The Knights of Columbus vs. the Klan: When Catholic Men Fought Back by Jeff Callaway

The Knights of Columbus vs. the Klan: When Catholic Men Fought Back

by Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

Introduction: When the Cross Burned Against Catholics

Picture America in the 1920s, not the jazz and flappers version they teach in sanitized history books, but the real thing. The Second Ku Klux Klan, millions strong and growing like a cancer across the heartland, burning crosses not just in front of Black families but at Catholic churches, Jewish synagogues, and immigrant neighborhoods. This was not the defeated South's last gasp of resistance. This was mainstream America, from Oregon to Indiana, from Colorado to Maine, where one in three white Protestant men in some states wore the hood and called it patriotism.

The Klan claimed they were saving America, defending one hundred percent Americanism against foreign threats. And who were these threats? Anyone who wasn't white, Protestant, and native-born. Catholics especially. We were accused of serving Rome before America, of storing weapons in our churches for some imagined papal invasion, of loyalty to a foreign power that would destroy the Republic. They called our schools indoctrination centers. They called our priests subversives. They called our faith incompatible with freedom.

They were wrong. And Catholic men proved it, not with words alone but with action that shook the foundations of organized hatred in America.

This is not a story of passive Catholic suffering, of turning the other cheek while our churches burned and our children were threatened. This is the story of the Knights of Columbus and other Catholic men who stood their ground when bigotry marched through American streets wrapped in the American flag and carrying a burning cross. This is about Catholic masculinity tested in the furnace of persecution and emerging refined as steel, about faith defended not just in courtrooms but on the streets of South Bend and Steubenville and Denver.

This is about what happens when good men decide that evil will go no further.

The Poisoned Soil: Anti-Catholicism in America

The hatred didn't spring up overnight in 1920. It had deep roots, twisted and gnarled, reaching back to colonial times when Catholics were banned from holding office, when priests said Mass in secret, when professing the Catholic faith could cost you everything.

America was born Protestant, specifically Protestant in a way that saw Rome as the Antichrist and the Pope as the enemy of all free men. The Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s made anti-Catholicism its central platform. Convents were burned. Catholics were beaten in the streets. It was acceptable, even fashionable, to hate us.

When waves of Catholic immigrants arrived from Ireland in the 1840s, fleeing starvation and British oppression, they were met with contempt and violence. The Irish were considered subhuman by many Americans, depicted in cartoons as ape-like creatures, accused of bringing poverty and crime and popery to America's shores. Then came the Germans, the Italians, the Poles, the Czechs, millions upon millions of Catholic immigrants who worked in the steel mills and coal mines, who built the railroads and the cities, who wanted nothing more than a chance at the freedom they had been denied in the old country.

But America didn't want them. Not really. America wanted their labor but despised their faith.

By the early twentieth century, Catholics had established themselves as Americans through blood and sweat. They served in the military, opened businesses, raised families, built churches and schools. But the old prejudices never died. They merely waited for the right moment, the right vehicle, to surge back with renewed venom.

That vehicle was the Ku Klux Klan, reborn in 1915.

The Invisible Empire Rises Again

On Thanksgiving night in 1915, on top of Stone Mountain, Georgia, a former preacher and professional con man named William Joseph Simmons set a cross ablaze and declared the Ku Klux Klan restored. He had watched D.W. Griffith's film "The Birth of a Nation" and saw opportunity. The movie portrayed the original Klan as heroes, noble defenders of white civilization against the supposed barbarism of freed slaves. It was propaganda disguised as art, lies dressed up as history, and it ignited something dark in the American psyche.

Simmons combined the mythology of the first Klan with the anxieties of the modern age. World War I had just ended, and America was frightened. The Russian Revolution brought communism to Europe. Labor strikes swept the nation. Black Americans who had served in the war were demanding their rights. Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe kept arriving. The world was changing, and change terrified people who wanted to preserve what they imagined was a pure, Protestant America that had never actually existed.

