Has anti-Catholicism been a part of Western history?

Answer 1

Yes, anti-Catholicism has been a part of western history. As recently as the early 1960s, John F Kennedy was attacked for being Catholic. In Britain, there has been conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism since the times of Henry VIII and his creation of the Church of England in the 1500s.

Answer 2

Anti-Catholicism has been part of Western history ever since the Church existed. The first three centuries of the Church's existence in the Roman Empire were one long story of repression, lies, and killing. The Emperors often used the Christians as scape-goats and brutally suppressed what they saw as atheism (since the Christian did not believe in the gods of the Romans).

Once the Protestant revolt got underway 1100 years later, it got much worse since the founders of the Protestant religions made every kind of wild accusation against the Catholic Church and particularly the papacy accusing the pope of being the "anti-Christ" of the Scriptures. They even went so far as to deny that Catholics - the Church founded by Our Blessed Lord, guaranteed by Him, and guided by the Holy Spirit - were Christians. In England, the Church was brutally suppressed and King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I furnished the Church with many martyrs for the faith, torturing and killing anyone who had the temerity to still worship God and refuse to acknowledge the English sovereign as head of the Church. If you lived in the German states and you had a Protestant ruler, you were forced out of your country.

And it only seems to have gotten worse in the West of late as the Protestant revolt of the sixteenth century is finally bearing its fruit in a secular society which is totally denying God. In the United States, in the twenty-first century, people are being fined and even jailed for trying to adhere to Christian values. And specific laws allowing unspeakable crimes including murder of unborn human beings and legal status for sexual perversions have become enshrined in law in the United States. And Catholics are not to just to tolerate these crimes but actively support them, or else.

Of course, it could get worse, if the West keeps tolerating the extreme Muslim religion, then Christians will not just be fined and jailed but actively killed, and like the oppression under the English sovereigns or the Roman Senate, in the American democracy we will become saints through martyrdom or demons through apostasy. And anyone who thinks that this is unthinkable and will never happen hasn't been paying attention for the last sixty years. Nobody in their right mind in the 1950's would have ever conceived that we would be in the moral state that we are right now in 2016, we read things like the book 1984 as the grossest fiction, little did we know we would live to see worse!

For those of you wondering why things have gotten to this state, that is fairly simple to explain, as Our Blessed Lord Himself said of the devil in St. John's Gospel, that he (the devil) is ruler of this world and those who follow their leader are only putting his plan of attack into action:

John 12:31 31 Now is the judgment of this world, now shall the ruler of this world be cast out;
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John 14:30 30 I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no power over me;

John 16:11 11 of judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged.