Convents, Confessions, and Conflict: The 1920s Klan versus Our Sunday Visitor

In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan sponsored a variety of anti-Catholic lecturers, but the most popular, Helen Jackson and L.J. King, focused on Rome’s purported danger to white women through convents and confession. Jackson’s Convent Cruelties documented her supposed injustices she faced at a convent, and King, a Klansman and self-proclaimed former Catholic, regaled readers with sexual dangers of confession to pure Protestant women. This scandalous rendering of Catholicism did not go unchallenged. Our Sunday Visitor, a Catholic newspaper in Huntington, Indiana, questioned the accuracy of these narratives as well as printed biographies of the famed lecturers to show their suspicious backgrounds. The Visitor questioned the authority of these Protestant lecturers and fought a rhetorical war against the Klan to demonstrate that Catholics were just as American as the order claimed to be. While the Klan sought to prove not only that Catholicism was illegitimate Christianity but also distinctively un-American because of the Catholic hierarchy and questionable sexual practice (celibacy in particular), the Visitor impugned the Klan’s Protestantism by calling into question the validity of these lecturers as well as their practice of the faith. The rhetorical war between Klan lecturers and the Visitor demonstrates the attempts by both sides to contest the Christianity and patriotism of the other. By examining the conflict between Klan lecturers and the Visitor, this paper presents the fraught dialogue between Catholics and the Klan in 1920s. Catholics did not passively accept the Klan’s biased narratives of their faith or their distinctiveness, and the Klan actively claimed there could be only one legitimate form of American Christianity, their rendering of Protestantism.