What ‘Christian privilege’?

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

As a second-generation Irish Catholic immigrant, I was shocked to learn that some think Christians in this country used “privilege” to achieve success (“George Washington University to host seminar tackling ‘Christian privilege,’” Web, April 3). I recall my father telling me how, when he was a young man looking for a job in the early 1900s, he saw “Help Wanted” signs with the addendum “No Catholics, no Jews.” The Irish, who were mostly Catholic, were discriminated against when they first arrived in the late 1800s after the Great Famine in Ireland. Next came the Italians and the Eastern Europeans (Hungarian, Polish), who were also mostly Catholic — and likewise not warmly received.

We had to work hard — my father working the steel mills by day and attending a university by night — in order to achieve our place in American society. Many people even voted against John F. Kennedy, a wealthy Irish-Catholic, for president just because he was Catholic. And, just recently, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California grilled and berated a Catholic nominee for a judgeship because the woman took her “Catholic dogma” too seriously.

In the face of all this, we now have to listen to a supposedly learned professor teach impressionable minds how all Christians who have achieved success did so because of some kind of “privilege.” In many, if not most, cases the exact opposite is the truth.

So now we know: Anti-Christian/Catholic bigotry lives on at George Washington University.

ROBERT CARNEY

McLean