"Mosque furor echoes early American ant-Catholicism"

“We are awake to the hypocrisy and schemes of that designing, crafty, subtle, far-seeing and far-reaching Power, which is ever-grasping after the whole world, to sway its iron scepter with blood stained hands over the millions of its inhabitants.”  

OSV's editorial tells us that these words were written not in protest to the proposed building of a mosque near ground zero but in protest of "of a gift by Pope Pius IX of a block of marble for the Washington Monument.  The outrage felt by true-blue Americans was so great that the marble was reportedly tossed into the Potomac."

The editorial does not propose a solution to the mosque controversy but rightly hopes that legitimate dialogue and debate will trump heated rhetoric.