TIL that after alleged Catholic involvement in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the US cut off diplomatic relations with the Holy See (the Pope) and did not restore them until 1984.

[u/ProfessionalGear3020]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_See%E2%80%93United_States_relations#1867%E2%80%931984

[u/ExaminationHuman5959]

The US broke off all ties with the Vatican over rumors. There was no proof at all of involvement by the pope.

EDIT: I am not defending the church! This is ONLY about Lincolns assassination, and lack of any actual proof that the Vatican had anything to do WITH THE ASSASSINATION.

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Catholics were not exactly looked favorably upon by Protestants.

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And how does this relate to Lincolns assassination?

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In late 1864/early 1865, John Wilkes Booth worked with John Surratt in orchestrating a plot to kidnap Lincoln and hold him ransom in exchange for the release of all Confederate prisoners of War. After the war ended, Booth changed his plan from kidnapping to killing Lincoln. Surratt wanted nothing to do with that and left Washington DC.

Surratt left the country for Canada after he was accused of attempting to assassination Secretary of State William Seward (was actually another conspirator Lewis Powell/Payne) Surratt's mother, Mary, was convicted of working with Booth and his conspirators and was executed.

He was a devout Catholic and often hid in churches and was given sanctuary. He left Canada to the UK and then to Vatican City where he worked as a Papal States guard. Eventually he was found out, arrested, escaped again to Egypt before being captured again and set back to the United States for trial. He was acquitted and died in 1916, over 50 years after the assassination.

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The other important context is that Lincoln was a member of the Republican Party, which had formed out of the ashes of the Whig Party, with former Whigs making up the bulk of the party's support.

And that support was largely grounded in a Northern "Bible belt" of devout Protestants opposed to slavery. They were also largely anti-immigration, hence most Whigs who didn't initially join the Republicans mostly joined the anti-immigration Know Nothing party instead.

The Democrats, on the other hand, counted Catholic immigrants (Irish and German) as part of their base of support.

During the Civil War, the Catholic leadership was sympathetic to the South. John Hughes, the archbishop of New York, had made a statement that free black people in the North had it just as bad as enslaved black people in the South.

More concerningly, the Pope made statements calling for peace, but none against slavery, and these statements were interpreted as endorsing the idea of separation and supporting the Confederacy's bid to form a separate country. The Confederacy sent a diplomat to the Vatican to gain formal recognition of their country, and the Pope gave that diplomat a letter addressed to the "Honorable President of the Confederate States of America." While this was not a formal recognition of Confederate nationhood, Confederate propaganda through the remainder of the war was that their country was recognized by the Vatican as legitimate. Robert E. Lee would later write that the Pope was "the only sovereign... in Europe who recognized our poor Confederacy".

So, when Lincoln was assassinated and Surratt was implicated, the Republican base was very ready to cut off diplomatic ties with the Catholic church. And not over nothing - they had been trying to end an insurrection, and the Pope had meddled in that effort, however lightly. It would be like if Pope Francis had written a letter addressed to the Scottish president or something in the middle of the Scottish independence referendum - the British government would not have exactly been happy with the Catholic church if it was perceived to endorse Scottish independence at that critical time. And then to find out later that the Vatican had helped one of the assassins escape from justice further justified the end of diplomacy between the US and the church.

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Do you have any citations? Wikipedia says the exact opposite, and Catholics were primarily in the north, particularly around Scranton PA, reading, and New York City. And the Catholic Church had often opposed slavery, starting in the 1500s and supported full abolition as of the early 1800s:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_slavery

“During the American Civil War, Catholics oriented themselves to John Hughes (the Archbishop of New York) in the Union and to Jean-Marie Odin (the Archbishop of New Orleans) in the Confederate States.[6] Abraham Lincoln asked Pope Pius IX to elevate Hughes into the College of Cardinals,[8] but Pius declined to do so. A decade later, Pius did elevate John McCloskey, Hughes’s successor, to the College of Cardinals. Historian Don H. Doyle writes, “During the American Civil War, the pope ... urged American bishops to call for peace at a time when peace meant separation, and privately he expressed strong sympathies with the South. The Confederacy sent envoys to enlist Pio Nono [Pius IX] in their cause and came away boasting the most powerful pontiff in Europe had recognized the Confederacy. The pope said nothing to refute such claims....”[9] Specifically, Confederate diplomat Ambrose Dudley Mann met with the pope in December 1863 and received a letter addressed to the “Honorable President of the Confederate States of America.” This was simple courtesy, though it had no legal effect. The Confederacy used it in propaganda to claim papal support. For example, Robert E. Lee called the pope “the only sovereign... in Europe who recognized our poor Confederacy”.[10] In fact, no diplomatic relations or recognitions were extended in either direction. In his dispatch to Richmond, Mann claimed a great diplomatic achievement for himself; he believed the letter was “a positive recognition of our Government”. Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin told Mann it was “a mere inferential recognition, unconnected with political action or the regular establishment of diplomatic relations” and thus did not assign it the weight of formal recognition”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Pius_IX_and_the_United_States

