Persecution of Catholics

Anti-Catholicism is hostility towards or opposition to the Catholic Church, its clergy and adherents.

After the Protestant Reformation and until at least the late 20th Century, majority Protestant states (especially England, Germany, the United States, and Canada) made anti-Catholicism and opposition to the Pope and Catholic rituals major political themes, with anti-Catholic sentiment at times leading to violence and religious discrimination against Catholic individuals (often derogatorily referred to in Anglophone Protestant countries as "papists" or "Romanists"). Historically, Catholics in Protestant countries were frequently (and almost always baselessly) suspected of conspiring against the state in furtherance of papal interests or to establish a political hegemony under the "Papacy", with Protestants sometimes questioning Catholic individuals' loyalty to the state and suspecting Catholics of ultimately maintaining loyalty to the Vatican rather than maintaining loyalty to their domiciled countries. In majority Protestant countries with large scale immigration, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, suspicion or discrimination of Catholic immigrants often overlapped or conflated with nativism, xenophobia, and ethnocentric or racist sentiments (i.e. anti-Italianism, anti-Irish sentiment, Hispanophobia, anti-Quebec sentiment, anti-Polish sentiment).