The Coming Latino Catholic Majority | Jeff Ziegler | Catholic World Report
Hispanics account for more than 70 percent of the growth in the US Catholic population since 1960.
In 1558, after five years of Catholic tyranny, the good Virgin Queen succeeded Bloody Mary, who had burned countless Christians at the stake. During Elizabeth’s reign, the heroic Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe and defeated the Spanish Armada. After Captain John Smith established Jamestown, brave Separatists set sail for Holland to worship according to their consciences; in 1620, these men, now the Pilgrims, set sail on the Mayflower and penned the Mayflower Compact, the foundation of American representative government. They celebrated the first Thanksgiving Day, and soon Massachusetts Puritans built a shining city on a hill.
Moved by the spirit of liberty, the colonists declared their independence from King George. After winning their independence, Americans fulfilled their manifest destiny, spreading Christianity and civilization from Atlantic to Pacific. The Protestant work ethic made the United States as prosperous as it was free, while the Catholic nations to the south, marred by sloth, despotism, and corruption, were doomed to backwardness.
This version of history, influenced by the Black Legend and nativism alike and imbibed in some form by many an American, has deep roots in US history. “Surely American Protestants, freemen, have discernment enough to discover beneath them the cloven foot of this subtle foreign heresy, and will not wait for a more extensive, disastrous, and overwhelming political interference, ere they assume the attitude of watchfulness and defense,” the inventor Samuel F. B. Morse wrote in his influential 1835 book Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States.
“The Romish priests have succeeded in extinguishing reason, judgment, and common sense among the Mexicans,” Charles Sparry said in his 1847 work, The Mysteries of Romanism. Describing a Mexican Marian procession, Sparry wrote that “this idol is paraded to its niche, by bishops, and by many plump, well-fed priests.… In all popish lands, the priest is everything: he is the breath in the nostrils of all devoted superstitious pagans and Romanists.”
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