What is "anti-catholicism"

n. a religious orientation opposed to Catholicism

Anti-Catholicism is hostility towards or opposition to the Catholic Church, its clergy and adherents.

After the Reformation and until at least the late 20th Century, majority Protestant states (especially England, Germany, the United States, and Canada) made anti-Catholicism and opposition to the Pope and Catholic rituals major political themes, with anti-Catholic sentiment at times leading to violence and religious discrimination against Catholic individuals (often derogatorily referred to in Anglophone Protestant countries as " papists" or " Romanists"). Historically, Catholics in Protestant countries were frequently (and almost always baselessly) suspected of conspiring against the state in furtherance of papal interests or to establish a political hegemony under the " Papacy", with Protestants sometimes questioning Catholic individuals' loyalty to the state and suspecting Catholics of ultimately maintaining loyalty to the Vatican rather than their domiciled country. In majority Protestant countries with large scale immigration, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, suspicion or discrimination of Catholic immigrants often overlapped or conflated with nativism, xenophobia, and ethnocentric or racist sentiments (i.e. anti-Italianism, anti-Irish sentiment, hispanophobia, Anti-Quebec sentiment).

In the Early modern period, in the face of rising secular powers in Europe, the Catholic Church struggled to maintain its traditional religious and political role in primarily Catholic nations. As a result of these struggles, there arose in some majority Catholic countries (especially among those individuals with certain secular political views) a hostile attitude towards the considerable political, social, spiritual and religious power of the Pope and the clergy in the form of anti-clericalism.