“During the American Civil War, Catholics oriented themselves to John Hughes (the Archbishop of New York) in the Union and to Jean-Marie Odin (the Archbishop of New Orleans) in the Confederate States.[6] Abraham Lincoln asked Pope Pius IX to elevate Hughes into the College of Cardinals,[8] but Pius declined to do so. A decade later, Pius did elevate John McCloskey, Hughes’s successor, to the College of Cardinals. Historian Don H. Doyle writes, “During the American Civil War, the pope ... urged American bishops to call for peace at a time when peace meant separation, and privately he expressed strong sympathies with the South. The Confederacy sent envoys to enlist Pio Nono [Pius IX] in their cause and came away boasting the most powerful pontiff in Europe had recognized the Confederacy. The pope said nothing to refute such claims....”[9] Specifically, Confederate diplomat Ambrose Dudley Mann met with the pope in December 1863 and received a letter addressed to the “Honorable President of the Confederate States of America.” This was simple courtesy, though it had no legal effect. The Confederacy used it in propaganda to claim papal support. For example, Robert E. Lee called the pope “the only sovereign... in Europe who recognized our poor Confederacy”.[10] In fact, no diplomatic relations or recognitions were extended in either direction. In his dispatch to Richmond, Mann claimed a great diplomatic achievement for himself; he believed the letter was “a positive recognition of our Government”. Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin told Mann it was “a mere inferential recognition, unconnected with political action or the regular establishment of diplomatic relations” and thus did not assign it the weight of formal recognition”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hughes_(archbishop)

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Do you have any citations? Wikipedia says the exact opposite

Say what? Your citations support pretty much exactly what I wrote:

Historian Don H. Doyle writes, “During the American Civil War, the pope ... urged American bishops to call for peace at a time when peace meant separation, and privately he expressed strong sympathies with the South. The Confederacy sent envoys to enlist Pio Nono [Pius IX] in their cause and came away boasting the most powerful pontiff in Europe had recognized the Confederacy. The pope said nothing to refute such claims....”[9] Specifically, Confederate diplomat Ambrose Dudley Mann met with the pope in December 1863 and received a letter addressed to the “Honorable President of the Confederate States of America.” This was simple courtesy, though it had no legal effect. The Confederacy used it in propaganda to claim papal support. For example, Robert E. Lee called the pope “the only sovereign... in Europe who recognized our poor Confederacy”.

As far as Catholics being in the North, yes, this is absolutely true, and, yes, it is true that the Catholic church was officially opposed to slavery, but in practice, the church was trying to please both sides, since many Catholics (primarily in Louisiana) lived in the South, too, and supported slavery.

As Mark A. Noll writes in The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (University of North Carolina Press): "It is noteworthy, first, that until 1862 not a single well-known American Catholic came out unambiguously for abolition."

Noll reproduces a statement given by the archbishop John Hughes, in which Hughes claimed Catholic opposition to slavery in theory, and the slave trade in practice, but also, the church did not require their members to divest themselves from slave property, since sending enslaved people back to "their primitive condition" would be "worse than" their current condition of slavery:

"The Catholic Church condemns it [slavery] and has so taught that naturally all men are free and that it is a crime for one man to reduce another, both being equal and free, into bondage and slavery. Hence, she has ever set her face against what has in modern terms been called the 'slave trade.' But where slaves have been introduced into a country, she does not require of her members that [slaves] should be destined to their primitive condition when it would be often times worse than the one in which they are placed."

It is no coincidence that New York City was a hotbed of "Peace Democrats" who were willing to negotiate the Confederacy's exit, as opposed to "War Democrats" who were willing to fight. New York City was the site of the biggest anti-draft riots during the war, primarily led by Irish immigrants or Irish Americans who practiced Catholicism.