The Klan grew slowly at first, but in 1920 they hired professional marketers Edward Young Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler, who turned the organization into a money-making machine. For ten dollars, you got a hood, a robe, and membership in what they called the Invisible Empire. Recruiters worked on commission. Grand Dragons and Wizards and all manner of ridiculous titles were invented to make small men feel important. And the message was simple, seductive, and poisonous: America is under attack, and only the Klan can save it.

By 1924, the Klan claimed over four million members nationwide. In states like Indiana and Oregon and Colorado, they controlled entire state governments. They elected mayors, sheriffs, judges, governors. They weren't a fringe movement. They were mainstream, respectable even, with women's auxiliaries and youth groups and public parades in broad daylight.

And Catholics were their primary target in many Northern and Western states.

A Klan pamphlet from 1921 titled "The Ku Klux Klan or the Knights of Columbus Klan" referred to the Knights of Columbus as the Pope's Knights of Mob and Murder, his Militia of Christ, his pliant tools who have bound themselves together in a secret, unholy compact to destroy our free American Public School system, our Constitution and its guarantees. Another Klan publication identified the Knights of Columbus as the organization most interested in the destruction of the Ku Klux Klan.

They were right about that last part. The Knights were indeed interested in destroying the Klan, or at least in destroying its power to harm the innocent and spread lies about the Catholic Church.

The Knights of Columbus: Men of Faith and Action

To understand what happened next, you need to understand who the Knights of Columbus were and why they existed in the first place.

In 1882, in the basement of St. Mary's Church in New Haven, Connecticut, a young priest named Father Michael McGivney gathered a group of Catholic men together. These were working men, immigrants and sons of immigrants, men who faced discrimination in employment and social life simply because of their faith. They had families to support, but if the breadwinner died, those families often faced destitution. Protestant fraternal organizations offered mutual aid and insurance, but they excluded Catholics.

Father McGivney founded the Knights of Columbus to fill that need, to provide Catholic men with insurance and fraternal support, to strengthen their faith and give them pride in their identity as both Catholics and Americans. The organization was named after Christopher Columbus, the Catholic explorer who had brought Christianity to the New World. The Knights wore swords at formal ceremonies, not as weapons but as symbols of their willingness to defend the faith.

By the 1920s, the Knights of Columbus had grown into a major force in American Catholic life, with hundreds of thousands of members organized into councils across the country. During World War I, they had established huts and recreation centers for soldiers, serving men of all faiths and races at a time when segregation was the law in much of America. They had proven their patriotism with blood and treasure.

But patriotism wasn't enough for the Klan. To the Klan, being Catholic meant you could never be truly American.

The Knights understood what was at stake. This wasn't just about defending their own honor. This was about defending the right of Catholics to exist freely in America, to practice their faith without persecution, to educate their children as they saw fit, to participate fully in American life without being treated as second-class citizens or foreign agents.

So they fought back. They fought in the courts and in the press and in the streets. They fought with lawyers and with fists. They fought with the weapons of truth and, when necessary, with their physical courage.

The Battle for Truth: Fighting the Bogus Oath

One of the Klan's most effective weapons was a document known as the Bogus Oath, supposedly taken by Fourth Degree Knights of Columbus. According to this fabrication, Knights swore to wage eternal war against Protestants and Freemasons, to flay and burn and boil and kill heretics when called upon by church authorities, to vote only for Catholics and work to overthrow the United States government in favor of papal rule.

Every word was a lie. The real Fourth Degree oath was about patriotism and service to country. But lies spread faster than truth, and the Bogus Oath spread like wildfire.

The Klan distributed hundreds of thousands of copies. During the 1928 presidential campaign, when Catholic Al Smith ran for president, they printed a million copies in an attempt to defeat him. A United States Representative actually read the Bogus Oath into the Congressional Record, giving it an air of legitimacy.

