Via the Drudge Retort, here is some history worth remembering from Paul Moses in Commonweal – a Catholic magazine.
It seems that in 1879 the Knights of Columbus proposed to build a church on an affluent street in Protestant New Haven, Connecticut. Shades of the ‘ground zero mosque’! Moses quotes from the New York Times archives…
As The Times put it, “When the residents of this aristocratic avenue discovered that they were in danger of seeing a Roman Catholic church spring up among them, with all that the establishment of such a church implied, they bestirred themselves to oppose the project. The wisest of the Roman Catholics here did not favor it, and St. Mary’s was induced to exchange the lot for a good one in some other locality.” But that site was also deemed “too good” for Catholics, so a lesser lot was found. The pastor refused this, according to The Times, and built the church as originally planned on wealthy Hillhouse Avenue.
Follow the link to see how it turned out.
America from the beginning has been a refuge for people who were willing to sacrifice all for the right to practice their religion in freedom and dignity. Let’s celebrate that.
