some of the attacks on Catholics came from liberals. Catholicism, they argued, which theoretically required unquestioning allegiance to the Pope, was inherently hostile to liberty. This charge against Catholicism as antiliberal and antidemocratic would remain conventional wisdom in American academic circles, not to mention the public at large, until deep into the second half of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, there was a kernel of truth in it, inasmuch as many Catholics in antebellum America shared with the Southern slaveholders an uneasiness about liberal individualism.
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