The Knights responded aggressively. In 1921, they established a Historical Commission to combat anti-Catholic slanders. They offered rewards of up to twenty-five thousand dollars to anyone who could prove the Bogus Oath was authentic. No one ever could, but that didn't stop the Klan from continuing to distribute it.

The Knights then took the fight to the courts, filing libel lawsuits against distributors of the Bogus Oath. They won case after case, forcing Klan-affiliated newspapers and publishers to pay fines or face jail time. Eventually, the Klan stopped publishing the fake oath, though it continued to circulate in underground channels for years.

But the Knights didn't stop with defensive measures. They went on offense, publishing books and pamphlets that told the truth about Catholic contributions to America and exposed the Klan's profit motives and moral bankruptcy. They formed a Racial Contributions Series that included books celebrating the achievements of Black Americans, Jewish Americans, and German Americans, all groups targeted by the Klan's hatred.

The Knights understood that fighting bigotry required more than just defending Catholics. It required defending the truth and defending all victims of hatred and lies.

The Oregon School Case: Religious Liberty on Trial

Nowhere did the Klan wield more power than in Oregon, where a relatively small Catholic population faced an organized campaign to eliminate Catholic education entirely.

In 1922, backed by approximately fourteen thousand Klansmen and allied anti-Catholic organizations like the Scottish Rite Masons, Oregon voters narrowly approved the Compulsory Education Act. The law required all children between ages eight and sixteen to attend public schools, effectively outlawing Catholic parochial schools and other private schools. Parents who refused could face jail time and heavy fines.

The intent was clear: destroy Catholic education and force Catholic children into public schools where they would be Americanized, which meant stripped of their Catholic identity.

Archbishop Alexander Christie of Portland recognized the existential threat. He traveled to Chicago to meet with the Knights of Columbus Supreme Council. We are at the end of our resources, he told them.

The Knights pledged ten thousand dollars immediately and promised whatever additional funds were necessary to fight the law. They partnered with the American Civil Liberties Union, whose associate director Roger Nash Baldwin was a friend of Luke E. Hart, the Knights' Supreme Advocate and future Supreme Knight.

The lead plaintiff was the Society of Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, a religious order that had operated schools in Oregon since 1859. Joined by Hill Military Academy, a nonsectarian private school, they filed suit arguing the law violated the Fourteenth Amendment by depriving them of property without due process and by interfering with the liberty of parents to direct their children's education.

The Knights funded the legal challenge. J.P. Kavanaugh, a former circuit court judge and Knight of Columbus, led the legal team for the Sisters.

In March 1924, a federal district court ruled the Oregon law unconstitutional. The state appealed to the Supreme Court.

On June 1, 1925, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the Sisters in Pierce v. Society of Sisters. Justice James Clark McReynolds wrote that the fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments of this Union rest excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state, McReynolds declared.

It was a landmark victory for religious liberty and parental rights, a precedent that has been cited in over one hundred Supreme Court cases since, including cases involving marriage, reproductive rights, and educational freedom. It established definitively that parents, not the state, have the primary right to direct the upbringing and education of their children.

The Knights of Columbus had saved Catholic education in America, and in doing so, they had defended the rights of all Americans against government overreach.

South Bend: When Students Fought Back

While lawyers fought in courtrooms, another kind of resistance was taking shape on the streets of South Bend, Indiana, home to the University of Notre Dame.

Indiana in 1924 was Klan country. An estimated one in three white Protestant men in the state were members. The state government was controlled by Klan-backed officials. D.C. Stephenson, the charismatic Grand Dragon of Indiana, wielded enormous political power and dreamed of using Indiana as a springboard to national influence.

In May 1924, the Klan announced plans for a three-day rally and parade in South Bend. It was a calculated provocation. South Bend had a large Catholic population, and seventy-five percent of Notre Dame's nearly two thousand students were Catholic. The Klan wanted to demonstrate their power, to show that even in a Catholic stronghold, they could march unopposed.

