesuit Priest.

The Civil War brought about a wider change however as American society at large remained viciously anti Catholic prior to the Civil War.  Catholics may have found a place in the Army, but they were generally pretty isolated in every way otherwise.  Bizarre anti Catholic literature was common accusing Catholics of all sorts of things.

Following the war, however, this largely ceased. The country didn't grow suddenly tolerant, but rather open bizarre hostility stopped.  This was in part because the high degree of sectarianism also stopped due to the war. Going into the Civil War Americans not only tended to be strongly Protestant or Catholic (although the level of non observance was much, much higher than imagined, which is another story), but they also tended to strongly have opinions on other Protestant faiths if they were Protestant.

San Miguel Church in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Built between 1610 and 1625, this church is a contemporary to the Anglican church at Jamestown, but it remains in use today.  This Catholic church is emblematic of the act that with the large amount of Mexican territory taken in by the United States during the Mexican War, a Hispanic Catholic population was taken in as well.

The American Civil War had come in the wake of the Second Great Awakening, although its technically outside of the time period for that which historians have assigned it and instead in what they have framed as the Third Great Awakening.  The Second Great Awakening saw the rise of the a lot of American Protestant denominations including some that had strong millenialism beliefs.  Catholics weren't part of this in the United States, of course.  But the very strong sectarianism that came up in the period came to a bit of a hiatus due to the Civil War.  Prior to the Civil War Americans were ready to cite religion in support of their fighting positions.  Mexico's Catholic status had been a cited reason to fight it in some Protestant sermons prior to the Mexican War.  The United States had fought a small scale war with the Mormons in the 1850s.  Going into the Civil War both sides cited religious grounds for going to war, with both of those sides citing Protestant religious grounds at that.

Let's be clear.  Neither the Mexican War nor the Civil War were wars over religion by any means.  Protestant ministers who cited Mexico's Catholic nation status as a reason to fight it were sincere, but at the end of the day the Mexican War was fought because Mexico couldn't stomach the thought that it had lost the province of Texas and they couldn't agree to the border with the newly American Texas being where it was claimed to be by the United States.  Religion didn't have much to do with that. And the Civil War was about slavery, plain and simple. There were certainly religious overtones to the positions taken by both sides in the Civil War, and religion strongly informed some of those positions, but the war itself was not a religious war which is attested to by some of the oddities of the topic on both sides of the war. The Union had huge numbers of Catholic troops including some who were outright Fenians, but that impacted those units only within them.  The Confederacy, which had  much higher religious uniformity than the North; it was overwhelmingly Protestant except in Louisiana and many of its senior generals were devout Episcopalians including one who was an Episcopal Bishop found itself taking a position on slavery that had already been condemned by the Catholic Church in Rome but its president toyed with Catholicism throughout his life and the Confederate cabinet included a Jewish member.

But because of the Civil War Americans really backed down on citing religion in an extreme prejudicial way like they had before.  Indeed, it wasn't all that long, in spite of ongoing prejudice, that there would be a United States Supreme Court justice on the bench who was both a veteran of the Confederate army and a Catholic.

Which doesn't mean that the prejudice had ended.  Well into the 20th Century to be a Catholic was to be subject to prejudice.  Catholics were mostly blue collar or agriculturalist, with medicine and the law, two professions always occupied by minorities, the exceptions. They couldn't attend Ivy League schools and remain faithful to their faiths and they largely didn't go on to upper education at all.

Which was the status when the United States entered World War One.

And the status after the war as well.

St. Joseph's Polish Catholic Church, an active church in Denver Colorado today, was built in 1902 as the Polish Catholics wanted their own church separate from the southern Slavic (Balkans) Catholic church one a block away. This is a bit symbolic of the degree to which Catholics lived in ethnic Ghettos at the time, but it was also contrary to the policy of the Catholic Church to attempt to integrate all Catholics into non ethnic congregations. This church was built in 1902 just as Slavic immigration was becoming significant in the United States and obviously various diocese yielded to pressures on occasion.  This same neighborhood contains a Russian Orthodox cathedral of the same vintage, reflecting the Slavic nature of the neighborhood. At the time this church was built, Poland wasn't a state and was part of both Russia and Germany.

Indeed, going into the war there were real reasons to worry about some of the Catholic populations of the United States and their receptive loyalties.  At the time, Catholicism was heavily represented in Irish, German, French, Italian and "Mexican" demographics.  Irish populations identified heavily with their ethnic fellows in Eire, which remained part of the United Kingdom but which was struggling with obtaining home rule and which was suffering under the long impact of religious oppression that had come to an official end only in the 19th Century.  German Americans retained a strong sense of pride in their ethnic origin and openly celebrated their Germaness in various ways throughout the year.  Hispanics, who were of various origins but whom most of, at that time, traced an origin to from Mexico or Spanish Mexico, were a suspect people both because of their ethnicity and because there were fears that they may sympathize with Carranza who, it was feared, might be sympathizing with the Germans.

Only French Americans, who were mostly Acadians, Cajuns, or Creole's, and Italian Americans, were not suspect. But the French population was so remote from France that it had no real sympathies with France itself and was highly concentrated in Maine and Louisiana.  The Italians were recent arrivals who did sympathize with Italy, an Allied power in World War One, and were not accordingly suspect.

Indeed, the Italians were hugely celebrated during World War One in the United States.  The Germans, Irish and Mexicans were worried about.

For no reason, as it turned out. They were not disloyal to the United States at all and served loyally.  Prejudice against the Germans was vicious in the U.S. but the German population in the country reacted basically by burying their culture to such an extent that it was largely lost.  The Irish did not do that, but their service in the Great War, including the fact that they were well represented in the Regular Army and made up the bulk of some National Guard regiments, put aside any fears that people had.

But it didn't do much, indeed anything at all, to address the ongoing prejudice that remained in the country.  In that fashion, they found themselves in the same position, but to a much lesser degree, as African Americans. African Americans served very loyally during the war and, unlike World War Two, there were significant numbers of black combat officers in some all black units, but after the war, prejudice against them didn't abate at all.

It'd really take the Second World War to address all of that.