She is largely credited with finding a way to outsmart the US government which at the time which outlawed the purchase of land by any native. Instead she came out of hiding and bought the land, as a white woman, and allowed her tribe to live on it in order to escape a forced removal to western lands. She is still honored today by the Maimi Indians of the State of Indiana as a primary reason our tribe still lives on our ancestral lands rather than a western reservation.

She is not only an example of a American Indian Catholic, but also one of the first true feminists of this county.

Presumably, they wouldn’t say that about practicing Episcopalians or Methodists (at least, sufficiently High Church Methodists) or Congregationalists, which suggests to me that the anti-evangelical bias may be about no small amount of class prejudice.

But in my experience, the same ethnic/cultural “pass” that many practicing Jews get from secular academics is often extended to Catholics. I’ve often been reassured that my being Catholic–even a practicing Catholic–isn’t the same as being religious in, you know, the bad way. Lots of secular academics (at least in literary studies) also seem to groove on the aesthetics, ritual, and historical/intellectual tradition that they associate with both Judaism and Catholicism–but that they don’t always permit to Protestantism.

Rosaries are an appealingly low-tech way to keep oneself occupied on a train. Is this what we did before mobile phones and BlackBerries?

At the same time, I am leery of the talk of anti-Catholicism as “the last acceptable prejudice,” for two reasons. First off, as others have noted, the playing field has changed over the past few decades. JFK almost couldn’t be elected because he was too Catholic; John Kerry arguably lost because he wasn’t Catholic enough. There are plenty of religious rifts in the modern US: between evangelicals and non-evangelicals; Christians and non-Christians; church-goers and those who are not observant. But the older Catholic-Protestant divisions are, if not completely gone, less meaningful than before, with the alliance of evangelicals and Catholics against abortion the most telling example. More importantly, I’m bothered that the Church, and those who champion its current positions, use charges of “anti-Catholicism” to silence debate. In short, they claim that anyone who questions church teachings does so not because they disagree with them, but because they are prejudiced against Catholics. This seems to me to be a distortion of history; an attempt to use improper historical analogies to tar modern critics of the church as old-school nativist bigots.

My experience however is solely mine and I worry about generating outward about how “Catholic women” feel or identify. There are Vatican I Catholics and Vatican IIs. There are radical Catholics and mujeristas and liberation theologists. Most of my Catholic friends are feminists and many of them teach WS or ES but they don’t identify their faith in mixed settings. Feminism can feel unsafe, and therefore unrelated, to women who cannot separate the misguided mocking of an entire faith community from the legitimate critique of patriarchal power in church doctrine or the exercise of discrimination through the guise of the church.