Anti-Catholicism is the ‘racism of the intellectuals’

A former Justice of the High Court of Australia, Dyson Heydon QC, has declared anti-Catholicism “the racism of the intellectuals” and compared modern attacks on the Catholic faith to the anti-clerical Kulturkampf waged by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, writes Mark Brolly.

Mr Heydon, a Rhodes Scholar and Fellow of Keble College at Oxford, said modern anti-Catholicism was intolerant, hypocritical and failed to recognise the extraordinary contribution of Australian Catholicism to so much of Australian life.

He examined the treatment of Catholics under Bismarck and his “incomparably more evil successor in the twentieth century, Hitler” in the Centre for Independent Studies’ annual Acton Lecture on Religion and Freedom in Sydney on 10 April. Mr Heydon said until about the 1960s, Australian society had been marked by sectarianism and warned that there may be a new form of anti-Catholicism, which “now might be called the racism of the intellectuals”.

“This new anti-Catholicism may backfire as much as Bismarck’s Kulturkampf,” he said. “It is intolerant. It is hypocritical. It fails to recognise the extraordinary contribution of Australian Catholicism to education, to charitable relief, to ... social progress of all kinds. To wipe out a religion is to wipe out the past of the nation.”