The joke is on the Catholics

Earlier this month, another anti-Catholic skirmish broke out. The debate centered on -- of all things -- a Doritos commercial in which a priest and pastor are brainstorming about ways to raise funds.

If nothing else, give Doritos points for good timing. This all happened just as the New York Archdiocese announced that nearly 30 Catholic schools would either be closing or consolidated.

One wonders if the church higher-ups might actually consider dispensing Doritos instead of Communion wafers, if the orange-dusted snack would actually put fannies in the pew and, thus, more dollars in the collection plate.

Anyway, some people got all riled up. They said mocking the sacrament of Communion was offensive.
The only trouble is that the commercial was never really an officially-sanctioned advertisement. The Doritos ad, instead, was one of several proposed ads which were entered into a contest which was designed to produce an official advertisement.

Either way, the corporate big wigs got nervous and pulled the ad.

It should not be surprising, though, that this had the apparent effect of actually encouraging other advertisements that poked fun at the sacraments.

Perhaps you’ve seen the ad for Red Bull energy drink, in which the slacker boy enters a church confessional and begins speaking to an Irish priest, complete with red hair and a bad brogue. (What? No freckles? No Irish Spring theme song?)

The boy confesses vague sins related to females, and the priest questions him, asking him about this particular girl or that particular girl. In the end, the boy is told to say something like 40 Hail Marys.

The boy, though, is quite happy. He says he’s now got a couple of hot prospects in the female department, all thanks to the pushy questions from the Irish priest.

I don’t know if the ad is new, but I don’t recall seeing it until the whole Doritos mess went down. I’ve since seen the ad about 20 times since.

So what can we take out of this? Sometimes, professional spotters of anti-Catholic humor actually encourage the very forces they are hoping to tamp down.

I’m not sure why the likes of the Catholic League and Bill Donahue have not gone after Red Bull. Let’s face it, that’s got to be pretty much what Red Bull wants. After all, you can’t pay for that kind of exposure.

Meanwhile, some Catholic bloggers and letter writers who have commented on the Red Bull ad take this as an opportunity to flaunt their own angry side. They believe Catholicism remains the only religion which is okay to mock, a patent falsehood to anyone who has seen an episode of Seinfeld or The Simpsons or Family Guy in the past decade or so.

Others add bitterly that Catholics are at least more tolerant than Muslims, who would surely set about torching the corporate offices of any company which so much as mentions Islam -- much less the prophet Mohammed -- in anything so crude as an advertisement for chips or drinks.

What all of this does do is deflect attention from some real problems the Catholic Church is facing, around the world, but particularly in America and Ireland. In case you’d forgotten, we have Dennis Leary to remind us.

Leary has a new stand-up comedy special out called Dou***bags and Donuts. The special, which can be seen in repeats on Comedy Central, opens up with a rousing musical number that may very well be the most offensive song ever recorded about the ills of the Catholic Church.

Suffice it to say, not much of it can be printed here, but the emphasis is on the sex scandals which have rocked the church in both the U.S. and Ireland.

Leary’s raucous song, which features rather graphic descriptions of horny priests and exploited boys and bodily fluids, makes both the Doritos and the Red Bull ad look like grade school productions.

But who is to blame? Is it Leary, the angry lapsed Catholic? Or the high church officials who let things go so far?

Anti-Catholicism isn’t dead. A Protestant main character in Jonathan Franzen’s best-selling novel Freedom is an unabashed hater of the Pope. The trouble is, more and more people baptized into the church are coming to the same conclusion.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

What is so great about New York Irish?

In the current issue of New York magazine, a wide range of heavy hitters weigh in on what the cover calls “New York’s Greatest-Ever Everything.” As in, New York City’s greatest book, mayor, TV show, athlete and more.

Trouble is, there is a decided shortage of Irish names among both the greatest as well as those choosing the greatest.

So, as the Irish have always done, we’ll do for ourselves when no one else is interested. What follows is a highly subjective attempt to come up with “Irish New York’s Greatest-Ever Anything.”

MAYOR: Laois-born William Grace was the first Irish Catholic mayor of New York City, elected in 1880, and in the century that followed over half a dozen mayors had Irish roots.

