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Entry: Confederates and Catholics, Unite! Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/down_in_dixie#2607 Post contents: Since a number of my friends have posted on this thread, and made some very fine comments, let me jump in as well. I'm one of those descendants of both Confederate soldiers (on both sides of the family) and Southern Catholics. For some time I've been fascinated by the historic position of Catholics in the South, and in particular, during the years that the Southern Confederacy fought for its independence. As an archivist and historian by profession I've had the opportunity over the past 25 years to investigate that history, and what emerges from that research is a complex picture, one that strongly suggests that Catholics in the Old South-- and not just in Louisiana and Maryland--enjoyed a more secure and respected position in most areas of the South during the antebellum and War period than, comparatively, they did in the North. Just here in North Carolina---the state with the lowest percentage of Catholics in the Federal union---small communities of Catholics settled in old Halifax, in New Bern, in Wilmington, and later in Fayetteville, and shortly after the war in the Sampson County area. In examining local records, newspapers, and correspondence, I find that by and large the kind of anti-Catholicism that one observes in some of the larger cities in the North does not exist. Indeed, the state of North Carolina, which had a religious test clause for holding public office (Protestants only) until 1835, modified that Constitution in 1835 specifically to include a growing Catholic population and its state Chief Justice William Gaston. Not only that, but in 1850 the Episcopal bishop of the state Levi S. Ives converted and took several congregations with him. Catholics were elected sheriffs in several counties and equally served as Justices of the Peace...and all of this in a state where Catholics numbered (in 1860)only around a thousand souls. Across the Confederacy such tendancies (an "American" Tractarian Movement?) can be multipied, and I need not mention the roles of prominent Catholic laymen and generals (not to mention religious leaders like Frs. Ryan and Bannon and Bishops Lynch and Verrot). The South was quite hospitable to Catholicim. And, as it well known, the Blessed Pope Pius IX was quite favorable to the Confederacy. Of course, counterfactual history is always fun, and it is interesting to speculate on what might have been. But the fact remains that historically the South and the Catholic faith share many points of interest and convergence. After the vacuous emotionalism of dispensationalist heresy wears off, is it too much to hope that thinking Southerners will once again turn to what Herman Melville called (in his epic narrative poem Clarel), "the last hope of mankind"? Sent at: 2008 10 13