George Wegiel: Defending Religious Freedom in Full: A Generation's Challenge

(McNaughton Fine Art)   

One of George Wegiel's best talks given to the graduating students of Benedictine College. The topic,  Religious Freedom, a Generation's Challenge.

Oh and check out his Book: The End and the Beginning    

A Generation's Challenge   
At the time of the American Revolution, Catholics accounted for less than 1 percent of the population of the 13 colonies – a tiny population clustered primarily in my native Maryland and a few counties of Pennsylvania. Yet within a few decades of the founding, the great tides of European immigration that began to wash onto the shores of the new nation – those "huddled masses yearning to breathe free," as they are memorialized on the Statue of Liberty – brought millions of Catholics to the New World: at first, Irish and Germans; later, Italians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenians, and many others who wove their lives and aspirations into the rich ethnic tapestry of American democracy. Those 19th-century immigrants felt the sting of anti-Catholic prejudice, even anti-Catholic violence. But notwithstanding that bigotry – which historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. once described to the dean of U.S. Catholic historians, Fr. John Tracy Ellis, as the deepest prejudice in the history of the American people – Catholics have, I believe, almost always felt at home in these United States.