Not only is anti-Catholicism the last acceptable prejudice in our land, but it also might have been the first: The Puritans carried anti-Catholic tracts with them across the Atlantic. (Presumably, they didn't want to be caught unprepared should “Roman” missionaries be there to greet them upon landing in New England.)

Through out America's history, hostility toward the Church has erupted into riots and attacks — physical as well as rhetorical — on Catholic institutions and religious orders. The antagonism forced Al Smith to abandon his candidacy for president in 1928 and prompted John F. Kennedy to deny during the 1960 campaign that his faith would have any influence over his decisions at all once he was in the White House. It has marked a good deal of Supreme Court jurisprudence regarding religious liberty. And, despite Catholicism's status as the nation's largest religious denomination, cartoonish stereotypes that would have been familiar to the Puritans remain a staple in the media and popular culture.

Although much of that traditional animus is, thankfully, now of only historical interest, all is not well. Contemporary anti-Catholicism has become, as scholar Philip Jenkins has argued, “a significant ideological component of the new liberalism.” The Church's sacramental view of the world, its defense of the natural law and of the traditional family as well as the old bugbears of “hierarchy” and “dual loyalty” continue to make the Catholic faith a shorthand target for everything modern liberalism opposes.

In his new book, Jesuit Father Mark Massa, director of the American Catholic Studies program at Fordham University, considers the range and varieties of anti-Catholic expression in American life. Constructed as a series of historical studies, the book looks at such anti-Catholic phenomena as Jerry Falwell and the Pentecostal movement, the virulently bigoted comic strips of Jack Chick, Norman Vincent Peale on Kennedy's election and the tensions between Catholics and Protestants in postwar America.

According to Father Massa, the Catholic faith challenges the American vision of privatized religion “on a wide spectrum of very public issues that divide the culture. … [The Church] has continued to make very loud and very public statements to morally authoritative teaching in ways that outrage significant segments of the culture.”

As he shows, the Catholic faith was once itself opposed to a largely Protestant public culture with which it nevertheless shared some core beliefs. The contemporary situation is different. Because political liberalism operates from very different premises from Catholicism and because it denies any institution the ability to pronounce on public issues, anti-Catholicism has become more ingrained in elite secular culture.

Father Massa traces anti-Catholicism in large part to the differences between the Protestant imagination and its Catholic counterpart. The Catholic imagination sees creation as a direct echo of the kingdom of heaven: God reaches down and reveals himself to man through the sacramental order he created. The Protestant imagination, which seeks after God mainly through logic and verbal expression, tends to emphasize the corruption of creation by sinful man and, thus, the radical separation between God and humanity. In this view, salvation necessarily requires a rejection of “the world.” In defining these differences, historian David Tracy has described the Protestant imagination as “dialectical” and the Catholic as “analogical.”

Tracy's conceptual distinction is being borne out by a growing body of social-science research showing that Catholics and non-Catholics do, indeed, think differently about a range of issues involving collective morality — the rightful role of government, for example, and the best way to care for the poor. As Father Massa ably explains, these differences remain even as mainline Protestantism loses its influence. Why? Because the liberal imagination that has supplanted the historically Protestant one maintains Protestantism's rejection of Catholicism's sacramental vision.

In his concluding chapter, Father Massa addresses the recent scandals and the role they have had in reviving anti-Catholic stereotypes.

He hopes the Church can restore internal harmony and reconstruct its relationship with America by effectively engaging both types of imagination. Even if that happens, however, Father Massa makes a good case that Catholics will likely remain outsiders in the American experiment for the foreseeable future.

The good news is, our dual status here — as outsiders and insiders — presents us with a unique opportunity to evangelize and catechize our fellow countrymen as no one else can.

Gerald J. Russello lives in Brooklyn, New York.