They were wrong.

On the morning of May 17, as Klansmen began arriving by train and automobile, wearing their white robes and carrying their regalia, Notre Dame students poured into downtown South Bend. University President Father Matthew Walsh had urged the students to ignore the Klan and stay on campus. The students ignored him.

What happened next became legend.

The students, roughly five hundred strong, confronted the Klansmen. At first, they were almost playful, offering to help confused Klansmen find their way, then leading them down alleys where they were surrounded and relieved of their robes and hoods. Students ripped the disguises off Klan members, exposing them to public ridicule. They chased Klansmen through the streets.

The confrontation centered on the Klan headquarters at the corner of Wayne and Michigan streets. A fiery cross made of red light bulbs hung in the third-floor window. Outside, a grocery store had barrels of potatoes for sale.

The students grabbed the potatoes and began hurling them at the Klan headquarters, shattering windows and knocking out most of the lights on the electric cross. Quarterback Harry Stuhldreher, one of the famed Four Horsemen of Notre Dame, reportedly made an impossible shot that took out the uppermost bulb.

When one Klan leader pulled a pistol and pointed it at a student, all hell broke loose. The students attacked in earnest. Cars were overturned. Klansmen were beaten with fists and whatever came to hand. The riot continued for hours.

On the second day, May 18, the violence escalated. More Klansmen arrived, and this time they came prepared to fight. A pool hall called Hully and Mike's became a makeshift hospital and retreat point for Notre Dame students taking a beating. Armed Klansmen and armed students clashed in running battles through downtown South Bend.

But the students didn't back down. They held their ground. And the Klan, humiliated and bloodied, began to retreat.

By the third day, the Klan's planned parade was in shambles. The National Guard was finally called in to restore order. Over one hundred people were arrested, but significantly, Father Walsh never disciplined a single Notre Dame student for fighting the Klan.

The Klan sent a scathing letter to the university president claiming that if the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan assembled in South Bend last Saturday had been as lawless as your bunch of Anarchist students, they would have wiped the Notre Dame buildings off the map.

It was a hollow threat. The truth was the Klan had been routed by Catholic college students who refused to be intimidated. The Klan never held their promised second rally in South Bend. Their aura of invincibility had been shattered.

Notre Dame's football team went on to have a perfect season that year, capturing the national championship. The Fighting Irish had earned their name not just on the football field but in the streets, standing up to hatred with courage and fists.

Ohio: The Knights of the Flaming Circle

While Notre Dame students fought in South Bend, a different kind of resistance was forming in the steel towns and mining communities of Ohio's Mahoning Valley.

In August 1923, a Klan motorcade from East Liverpool and Chester, West Virginia, rolled into Steubenville, Ohio, for a rally and dinner at a local hotel. Steubenville was a divided city. One side was predominantly white Protestant, many of them Klan sympathizers. The other side was heavily Italian and Irish Catholic, working-class immigrants who had built lives in the steel mills and found the Klan's harassment intolerable.

When the Klansmen gathered at the hotel, they found themselves surrounded by between two and three thousand angry anti-Klan protesters. Cars were overturned. Klansmen were attacked with bricks, bottles, and clubs. The violence was intense, though remarkably no one was killed.

Out of this confrontation emerged a militant anti-Klan organization called the Knights of the Flaming Circle, founded by Dr. W.S. McGuigan, an Italian immigrant dentist from Niles. The Knights of the Flaming Circle were everything the Klan was not. Where the Klan excluded immigrants, the Flaming Circle welcomed everyone except those who would qualify for Klan membership. Where the Klan wore white robes and hoods to hide their faces, the Flaming Circle wore white robes with red circles and an image of the Statue of Liberty, and they left their faces uncovered. Where the Klan burned crosses on the lawns of their victims, the Flaming Circle burned tires in flaming circles on the lawns of known Klansmen.