They are a colorful bunch, from party boy Jimmy Walker (who fled New York with his mistress before he could be sacked in the wake of a scandal) to John O’Brien, who served exactly one year in office.

Grace was also a hugely successful businessman (and sent massive donations to Ireland in the 1870s), so his status as a trailblazer makes it hard for him not to be seen as New York’s greatest Irish mayor. He was anti-Tammany, but we won't hold that against him!

GANGSTER: The line between crime and politics was often fine for the New York Irish, and this is another tough category, with the likes of Owney “the Killer” Madden and Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll competing with more recent thugs such as the Westies’ Jimmy Cooney.

My vote goes to “the Gentleman Gangster,” Mickey Spillane, the West Sider who married into the fabled McManus political clan and went to war with Cooney in the late 1960s.

BOOK: New York’s greatest Irish book could be the toughest category yet, with Peter Quinn’s Banished Children of Eve doing battle with Jimmy Breslin’s Table Money and Pete Hamill’s Forever.

Then there’s National Book Award winner Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. Another little book called Angela’s Ashes also had a number of Brooklyn scenes.

I’ll go with something slightly different here and pick Eugene O’Neill’s play Iceman Cometh. It is written by an Irish artist of the highest order, and depicts how the Irish fit in (or didn’t) with the rest of New York’s crazy melting pot.

ATHLETE: While the likes of Derek Jeter and Paul O’Neill can claim some Irish ancestry, this category calls for hefty Hibernian roots. It comes down to the great Yankees pitcher Whitey Ford and voluble tennis star John McEnroe.

Honorable mention goes to 19th century boxer “Old Smoke” John Morrissey who, in his spare time, was a political leader who orchestrated the death of anti-Irish leader Bill “the Butcher” Poole.

BAR: There are the old stalwarts like McSorley’s, literary dives like the old Rocky Sullivan’s, and quirky joints like Café Sine. My vote goes to the Village’s the Lion’s Head, which was not technically an Irish joint, but took to heart the old the Brendan Behan maxim that a great bar is a place “for drinkers with writing problems.”

MOVIE: This is a tough category, as there are dozens of solid movies (State of Grace, Brothers McMullen) but not many brilliant stand-outs. But when you crunch all the numbers, based simply on the big names and history and the best scenes (as opposed to some of the laughably bad ones), the best New York Irish movie could be Gangs of New York.

TV STAR: A battle of heavyweights between All in the Family’s Carroll O’Connor and The Honeymooners’ Jackie Gleason. You really can’t lose with this one, but in the end I’ll take Gleason for the sheer tenement tackiness of The Honeymooners.

UNION LEADER: Mike Quill. ‘Nuff said.

YEAR: It must have been somewhat lofty when, in 1928, a son of the Lower East Side, Al Smith, was nominated as the first Catholic presidential candidate. The Irish hadn’t come all the way, and they were going to be slapped when Smith not only lost big, but faced burning crosses and other nastiness from the KKK on the campaign trail.

Still, they had come far, and, for awhile, it must have been surreal to see Smith, with his cigar and Tammany ties and thick Noo Yawk accent, running for the highest office in the land.

Let the debate begin!

Predictions for a wacky New Year

It's that time of year again. Time to look back on the year that was and, more importantly, look ahead to the New Year.

In January of 2011, for example, I suspect that a slew of big-time Hollywood actors and agents are going to relocate from the sun and surf of California to the gritty streets of Boston.

After all, from Good Will Hunting and The Town to Gone, Baby Gone, Mystic River and The Fighter, there is a lot of gold to be found in the triple-decker house and Irish bars of every little Massachusetts burg from Southie to Lowell to Dorchester.

Of course, when all those Hollywood types get there, they may discover there’s not quite that many rugged Irish men and feisty Irish women as there used to be.

And that accent! Where’s that accent? They may feel the need to train the locals to talk more like the Boston Irish do in the movies, because they can’t seem to find that odd inflection anywhere on the actual streets of Boston.

Some of the new movie projects we can expect to come out of the Boston Irish Hollywood machine? A remake of It’s a Wonderful Life, with the Jimmy Stewart character now recast as a bank robber with a mean mother and heroin problem.

In February 2011, we can expect another shocking announcement from Pope Benedict. His holiness raised many eyebrows not long ago when he said that it might be okay for Catholics to use condoms in certain circumstances.

