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American Freedom and Catholic Power is an anti-Catholic book by American writer Paul Blanshard, published in 1949 by Beacon Press, which asserted that America had a "Catholic problem" in that the Church was an "undemocratic system of alien control" and has been characterized as propaganda. It was based on a series of articles he had published in the magazine The Nation.

Blanshard's autobiography indicates that his precipitating concern in 1946, that which propelled him to commence research, was the influence of Catholic doctrine upon the practice of medicine generally, and obstetrics specifically. The book has been widely characterized as a work of anti-Catholicism and incorporated nativist sentiments and centuries worth of anti-Catholic propaganda, including that the Church was a foreign power in America determined to dominate the world.

Writings in The Nation

In the late 1940s he published a series of articles that questioned and criticized specific activities and goals of the Catholic Church in the United States. New York school libraries were importuned to cancel subscriptions to The Nation and Eleanor Roosevelt denounced this pressure in My Day her daily newspaper column - triggering a famous exchange with Cardinal Francis Spellman. The series of articles formed the basis for the book published by Beacon Press.

Political power of the Catholic hierarchy

Blanshard wrote:

"There is no doubt that the American Catholic hierarchy has entered the political arena, and that it is becoming more and more aggressive in extending the frontiers of Catholic authority into the fields of medicine, education and foreign policy. As we shall see in this book, the Catholic hierarchy in this country has great power as a pressure group, and no editor, politician, publisher, merchant or motion-picture producer can express defiance openly - or publicize documented facts - without risking his future."

Reception and criticism

When the book was released, The New York Times refused to accept advertising for the book and many bookstores refused to carry it. The book circulated widely, selling in excess of 300,000 copies, but not to American Catholics, who were forbidden to read the book. The opus was kept under lock and key in Catholic seminaries and institutions of higher learning. A work of rebuttal, Catholicism and American Freedom was written by James M. O'Neill and published in 1952. Paul Blanshard's rejoinder to O'Neill and others was the pamphlet My Catholic Critics. Precisely because this book was popular, Paul Blanshard updated the book and published a second edition.

William A. Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights calls it a "hate-filled" book which raised the "old canard of 'dual loyalties'" and included such "rubbish" as Blanshard's "Catholic Plan for America", which purportedly entailed "seizing the government, repealing the first amendment, outlawing divorce,and making the pope the president's official superior". Philip Jenkins, the Protestant author of The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice, notes that the book has echos of the American Protective Association and the Ku Klux Klan and that, althouth his plan of "resistance" to Catholicism, did not prescribe the violence of those earlier anti-Catholic predecessors, that in the shadow of World War II readers would read the word resistance to have such an implication.

Today the book is popular in atheist and humanist circles., the work essentially making a secular argument, depite having its foundation in English anti-Catholism of a protestant variety..

Second Edition, March 1958

In the Preface to the Revised Edition, Paul Blanshard had these things to say.

"It is almost ten years since American Freedom and Catholic Power was published as a book, and somewhat more than a decade since major portions of this work appeared in magazine form. I express my appreciation to those American and foreign readers (several millions) who made possible the miraculous passage of this book through the vicissitudes of twenty-six printings in this country and abroad.

- No book in recent years has drawn a heavier barrage from ecclesiastical batteries. The work is often called "controversial" - and I "the dean of American controversy". I do not care to repudiate the title, since I regard controversy in a good cause as entirely honorable. - It is my purpose here to bring all factual statements up to date, to cover the most dramatic and significant events in the battle of Catholic power during the past decade, and to add to the narrative more abundant documentation so that every controversial assertion may be supported by the latest items of evidence from Catholic sources.

Paul Blanshard monitored the rise in public esteem of Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy, whom he, too, admired. Incidentally, at this time in Massachusetts Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy were prohibited from receiving any medical counsel about Family Planning, even from their own physician, nor could they obtain any "artificial" means of birth control.

On page 350 of the Second Edition, Blanshard included three queries that must be made of an Catholic candidate for the U.S. Presidency. One consequence of this was that the clergy who organized the 1960 Houston Minister's Conference, during the presidential campaign, invited Blanshard to moderate the event. Senator Kennedy and staff "boned up" upon AF&CP-2 and rehearsed mock interviews by Blanshard - but Paul decided not to go to Houston.

References

1. Manning, Martin J. and Herbert Romerstein, , p. 49, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004
2. Lockwood, Robert P., Anti-Catholicism in American Culture, p. 41-43, 2000, Our Sunday Visitor Publishing
3. American Freedom and Catholic Power
4. (p.4)
5. Jenkins, Philip, , p. 37, Oxford University Press US, 2004
6. Review at Amazon.com
7. Donohue, William A., Secular Sabotage: How Liberals Are Destroying Religion and Culture in America, p. 81-82, Hachette Digital, Inc., 2009
8. Jenkins, Philip, , p. 37-38, Oxford University Press US, 2004
9. Lockwood, Robert P., Anti-Catholcism in American Culture, p. 45, 2000, Our Sunday Visitor Publishing
10. Lockwood, Robert P., Anti-Catholicism in American Culture, p. 42, 2000, Our Sunday Visitor Publishing

• 1949 books
• Anti-Catholicism in the United States
• Propaganda
• Pseudohistory