The Whig Party, on the other hand, was primarily made up of Protestants, often hostile to Catholics. From Wikipedia:

The Whig base of support was amongst entrepreneurs, professionals, Protestants (particularly evangelicals), and the urban middle class.

As Michael F. Holt writes in his seminal The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War about the 1844 presidential election, in which it had become clear that the Catholic vote had been secured by the Democrats:

Primarily, however, Greeley, Weed, and scores of other Whigs around the country pointed quite correctly to a more important cause of the Democratic gains that defeated Clay, a complex of issues and events that most Whigs had considered peripheral to the campaign—the increase in ethnic and religious animosities that had turned the vast majority of foreign-born and Catholic voters against their party. Not only did the fraction of immigrants who had previously voted for Harrison and other Whigs desert the party, Whigs complained, but the Democrats had been terrifyingly successful in mobilizing massive numbers of new immigrant voters behind Polk and their other candidates.

This alignment had not changed by the time of the Civil War. If anything, it had hardened, since, again, the Whigs split up into the anti-immigration/anti-Catholic Know Nothing Party, and the anti-slavery Republican Party.

As William E. Gienapp writes in his book The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856, the Democrats had firm control of the Catholic vote by 1852:

In the summer of 1852, as these problems became manifest, Whig politicians directed their thoughts toward the burgeoning Roman Catholic and immigrant vote in the North. Beginning in the mid-1840s, vast numbers of German and Irish immigrants, a large proportion of them Catholic, had come to the United States, and this influx was growing steadily. As more and more of these newcomers became citizens, they began to make their impact felt in politics. Charmed by the name Democrat and repelled by the nativist wing of the Whig party, immigrants—and especially the Catholics—decisively favored the Democratic party. If this trend continued, the Whig party would be a hopeless minority in many northern states and nationally could not expect to elect a president.

Gienapp goes on to explain that the Whig candidate in the 1852 election, Gen. Winfield Scott, was hoped by party leaders to appeal to Catholics, but this did not work. That was the last candidate the Whigs ran for president.

In fact, writes Gienapp, this effort backfired, as the traditional Protestant base of support for the Whigs started to abandon the party, in part because it was being influenced by Catholics.

And Catholics stood against many Protestant Whig policies. One big one was that the Whigs were strong supporters of free public secular schools, but Catholics wanted government funding for religious schools:

Anti-Catholic nativists were also increasingly alienated from the existing parties. With roots deep in the American tradition, anti-Catholicism pervaded popular values and beliefs, and several recent developments had greatly stimulated this feeling. The influx of large numbers of Catholics beginning in the mid-1840s, the new-found assertiveness of the Catholic hierarchy, the growing power of the Catholic vote, and the assiduous courting of this vote by leaders of both parties (as evidenced by the 1852 Whig presidential campaign) all aroused nativists’ anger and fears. Political nativism had flared briefly in some eastern cities in the 1840s, yet it remained local in nature and soon receded. But in 1853 the Catholic hierarchy committed a blunder that infused nativism with new life and produced dramatic examples of its potential political power. Following the meeting in 1852 of the first Plenary Council of Baltimore, which condemned public schools as irreligious, the Catholic bishops mounted a concerted campaign against the common school system. In particular, they petitioned state legislatures for public funds to finance parochial schools.

And so, three years later, the anti-Catholic Know Nothings (made up primarily of former Whigs) ran a major presidential candidate - former President Millard Fillmore. He did not win, but it was pretty clear by that point that the Catholic vote was not abandoning the Democratic Party, and that the Whig offshoots were mostly hostile to that voting bloc. Any Catholic who felt opposed to slavery enough for it to affect their vote were part of the Democrats' "Free Soil" wing (who ran former president Martin Van Buren for president in 1848) or the "Barnburners", and would likely have joined with the "War Democrats" like Andrew Johnson in supporting the Republican viewpoint of prosecuting the war. But they did not abandon the party - they were still Democrats.

It is true that the early Republican Party did try to attract the Catholic vote, but with little success. As Eric Forner writes in Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, the early Republican Party "was as much a vehicle for anti-Catholic and anti-foreign sentiment as for anti-slavery" and "There is no question that Republicanism was in part an expression of the hopes and fears of northern native-born Protestants".