In 2011, look for the Pope to say that birth control, the death penalty, pre-marital sex and harmless white lies are also acceptable under certain circumstances.

The shocking thing about this announcement, of course, is that it puts the Pope in agreement with just about every Roman Catholic on the planet.

Right around St. Patrick’s Day we can expect a flood of new tape recordings from jolly old Richard Nixon. “Tricky Dick” is the gift that just keeps on giving.

This month we heard a bunch of old recordings in which, after bashing the blacks and the Jews and the Italians, Nixon had this to say: "The Irish have certain -- for example, the Irish can't drink. What you always have to remember with the Irish is they get mean.

“Virtually every Irish I've known gets mean when he drinks. Particularly the real Irish."

In the new 2011 tapes, Nixon goes on at some length about the distinctions between the “real” Irish and the “fake” Irish. The real Irish, according to Nixon, have lots of freckles and wear Aran sweaters, even in July.

The fake Irish? Well, to Nixon, that’s pretty much anybody named Kennedy. Or with big teeth.

Nixon, of course, was completely drunk at the time he said this.

Politics will also dominate the summer of 2011 when supporters of the DREAM Act introduce a new version of this bill, which presents a path to citizenship for immigrants who came to the U.S. at a young age and are now planning to attend college or enter the military.

Supporters make concessions, saying that these undocumented immigrants will now be required to serve three to five tours of duty in both Iraq and Afghanistan, after which they will be eligible for college financial aid. (Even though they may not survive the combat tours and will probably be in their 40s by the time they return.)
“We don’t want our illegal immigrants in college!” an opponent of the DREAM Act II will snarl.

“They came here knowing they’d be mowing lawns and washing dishes. If we wanted more college students in the U.S. we’d somehow make it more affordable for working class white kids to go to college!”

The DREAM Act II, will fall one vote short in the Senate, when a Democrat switches his vote at the last minute, claiming, “We simply didn’t want to make the Republicans mad.”

Finally, for all of the doom and gloom, the ties between Ireland and America will remain strong in 2011.

Given the terrible state of the economy in both nations, an Internet campaign will link the Irish on both sides of the Atlantic whose homes are currently in foreclosure. This way, Pat from Long Island can spend a few weeks in the home belonging to Danny from Sligo and vice versa. By the time the bank officials come knocking, they’ll both have moved on.

Happy New Year!

(Contact Sidewalks at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Christmas Bah, Humbug to Fox News and Bill O’Reilly

Both sides are keeping the true Christ out of Christmas

There is an Irish pub in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma, called McNellie’s. The owner, Elliot Nelson, notes that his bar’s design was inspired by a semester he spent in Dublin, bending his elbow at watering holes such as Porterhouse and the Stag’s Head.

In case Nelson’s Hibernian chops still seem insufficient, he was a student at Notre Dame University while he was spending a semester in Ireland.

McNellie’s recently played a small role in a large, roiling war. In this sense, McNellie’s is a little bit like all of us who have the fortune to have been born in America, yet the misfortune to share this great nation with opportunists, cranks and loudmouths of all political stripes.

Last week, a kerfuffle broke out in Tulsa because a parade that some people had come to call a Christmas parade was instead officially renamed a “holiday” parade. This brought howls from the “Keep Christ in Christmas” crowd -- a crowd, incidentally, who should thank God (literally) every morning for all of those newfangled atheist groups out there who are just so willing to let you know that they not only don’t believe in God, but kind of loath anybody who does.

But back to McNellie’s. When the Christmas or holiday or whatever parade in Tulsa lost its sponsor, McNellie’s stepped up and sponsored the parade.

Perhaps they should have flexed some of their financial muscle and given the parade a name that would unite believers and non-believers alike. How about the Whiskey Wonderland parade?

Because after listening to all of these holy rollers and unholy atheists, I really need a good stiff hot toddy.
It may be looking a lot like Christmas these days. But amidst all of the holly and garland, there is a ceaseless culture war.

Try driving through the Lincoln Tunnel these days. Outside of the grimy tube which connects New York and New Jersey are competing billboards, one pro-religion, one anti-religion.

