Here is Scott Appleby and John McGreevy, two nationally known Catholic historians, on the parallels between the controversy over the Islamic center near Ground Zero and anti-Catholicism in the 19th century. It's a great short piece in this week's New York Review of Books.
As historians of American Catholicism, and Catholics, we are concerned to see the revival of a strain of nativism in the current controversy over the establishment of an Islamic center some blocks from Ground Zero in lower Manhattan.
For much of the nineteenth century Catholics in America were the unassimilated, sometimes violent “religious other.” Often they did not speak English or attend public schools. Some of their religious women—nuns—wore distinctive clothing. Their religious practices and beliefs—from rosaries to transubstantiation—seemed to many Americans superstitious nonsense.
Most worrisome, Catholics seemed insufficiently grateful for their ability to build churches and worship in a democracy, rights sometimes denied to Protestants and Jews in Catholic countries, notably Italy. In the 1840s and 1850s these anxieties about Catholicism in American society turned violent, including mob attacks on priests and churches as well as the formation of a major political party, the American Party, dedicated to combating Catholic influence. This led to novel claims that the US constitution demanded an absolute separation of church and state—claims that stem not from Thomas Jefferson and George Washington but from nineteenth-century politicians, ministers, and editors worried that adherents of a hierarchical Catholicism might destroy the hard-won achievements of American democracy. In 1875, a decade after accepting General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, President Ulysses S. Grant publicly warned that Catholicism might prove as divisive in American society as the Confederacy.
Like many American Muslims today, many American Catholics squirmed when their foreign-born religious leaders offered belligerent or tone-deaf pronouncements on the modern world. New York’s own Bishop John Hughes thundered in 1850 that the Church’s mission was to convert “the officers of the navy and the Marines, commander of the Army, the legislatures, the Senate, the Cabinet, the president and all.” The Syllabus of Errors, promulgated by Pope PiusIX in 1864 denied that the Church had any duty to reconcile itself with “progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.”
Christopher Hitchens has an article out now where he explains the Glenn Bleck rally as a "Waterworld of white self-pity" ... the recognition that whites are losing their majority in this country, and the the insecurity that comes with that.
The poorest people of the world are Muslims. The richest people are Christian.
I think that Islamophobia is rooted in this insecurity - the idea that power and wealth will be lost - that another group is coming along, and by its sheer numbers, may take over control of the purse strings.
As the Catholics melded into the American political scene, they assumed the Protestant power structure, rather than overtaking it.
I'm not sure this will happen with Islam. It is no accident that the World Trade Centers were attacked on 9/11 - the center of world banking.