Growing Up Catholic in the South
When you are a Catholic growing up in the southern United States there are certain inevitable truths that you must simply accept. Any attempt to deny or combat these truths will most likely lead you to either question your own faith or resent that particular region of your country. The southern United States has always traditionally been Protestant. It’s a simple by-product of the English and Scottish immigrants who chose to relocate to the New World in the earliest parts of our nation’s history. It was not until the influx of Irish and Italian immigrants to the northern states like New York and Massachusetts in the early 1900s that Catholicism started to take root in America. As generations passed new Protestants were born and raised in the South while Catholics continued to reshape the demographics of the North. In the mid 1800’s a completely new denomination of Protestants called the Southern Baptists came into being and the southern region was changed for...