Coughlin Will Be “aid and Comfort” to Anti-catholic Movement, Pegler Asserts

Westbrook Pegler declared today in his syndicated column, published in the World-Telegram here, that “Father Coughlin will yet turn to be the greatest aid and comfort to the recurrent anti-Catholic movement in the United States.

“These waves rise and fall,” Pegler said, “and when the next one sweeps along great emphasis will be placed on reports of an open-air meeting in Brooklyn during the Presidential campaign of 1936 at which Father Coughlin, of Detroit, a Catholic priest and politician, was attended by an honorary bodyguard of armed and uniformed men.

“This incident will be exploited as evidence of a private militia, and although neither Catholics nor the Catholic Church were at all concerned in it, by Father Coughlin’s own method of argument in holding all Jews accountable for the activities of some Jews the armed guard episode will be fair material. It needn’t even be true, because Father Coughlin himself has established precedent for the use of unverified but sensational material.

“I doubt, also, that the Brooklyn Tablet, a Catholic publication, would be willing to accept in that case a condition which it laid down last week in discussing Father Coughlin’s latest controversy. ‘He said openly what millions are saying in their ordinary conversation at home and on the streets,’ the Tablet said.

“That probably is true, but there have been times when millions of people in this country said, in their ordinary conversations at home and on the streets, many vicious and utterly false things about Catholics and Catholicism, and a time may come when they will say them again. And right now if some anti-Catholic orator were to take the air as prominently as Father Coughlin did and accuse all the Catholics of the United States of being Nazi-Fascists or Nazi-Fascist sympathizers, of plotting to deliver this country to the Pope, Mussolini or Hitler, the Brooklyn Tablet would be less tolerant of the open declaration of every canard currently on the lips of many individuals. The Tablet is not famous for its to erance.

“By Father Coughlin’s own argument it would be fair and just to hold that Catholics exert a corrupting influence in American politics because Tammany hall and the New York City Hall were dominated by Catholic politicians in days of atrocious corruption and because the same phenomenon has occurred in Jersey City and Kansas city – a fact which, incidentally, has been discussed by millions in their ordinary conversations at home and on the streets.”