The Flaming Circle spread quickly across Ohio and into neighboring states. They were composed largely of Catholic immigrants, workers from the steel mills and factories, men who had nothing to lose and everything to fight for.

In June 1924, when the Klan attempted to parade through Niles, the Flaming Circle blocked them, leading to a two-hour clash that forced the Klan to postpone. A truce was arranged, both sides agreeing to stop burning crosses and circles. It didn't last.

The Klan announced a major parade in Niles for November 1, 1924, right before the elections. The Flaming Circle promised a counter-demonstration with ten thousand participants. Tensions were explosive. On October 29, someone bombed the mayor's house because he refused to revoke the Klan's parade permit.

On November 1, Niles became a war zone. At Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church, seventeen hundred people attended Mass at dawn, then went home to prepare for battle. The Flaming Circle gathered at a park across from General Electric, armed to the teeth, setting up blockades.

When the Klan arrived, violence erupted immediately. Gunfire echoed through the streets. At least thirteen people were wounded. The riot lasted eighteen hours. Only the arrival of the National Guard and the imposition of martial law brought it to an end. Over one hundred people were indicted, from both the Klan and the Flaming Circle.

The Knights of the Flaming Circle represented a different kind of Catholic resistance than the Knights of Columbus. Where the Knights of Columbus fought primarily through legal and political means, the Flaming Circle met violence with violence, intimidation with intimidation. They were not patient with turning the other cheek. They believed that the Klan only understood force, and they were willing to provide it.

History does not always look kindly on those who choose violence, even in self-defense. But the men of the Flaming Circle saw their families threatened, their churches targeted, their faith mocked, and they responded the only way they knew how. They were working men, immigrants, people who had experienced violence and oppression in the old country and refused to accept it in the new.

The Catholic Press: Warriors with Words

While some Catholics fought with fists and lawyers fought in courts, the Catholic press waged its own crucial battle against the Klan.

In Denver, Colorado, where the Klan controlled state government and had elected a governor who promised to ban sacramental wine, the Denver Catholic Register became a relentless voice of truth and resistance. The editor was a young priest named Father Matthew Smith, later Monsignor Smith, who refused to be intimidated.

The Klan targeted the Register immediately, calling local businesses and threatening them if they advertised in the Catholic paper. They tried to strangle the Register economically. It didn't work. The paper's loyal readers and advertisers held firm.

Father Smith used the Register to expose Klan activities, to educate Catholics about their faith in response to Klan lies, and to ridicule the absurdity of Klan propaganda. When a Protestant minister attempted to explain Catholic doctrine in a Klan newspaper, Father Smith mockingly suggested that if the Klan really wanted to understand Catholic teaching, they should buy a Baltimore Catechism. It costs only ten cents, he noted.

The Register covered the proliferation of fake former priests and nuns who traveled the Klan circuit, speaking at rallies about the supposed depravity of Catholic religious life. One such charlatan called Sister Angel claimed to have been a Franciscan nun for one year when she was in her twenties. She was fifty-eight at the time of her anti-Catholic lectures. The Register reported that her talks were so obscene that they refrained from publishing details for fear of being jailed for distributing obscenity.

For his courage in speaking truth, Father Smith was nearly run down in the streets on at least six occasions by cars that swerved toward him as he walked to his office. He kept walking. He kept writing. He kept fighting.

Across the country, Catholic newspapers played similar roles. They were frontline warriors in the information battle, countering Klan propaganda with facts, exposing Klan tactics, strengthening Catholic resolve. They reminded Catholics that they had nothing to be ashamed of, that their faith was not un-American, that they had every right to defend themselves and their institutions.

The Church's Response: Bishops and Believers

The Catholic hierarchy in America understood the danger the Klan posed. Bishops issued pastoral letters condemning religious bigotry and affirming the compatibility of Catholic faith with American citizenship. They encouraged Catholics to vote, to participate in civic life, to stand up for their rights.