Over in Fort Worth, meanwhile, atheists and believers are doing battle by way of advertisements of buses.
All of this might make you wistful for loud ads for that Hess truck for kids, or even that annoying “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” song.

Of course, the usual Irish suspects are right in the thick of all this.

There’s Bill O’Reilly over on Fox News, going on and on yet again about the War on Christmas.

Over there at the Staten Island Ferry terminal is Bill Donahue of the Catholic League for Civil Rights. Some scholar who works at the ferry terminal apparently placed a Baby Jesus in the facility’s multicultural holiday display. Another genius then decided to remove the offending baby Jesus, thus literally taking Christ out of Christmas!

This made Donahue nearly as angry as ecstatic. After all, he could not have scripted a more perfectly horrible symbol of his own righteous cause.

Though Donahue better be careful. While he was slamming the decision to remove Baby Jesus, Donahue consistently stated this was offensive to “Catholics.”

Last time I checked, Protestants -- for whatever they are worth -- also kind of worship Jesus. Which makes Donahue guilty of the kind of exclusion he so often accuses others of.

Ultimately, this is about as much fun as watching Scrooge do battle with the Grinch. It’s really hard to root for anyone.

The atheists can’t possibly allow someone to be comforted by an otherworldly power, even if that otherworldly power has endured some 2,000 years.

As for the Keep Christ in Christmasers, they seem to want to pretend it’s 1832 in America.

They are prepared to accept that non-Christians exist. They just don’t want to, you know, acknowledge them.

By the way, let’s see how they feel when some do-gooder, in the name of Christian charity, suggests that all retail stores open and close at reasonable hours so that folks can spend Christmas with their families.

Stop the spinning holy wheels of capitalism? Humbug!

And so…Merry…I mean Happy…oh…never mind. Let’s just go to McNellie’s.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Christmas bah humbug to Fox News and Bill O’Reilly

Both sides are keeping the true Christ out of Christmas

There is an Irish pub in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma, called McNellie’s. The owner, Elliot Nelson, notes that his bar’s design was inspired by a semester he spent in Dublin, bending his elbow at watering holes such as Porterhouse and the Stag’s Head.

In case Nelson’s Hibernian chops still seem insufficient, he was a student at Notre Dame University while he was spending a semester in Ireland.

McNellie’s recently played a small role in a large, roiling war. In this sense, McNellie’s is a little bit like all of us who have the fortune to have been born in America, yet the misfortune to share this great nation with opportunists, cranks and loudmouths of all political stripes.

Last week, a kerfuffle broke out in Tulsa because a parade that some people had come to call a Christmas parade was instead officially renamed a “holiday” parade. This brought howls from the “Keep Christ in Christmas” crowd -- a crowd, incidentally, who should thank God (literally) every morning for all of those newfangled atheist groups out there who are just so willing to let you know that they not only don’t believe in God, but kind of loath anybody who does.

But back to McNellie’s. When the Christmas or holiday or whatever parade in Tulsa lost its sponsor, McNellie’s stepped up and sponsored the parade.

Perhaps they should have flexed some of their financial muscle and given the parade a name that would unite believers and non-believers alike. How about the Whiskey Wonderland parade?

Because after listening to all of these holy rollers and unholy atheists, I really need a good stiff hot toddy.
It may be looking a lot like Christmas these days. But amidst all of the holly and garland, there is a ceaseless culture war.

Try driving through the Lincoln Tunnel these days. Outside of the grimy tube which connects New York and New Jersey are competing billboards, one pro-religion, one anti-religion.

Over in Fort Worth, meanwhile, atheists and believers are doing battle by way of advertisements of buses.
All of this might make you wistful for loud ads for that Hess truck for kids, or even that annoying “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” song.

Of course, the usual Irish suspects are right in the thick of all this.

There’s Bill O’Reilly over on Fox News, going on and on yet again about the War on Christmas.

Over there at the Staten Island Ferry terminal is Bill Donahue of the Catholic League for Civil Rights. Some scholar who works at the ferry terminal apparently placed a Baby Jesus in the facility’s multicultural holiday display. Another genius then decided to remove the offending baby Jesus, thus literally taking Christ out of Christmas!

This made Donahue nearly as angry as ecstatic. After all, he could not have scripted a more perfectly horrible symbol of his own righteous cause.

