Let’s first start with some education… because clearly, education is needed:
Papist is a (usually disparaging) term or an anti-Catholic slur, referring to the Roman Catholic Church, its teachings, practices, or adherents. The term was coined during the English Reformation to denote a person whose loyalties were to the Pope, rather than to the Church of England. Over time, however, the term came to mean one who supported Papal authority over all Christians; it thus entered widespread use, especially among Anglicans and Presbyterians. The word, dating from 1534, derives (through Middle French) from Latin papa, meaning “Pope”.
Wikipedia is more to the point in its See Also section where Anti-Catholic is listed as the first entry.
Webster’s calls it a disparaging term for Roman Catholic.
The Urban Dictionary holds nothing back as it defines the term simply as an anti-Catholic slur and lists an obscene example perhaps lifted straight from the comments at Wizbang… perhaps… 🙂
Speaking of which, let’s see how the word has been recently used in just a few (of a number of) comment threads here at Wizbang:
Jeez, Rick. So am I to take it that if I don’t kiss your Pope’s ass I don’t care about Military veterans?
Or is it that having the right position on veterans is somehow determined by whether I am a Papist or an anti Papist?
One thing’s for sure, you will go to ANY length to find an excuse to carry on about how people don’t love your Pope enough and how we are all going to Hell because we disagree with him on his economics and politics.
Thank God I’m not a Catholic. No strike that. Thank God that God is not a Catholic.
Has the Papist God on earth told you you aren’t allowed to use Google, or something?
I blame the stinkin’ Papists.
The focus here is on the term Papist but it wouldn’t take much to go back through Wizbang and find additional disparaging comments that use not the word.
And for those wondering, this post is in response to Scalia’s challenge on a post on which Rodney Graves decided I could no longer comment:
Yes, it [the term Papist] is derogatory and pejorative, but without an example, it’s an empty charge.
…
I suspect that it was used in reference to you, not to Catholics in general, and in the contexts in which I recall it was used, it was used to describe the poster’s belief that you worship the Pope and/or your church. You of course disagree with that characterization, but that does not mean that your opponents are anti-Catholic; it means they are anti-Rick.
To prove your point, you will need to cite an example where Catholics in general are called papists or any when any epithlet was used to describe Catholicism in general.
I think I’ve done that with this post and yet I’m no fool. This won’t be enough. The dodging, the maneuvering, the manipulation, the maligning excuses will continue because this sort of thing is part and parcel of the character of certain people. It’s who they are. It’s how they get their pathetic and pathological jollies.
The purpose of this post is to do nothing more than to reach out to the reasonable, the rational, those not so zealous in their ideology, who might be interested in extending the fair shake.
I would like to think know there are a few, more than a few, in the Wizbang community.