But the bishops also faced a delicate balance. They didn't want to appear too militant, too foreign, too defensive in ways that might confirm Klan propaganda about Catholic disloyalty. They wanted Catholics to be seen as good Americans who also happened to be Catholic.

This tension between assertive defense and cautious respectability shaped much of the Catholic response. The Knights of Columbus embodied this balance well, fighting aggressively but through legal and political channels, demonstrating both courage and commitment to American institutions.

Yet the grassroots response often exceeded what church leaders preferred. The Notre Dame students, the Knights of the Flaming Circle, the Catholic workers who refused to back down, these were not always following carefully calibrated strategies approved by bishops. They were responding from the gut, from a sense of honor and justice, from a refusal to be treated as less than full citizens.

The Klan persecution had an unintended effect. It strengthened Catholic identity and solidarity. It forced Catholics to articulate clearly what they believed and why they belonged in America. It accelerated the integration of Catholic immigrants into the broader American culture, even as it reinforced the distinctiveness of Catholic community and institutions.

Catholics learned that they could not rely on the goodwill of the Protestant majority to protect their rights. They had to fight for those rights, to organize politically, to use the courts, to stand up physically when necessary. They had to prove through action that they were worthy of respect and equal treatment.

The Klan's Collapse: Scandals and Decline

The Klan's power in the mid-1920s seemed unshakeable, but it collapsed with stunning speed. Scandals, hypocrisy, greed, and resistance all played a role.

In Indiana, Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson, the charismatic leader who had built the state Klan into a political powerhouse, was convicted in November 1925 of abducting, raping, and murdering a young woman named Madge Oberholtzer. The details were sordid and horrifying. Stephenson, who had presented himself as a moral crusader defending white womanhood, was revealed as a monster.

His conviction shattered the Klan's moral authority. Stephenson, seeking revenge against political allies who refused to save him, released evidence of Klan corruption and political manipulation. Numerous politicians were implicated. The Klan in Indiana collapsed almost overnight.

Similar scandals erupted in other states. In Colorado, Klan leaders were exposed for embezzlement and moral hypocrisy. The organization that claimed to stand for law and order was revealed as a criminal enterprise enriching its leaders.

The Immigration Act of 1924 also undercut one of the Klan's primary recruiting tools. The act severely restricted immigration, implementing a racist quota system that limited immigration from southern and eastern Europe. With immigration reduced, the Klan's warnings about immigrant hordes invading America lost much of their appeal.

Economic prosperity in the late 1920s made people less anxious, less susceptible to the Klan's fear-mongering. When people felt secure, they were less interested in scapegoating minorities.

But resistance also mattered. The Knights of Columbus had won legal victories that established precedents protecting religious liberty. Catholic voters had mobilized politically, defeating Klan-backed candidates in many areas. The Catholic press had exposed Klan tactics and lies. And on the streets, from South Bend to Steubenville to Denver, Catholics and their allies had shown that the Klan could be confronted and defeated physically.

By 1930, Klan membership had collapsed to an estimated forty-five thousand from its peak of over four million. The Invisible Empire had been exposed as a paper tiger, propped up by secrecy, intimidation, and lies. When the light of truth and the force of resistance hit it, it crumbled.

Pierce v. Society of Sisters: The Lasting Victory

Of all the victories Catholics won against the Klan, none proved more enduring than Pierce v. Society of Sisters. The Supreme Court's unanimous decision in 1925 established fundamental principles about parental rights, religious liberty, and limits on state power.

The child is not the mere creature of the state. Those ten words encapsulated a philosophy of human dignity and freedom that stood in stark contrast to the totalitarian ideologies then emerging in Europe and the authoritarian impulses present in America.

The Pierce decision has been cited in major Supreme Court cases for a hundred years. It was cited in Griswold v. Connecticut, which established a right to marital privacy. It was cited in Roe v. Wade. It was cited in cases involving educational rights, family autonomy, and religious freedom.