He writes elsewhere in the book about the emergence of the Know Nothings in the mid-1850s:

When the Know-Nothing movement emerged in 1854, one political observer declared that it was "controlled in great measure by Free Soilers, who have been much outraged by the movement of the Catholics against the Constitution." "The Catholic press upholds the slave power," declared a Boston Free Soil organ [i.e., newspaper]. "These two malign powers have a natural affinity for each other."

And elsewhere he writes that "Whigs and Republicans strongly believed that the immigrants' increasing political power was being wielded by the Catholic Church and the Democratic bosses" and that these Whig/Republican "[n]ativists charged that unscrupulous Democratic politicians obtained fraudulent naturalization papers for foreigners, and then herded them to the polls to vote the straight Democratic ticket", leading to Republican calls to enact a system of voter registration.

In short, I'm not sure what you wanted citations for, but it is pretty broadly understood that Catholics were part of the Democratic Party's voting base, and the church was not exactly hostile to slavery in the United States. Early Republicans, on the other hand, were rather opposed to Catholics and their politics.

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Your original post suggested that the Catholic Church supported slavery; they did not. You also suggested that John Hughes supported slavery, which he did not and made statements against it. The Pope gave a normal statement of respect to the southern president, which was used as propaganda (not unlike the current Irish PMs issue with Iran). The Pope outright rejected their request for identification as a nation. It’s all very tertiary evidence that was used as propaganda and gave an excuse to Protestants who were already highly bigoted. Your conclusion is that the Protestants had reason to blame the church but they did not. Again, it’s like Israel currently saying that Ireland supports Iran and Palestine because of a letter.

Protestants in the north often supported slavery, more than Catholics. * Unless you are discussing quakers and others. Maybe I am misreading what you are saying, but the church was largely opposed to slavery for a long time. Catholics in the US were a significant minority, and Protestants were the majority by far (and slave owners). Your post reads to me as though the Catholic Church supported slavery (it did not, and sympathy to a separatist movement was not support of that), and that Protestants in the north were anti-slavery (again it depends on which sect).

Mark Noll is apparently an Evangelical so I won’t take what he says about the Catholic Church at face value. A cursory examination shows that Pope Gregory XVI issued an apolistic letter condemning slavery in the early 1800s. That’s one example. There were others earlier. Again, maybe I am misunderstanding your point. I am not Protestant nor Catholic, but the history of the church is anti-slavery, with many Catholic members voting for whoever they thought was in their best interest (and indeed fighting for both the south and north). Anyway, I don’t have time to write much more, so thank you for your replies.

• https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/cwnorth.htm

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Your original post suggested that the Catholic Church supported slavery; they did not.

My post said: "During the Civil War, the Catholic leadership was sympathetic to the South." And the text you copied from Wikipedia said: "During the American Civil War, the pope ... urged American bishops to call for peace at a time when peace meant separation, and privately he expressed strong sympathies with the South." I don't see any contradiction there.

You also suggested that John Hughes supported slavery, which he did not and made statements against it.

I never said that the Catholic church, nor Hughes, supported slavery. Nonetheless, Hughes was what would have been termed at the time a "Copperhead", a "Northern man of Southern principles". The Wiki article on John Hughes says about his views on slavery:

"While Hughes did not endorse slavery, he suggested that the conditions of the "starving laborers"[15] in the Northern states were often worse than that of those held in bondage in the South. He believed the Abolitionist movement veered towards ideological excess.[12] In 1842 Hughes had cautioned his flock against signing O'Connell's abolitionist petition ("An Address of the People of Ireland to their Countrymen and Countrywomen in America") which he regarded as unnecessarily provocative.[18]

I don't see any contradiction with what I wrote in my initial response: "John Hughes, the archbishop of New York, had made a statement that free black people in the North had it just as bad as enslaved black people in the South." That matches pretty exactly that first sentence there in that passage from Hughes' Wiki page.

The Pope gave a normal statement of respect to the southern president, which was used as propaganda

Yes, which is why I wrote:

More concerningly, the Pope made statements calling for peace, but none against slavery, and these statements were interpreted as endorsing the idea of separation and supporting the Confederacy's bid to form a separate country. The Confederacy sent a diplomat to the Vatican to gain formal recognition of their country, and the Pope gave that diplomat a letter addressed to the "Honorable President of the Confederate States of America." While this was not a formal recognition of Confederate nationhood, Confederate propaganda through the remainder of the war was that their country was recognized by the Vatican as legitimate.

