Joann Wypijewski starts Liberal Pieties, her review of McGreevy’s Catholicism and American Freedom: A History and Jenkins’ The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice, with an eye-opening piece of history from McGreevy’s work:
John McGreevy begins his book with an emblematic story. The year is 1859; the place, Boston. The public schools, dominated by the Protestant elite who also write the law, start each day with obligatory reading of the King James Bible and recitation of the Ten Commandments. Glorious as the King James version is, it is not taught as literature but, with the commandments, is intended to build moral fiber in the students, a great many of whom are Catholic. It disturbs twenty-first-century assumptions to imagine Catholics opposing school prayer, but the church doesn’t subscribe to the Protestant Bible, or to private Bible reading in general, and was even more hostile to it in the nineteenth century. Nor are Catholic and Protestant versions of the Ten Commandments the same, the latter proscribing ‘graven images,’ an affront to the whole Catholic rococo of crucifixes and icons, Virgin shrines, reliquaries and sacred art.Returning to our story, one day a 10-year-old Catholic boy at the Eliot School, Thomas Whall, is instructed to recite the commandments. He refuses. Days of urgent meetings follow, but the school committee decides it will not compromise. Again the boy is asked to read the commandments and again refuses, upon which an assistant to the principal declares, “Here’s a boy that refuses to repeat the Ten Commandments, and I will whip him till he yields if it takes the whole forenoon.” A half-hour later the child’s hands are ripped and bleeding from the blows of a rattan stick; by one account he faints during the torture. All boys unwilling to recite the commandments are ordered out of the school; hundreds leave. Because they had been urged in church to resist Protestant conformity, to “recite their own Catholic prayers” and “not to be ashamed,” they are seen in some quarters as mindless slaves to priestcraft. The most important Republican Party newspaper in Boston (Republicans were the liberals then) editorializes: “We are unalterably, sternly opposed to the encroachments of political and social Romanism, as well as to its wretched superstition, intolerance, bigotry and mean despotism.” When Whall and his father sue the assistant for excessive force, the court vindicates school authority, ruling that the child’s disobedience threatened the stability of the school, hence the foundation of the state.
Her review then turns into something Ellsworth Toohey might write:
Fascinating as that all is, ultimately McGreevy does something more valuable: prompting a meditation on power, and its shadow, marginality; on freedom, and its inevitable price, unfreedom; on faith, particularly the kind dressed up as secular rationalism.