This chapter examines aspects of American Catholic history that lay outside the commonly told story of parishes and immigrants by surveying the efforts of American Protestants—from the colonial era to the present—to properly map that Catholic place in the life of their nation and their own religious sensibilities. It shows how the ambivalent greeting initially extended to Catholic immigrants by U.S. Protestants was shelved for outright hostility during the nativist era prior to the Civil War, when the mass emigration of impoverished, famine-stricken Irish Catholics greatly aggravated preexisting fears of “popish superstition.” At the same time a number of Protestants—often from elite backgrounds—found themselves powerfully drawn to Catholic art and ritual, and more than a few took the plunge into religious conversion.