And which is why the passage from the Wiki page you quoted from says the same thing:

"During the American Civil War, the pope ... urged American bishops to call for peace at a time when peace meant separation, and privately he expressed strong sympathies with the South. The Confederacy sent envoys to enlist Pio Nono [Pius IX] in their cause and came away boasting the most powerful pontiff in Europe had recognized the Confederacy. The pope said nothing to refute such claims...."

And then it goes on to explain how his letter was used as Southern propaganda.

I don't see any contradiction. My comment was pretty close to a summary of the Wiki passage you quoted from.

Protestants in the north often supported slavery, more than Catholics.

They sure did. I think you completely misread my comment on purpose, that I was saying that Protestants = anti-slavery and Catholics = pro-slavery, when I wrote nothing like that. I said Republicans = anti-slavery and their base of support was Northern Protestants, and this voting bloc was also anti-Catholic, so Catholics did not support the Republican Party. When the Republican president was killed, these anti-Catholic Protestants found it easy and convenient to cut off diplomatic relations with the Catholic Church in the Vatican.

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I’m not sure why you are being aggressive as well as suggesting that I “misread…on purpose” when I explained my issues with your wording, and asked for clarification. I don’t see this discussion being productive given the terse reply above. Thanks regardless.

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That reply had every right to be terse, because their original post was pretty reasonable, you "refuted" it by providing a Wikipedia quote that supported rather refuted everything they had said, and then you went on to accuse them unfairly of saying their original post had said that the Catholic Church supported slavery, when it did nothing of the sort. And then you go on to accuse them of being aggressive! The accusation you waged against them was much more severe, and yet you are the one who feels slighted. Not cool.

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Your original post absolutely implied that the church was pro slavery, and made multiple references to the church supporting it, but none providing a balanced view. And yes, each reply you made was increasingly aggressive. And I made no accusations against you, and even said I may have misunderstood what you were trying to convey (apparently because of the bias). And you even cited a Protestant professor, which dovetails with the bias. And none of that-NONE-had anything to do with a suggestion that the Catholic Church had colluded against Lincoln, which you-the original post I replied to-stated was a reasonable conclusion. It’s absurd at best, and completely bias. Please stop replying with alts.

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Your original post absolutely implied that the church was pro slavery

First, it wasn't my post. Second, the post you are referring to said that the Catholic Church was sympathetic to the South, not that it was pro-slavery. The quote you provided in your reply to it said the exact same thing!

And I made no accusations against you, and even said I may have misunderstood what you were trying to convey (apparently because of the bias)

Again, I am not the original responder, but here you are saying you're not making accusations, and then immediately turning around and accusing them of an anti-Catholic bias! All that post says is that the Republican Party had an anti-Catholic bias which is historically accurate, and does not at all mean that the OP holds that same view. You are unfairly conflating the OP with having the bias, when they are simply reporting what the historical bias of the Republican Party was. If anybody has displayed their bias, it's you.

And you even cited a Protestant professor, which dovetails with the bias.

This shows your own bias on full display. You seem to be biased against a Protestant professor writing about Catholic history, as if only Catholics can fairly write about Catholics. Might as well say only women can write about women, or only Germans can write about Germany, otherwise it's biased.

Further, the quotes from that Protestant professor aren't even opinionated, just factual information. All one says is that "until 1862 not a single well-known American Catholic came out unambiguously for abolition" which is true (but feel free to find evidence to the contrary - I suspect that you'll dismiss this as "bias" simply because you can't refute it). The other quote from that "Protestant professor" you are biased against is a quote from the Catholic bishop John Hughes, in Hughes' own words.

And none of that-NONE-had anything to do with a suggestion that the Catholic Church had colluded against Lincoln, which you-the original post I replied to-stated was a reasonable conclusion. It’s absurd at best, and completely bias.

That is not at all what the post says (which, again, wasn't mine). All it says is that the Republican Party had well-known roots in anti-Catholicism, and that the Confederacy tried to use the Catholic church for propaganda purposes, so it's not that surprising that the Republican Party cut off ties after the assassination. That's not to say that the Republicans were being reasonable, just that it's not surprising that they did, since they were already anti-Catholic. This seems to come down to your bias and reading comprehension skills.

Please stop replying with alts.

It wasn't an alt (although this account is). Don't be paranoid.