Though Donahue better be careful. While he was slamming the decision to remove Baby Jesus, Donahue consistently stated this was offensive to “Catholics.”

Last time I checked, Protestants -- for whatever they are worth -- also kind of worship Jesus. Which makes Donahue guilty of the kind of exclusion he so often accuses others of.

Ultimately, this is about as much fun as watching Scrooge do battle with the Grinch. It’s really hard to root for anyone.

The atheists can’t possibly allow someone to be comforted by an otherworldly power, even if that otherworldly power has endured some 2,000 years.

As for the Keep Christ in Christmasers, they seem to want to pretend it’s 1832 in America.

They are prepared to accept that non-Christians exist. They just don’t want to, you know, acknowledge them.

By the way, let’s see how they feel when some do-gooder, in the name of Christian charity, suggests that all retail stores open and close at reasonable hours so that folks can spend Christmas with their families.

Stop the spinning holy wheels of capitalism? Humbug!

And so…Merry…I mean Happy…oh…never mind. Let’s just go to McNellie’s.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Now make a deal for the heroes of 9/11

NYPD officer James Zadroga

Last month, New York Congressman Joe Crowley recalled a light moment from a very dark time. "At the Concert for New York, my cousin, Mike Moran, who is a firefighter at 3 Engine down on 13th Street, told Osama Bin Laden that he can kiss his royal Irish a**," Crowley was quoted as saying.

"I'm not going to say that any senator who doesn't vote for this bill can kiss anything, but I will be thinking it."

Crowley was joined in Washington by New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg as well as New York Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand.

They were drumming up support for the so-called Zadroga Bill, which would deliver some $7 billion in aid to 9/11 first responders and their families.

These include quite a few Irish American families, whose prime years have turned into a nightmare of doctor’s visits and medication and bills, bills, bills, as mysterious illnesses have sapped first responders of time, strength and money.

A handful of Republican senators -- including Scott Brown, who sits in Irish American liberal lion Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat -- remain undecided on the Zadroga bill.

I consider myself neither Republican nor Democrat. I don’t see any reason to simply throw money at problems.

Yes, Washington should be careful with taxpayer money. This is basically what Republicans have been saying. Which is all well and good.

But when it comes to issues such as the Zadroga bill, it’s hard not to sound like an old-fashioned class warrior.

Billions for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan! Billions to bail out the banks and car makers! Billions for the very people who got us into this economic mess in the first place!

And nothing? Nothing at all for guys who were just trying to clean up the mess in the wake of New York City’s darkest day?

No wonder Gillibrand -- rarely confused with a fiery populist -- slammed Republicans with unusually harsh language this week, saying the GOP was pushing a “pack of lies” about the possible costs of the Zadroga bill.

The news was filled, earlier this week, with much hype regarding a deal struck by President Obama and Republicans which maintained the so-called Bush-era tax cuts for the working class as well as millionaires.

Republicans were gleeful. And you know what? You want to prioritize tax cuts for millionaires? Fine. Whatever.

But if Democrats can strike a deal with Republicans on that issue, then it’s time for a handful of Republicans to reach across the aisle and make a deal which would allow the Zadroga bill to become a reality.

Congressman Peter King, for one, has stuck his own neck out. The GOP lawmaker has more or less berated his own party for refusing to support the Zadroga bill, named after former police officer James Zadroga, whose death was attributed to the time he spent at Ground Zero.

Let’s even pretend for a moment that the Republicans’ worst nightmares about the costs of the Zadroga bill were true. Let’s pretend it might even be an expensive “job killer,” as one Republican-leaning analysis put it.

Isn’t that a monumentally insensitive way to put things? Should we be more concerned about jobs that may or may not die, or people who are actually dying?

Yes, Washington is notorious for wasteful spending. Kudos to the Republicans for trying to tighten the purse strings.

As Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander lamented, “We don’t know what it costs. It isn’t the way we do things around here. It’s not the way I do things.”

Well, no. It doesn’t seem to be how you do things when it comes to this particular bill.

There are plenty of times when the GOP is more than willing to throw money around like the proverbial drunken sailor. More often than not, they want to throw money at people who already have a lot of it, at people who have not performed dangerous, heroic acts, and who are in no way shape or form in peril of dying as a result of those acts.