The decision affirmed that while the state has an interest in education and can regulate schools, it cannot monopolize education or eliminate alternatives to public schools. Parents have the right to choose how their children are educated, including the right to choose religious education.

For Catholics, this was existential. Catholic schools were not just about teaching reading and arithmetic with a crucifix on the wall. They were about forming children in the faith, about transmitting a worldview and a way of life, about creating a community of believers who understood that their ultimate loyalty was not to any earthly state but to God.

The Klan understood this, which is why they targeted Catholic schools so aggressively. They knew that if they could destroy Catholic education, they could break the back of Catholic community and identity in America.

The Knights of Columbus, by funding and supporting the legal challenge that became Pierce v. Society of Sisters, saved not just Catholic schools but the principle of educational pluralism and parental rights in America.

Catholic Teaching on Religious Freedom

The battles of the 1920s prefigured themes that would later be explicitly articulated in Catholic teaching on religious liberty.

At the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the Church issued Dignitatis Humanae, the Declaration on Religious Freedom. It taught that the right to religious freedom is based on the dignity of the human person and that this right must be recognized in the constitutional order of society.

The document stated that religious communities have the right not to be prevented from publicly teaching and bearing witness to their faith by word and deed. It affirmed that parents have the right to determine the kind of religious education their children receive.

These principles were not new to Catholic theology, but Dignitatis Humanae gave them clear, authoritative expression. And they were principles that Catholics in 1920s America had defended with their wallets, their votes, their legal arguments, and their fists.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that nobody may be forced to act against his convictions in religious matters in private or in public. It recognizes that there have been times when the Church herself has failed to live up to this principle, but it affirms that the right to religious liberty is rooted in the very nature of the human person.

The Catholic men who fought the Klan understood this instinctively, even if they couldn't quote theological texts. They knew that their faith was not a private hobby to be practiced in secret. It was a public reality that shaped their entire lives, their families, their communities, their understanding of justice and truth. And they knew that when government or mob sought to suppress that reality, they had not just a right but a duty to resist.

What Catholic Masculinity Looks Like

The story of Catholics confronting the Klan in the 1920s reveals something essential about authentic Catholic masculinity.

It is not machismo or aggression for its own sake. It is not violence divorced from principle. But neither is it passivity in the face of evil or cowardice disguised as prudence.

Catholic masculinity stands for truth. The Knights of Columbus spent money and time and energy fighting the Bogus Oath because they understood that lies must be confronted and defeated. They couldn't allow a fabricated oath to define their organization or their faith. Truth matters, and men of faith defend it.

Catholic masculinity protects the vulnerable. The legal battle to save Catholic schools was ultimately about protecting children's right to an education formed by faith and protecting parents' right to fulfill their duty to raise their children in the truth. When the state claimed ownership of children's souls, Catholic men said no.

Catholic masculinity stands firm under pressure. When cars swerved toward Father Matthew Smith, he kept walking. When the Klan threatened businesses that advertised in the Denver Catholic Register, those businesses and the paper itself kept publishing. When Klansmen marched through South Bend, students didn't hide in their dorms. They went downtown and faced them.

Catholic masculinity is willing to fight when necessary. This is perhaps the most uncomfortable truth for modern sensibilities, but it's a truth nonetheless. The Notre Dame students who threw potatoes and threw punches, the men of the Knights of the Flaming Circle who met Klan violence with their own violence, they were not perfect. Their tactics were not always prudent. But they understood something that comfortable, safe Christianity often forgets: there are times when evil must be physically opposed, when turning the other cheek means allowing the innocent to be harmed.

The Church has always recognized the legitimacy of self-defense and the defense of the innocent. Catholic teaching on just war and legitimate defense acknowledges that there are circumstances when force is necessary to protect human life and dignity. The men who fought the Klan in the streets operated in that moral framework, however imperfectly.

