Catholics, Mormons and immigration 2

A bigger problem with the Deseret News article is that it too much posits immigrants verses native born Catholics as white verses non-white.

This comes from too narrow an understanding of Catholic history in the US. The percentage of Native Americans in the US who are Catholics is fairly high. It is telling that in my 20th-century Native American history class at Eastern Michigan University the two biographies of Native American women, one on a Lakota Woman, and the other on Molly Spotted Elk called "Penobscot in Paris", were both on women who were Catholics.

With Charles Chaput, the Archbishop of Philadelphia, being a registered member of the Prarie Band of Potawatomie, while also being one of the strongest voices of politically conservative Catholicism, the dichotomies in the Deseret News article do not hold up.

There are also more African-American Catholics than some realize. In Louisiana and MAryland especially there are long established African-American Catholic communities. In the case of Louisiana the Catholic Church ran a segregated school system. True, in both white and black schools there were probably non-Catholics, but there also were Catholics.