December 7, this week, was the 69th anniversary of the attack of Pearl Harbor, an event which shook a generation of Americans.

It would be terribly sad if, in the future, we make each and every 9/11 anniversary even more painful because we did nothing about those who are still dying and desperately need some help.

If we worried so much about a “job killer,” that we simply let people keep on dying.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Irish American Muslim converts emerge

Hamza Yusuf Hanson

Hamza Yusuf Hanson believes the Irish Catholic experience in America can tell us something important about how we will continue to deal with Muslim immigrants in the U.S.

Hanson should know. His great-great grandfather, Michael O’Hanson, left Ireland around the time of the Famine.

Along with his wife Bridget, O’Hanson settled in Philadelphia, where it wasn’t easy being Irish Catholic. Not for nothing did Hamza’s distant relative Anglicize his name by dropping the “O.”

These days, despite his Hibernian roots, Hamza Yusuf Hanson identifies himself as an “American Muslim” scholar who recently founded Zaytuna College in Berkley, California. That school is aiming to become the “first accredited Muslim college in the United States.”

As strange as that might sound, it’s probably no stranger than the notion of a “Catholic college” sounded some time ago.

So if we can have the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame, who’s to say deep into the 21st century, we won’t have the Fighting Arabs of Zaytuna, or elsewhere?

Michael and Bridget O’Hanson may or may not be rolling over in their Catholic graves, given the beliefs of their great, great grandson. But Hamza Yusuf Hanson is not the only American of Irish descent who has entered the world of Allah.

The rapper Everlast, formerly of the Irish American hip hop group House of Pain (remember the St. Patrick’s Day scenes in the ‘90s video “Jump Around”?) recently converted to Sunni Islam. Go to Facebook and you can find the aptly named group LIAM, which stands for the League of Irish American Muslims.

Most prominently, a few weeks back, an independent film called The Taqwacores was released.

Based on a book of the same name by Michael Muhammad Knight, the film is set in Buffalo and follows an average American white kid’s journey from angst to Islam. Along the way, he takes up what is probably his most passionate devotion -- punk rock.

By the way, the average punk kid in The Taqwacores was actually born and raised Irish Catholic.

The New York Times once dubbed Knight’s book a “Catcher in the Rye for young Muslims.”

The paper added, “Mr. Muhammad Knight was born an Irish Catholic in upstate New York and converted to Islam as a teenager. He studied at a mosque in Pakistan but became disillusioned with Islam after learning about the sectarian battles after the death of Muhammad.”

In a more recent book, Blue-Eyed Devil: A Road Odyssey Through Islamic America, Knight writes a length about the conflicts of being raised Irish Catholic and converting to Islam.

There’s a scene with his old Irish grandfather, who used to walk young Michael to church “on weekday mornings to sit down and stand up and sit down again and stand up again and kneel on the padded kneeler before a tall bloody Christ.”

There also a tense scene with “an archetypical old Irish fireman,” and reflections on another Irish American who made his own journey to Islam, John Walker Lindh, the so-called “American Taliban” who vowed to kill Americans in the name of Islam.

To some, these fine Irish Catholics converting to Islam are surely proof that we are too lenient or too secular or not nearly rigid enough in our Catholicism.

I would suggest that it’s mainly a product of living in America, where cultural collisions are at least as much of a rule as they are an exception.

Now, that does not mean this will be easy. Hamza Yusuf Hanson wrote in a recent Christian Science Monitor article, “The mid-19th century struggle of Irish-Catholics to be fully accepted as Americans should give today’s Muslims hope that their efforts to weather the storms of controversy and mistrust will bear fruit.”

Maybe. On the other hand, though it was not hard to find 19th century Protestants and Catholics literally clubbing each other in the name of religion, things are different today.

Elements of Islam have declared war on America, while that was not the case with Catholics back in the 1800s.

In the end, however, terrorism is not how most Americans -- Catholic or Muslim or whatever -- are going to experience good old-fashioned American culture clash.

Mostly, there will be intermarriage and earnest conversions, and some of those marriages will be successful and some won’t. Some of those conversions will be permanent and some will not.

One thing we can be sure of is that they will continue to happen.

(Contact Sidewalks at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)