But notice also what Catholic masculinity in this story is not. It is not individualistic. The Knights of Columbus was an organization, a brotherhood, a community of men supporting each other and acting together. The Notre Dame students fought as a group. The Flaming Circle was a collective response. Catholic masculinity is communal, built on solidarity and mutual support.

It is not divorced from faith. These men fought because of their Catholicism, not in spite of it. Their resistance was rooted in their understanding of human dignity, religious freedom, and the call to defend truth and justice. They prayed and went to Mass and drew strength from the sacraments even as they prepared for confrontation.

It is not reckless. Yes, there were riots and violence, but the primary Catholic response was legal, political, and educational. The Knights of Columbus fought in courts and through publications. Catholic voters organized and defeated Klan candidates. The goal was not chaos but victory for justice through legitimate means.

This is what Catholic manhood looks like when faith is under attack: organized, principled, courageous, and willing to sacrifice. It is men saying, "This far and no further. We will defend our faith, our families, our freedom, and we will not be moved by threats or violence or lies."

The Forgotten Heroes and the Fading Memory

Here's a question worth asking: Why has this story largely faded from popular memory?

Most Americans, including many Catholics, don't know about the battles between the Knights of Columbus and the Klan. They don't know about the Notre Dame students fighting in the streets of South Bend. They don't know about Pierce v. Society of Sisters or the Knights of the Flaming Circle or Father Matthew Smith standing up to Klan intimidation in Denver.

Part of the answer is that Catholic institutions themselves often downplayed these stories. As historian William Vance Trollinger Jr. has noted, Catholic universities like Notre Dame and the University of Dayton barely mentioned the Klan confrontations in their official histories. There was a desire, especially as Catholics became more integrated into mainstream American society, not to appear too militant, too defensive, too different.

Catholic leaders wanted Catholics to be seen as thoroughly American, and that meant playing down conflicts that might suggest Catholics were a separate group or that they had been victims of serious persecution. Better to emphasize contributions to American society, patriotism, and harmony than to dwell on times when Catholics had to fight for their basic rights.

There's also a secular historical narrative that prefers to emphasize the Klan's racism against Black Americans and to minimize or ignore the Klan's anti-Catholicism. The civil rights movement rightly receives attention as a heroic struggle against racial injustice. But the Klan of the 1920s was as much or more focused on Catholics, Jews, and immigrants as it was on Black Americans, particularly in the North and West. That part of the story doesn't fit neatly into simplified narratives about race in America.

And honestly, modern Catholics often don't want to hear about a time when being Catholic meant being hated, persecuted, and physically attacked. We've become comfortable. We've forgotten what it cost our grandparents and great-grandparents to preserve the faith and pass it on to us.

But we need to remember. We need to know these stories. Because the battles these men fought are not over, even if the enemy wears different robes today.

Conclusion: The Legacy and the Challenge

The Knights of Columbus in the 1920s faced a massive, well-funded, politically powerful movement dedicated to destroying Catholic influence in America. The Klan had millions of members, controlled state governments, elected congressmen and governors and judges. They had the momentum of history and the protection of mainstream respectability.

But they lost.

They lost because Catholic men refused to accept persecution as their lot. They lost because the Knights of Columbus organized an effective legal and political resistance. They lost because Catholic voters mobilized. They lost because the Catholic press told the truth. They lost because Notre Dame students and Ohio steelworkers and countless other Catholics were willing to physically confront Klan intimidation.

The Klan lost because Catholic men stood their ground and said, "We are Americans. We have every right to practice our faith, educate our children, live our lives according to our beliefs. And we will fight for those rights with everything we have."

That legacy is ours to claim or to squander.

Today, Catholics face different challenges. We're not fighting the Klan, burning crosses, or defending our churches from mob violence. But we are fighting for religious liberty in courts and legislatures. We are defending Catholic schools and institutions against government mandates that would force us to violate our beliefs. We are resisting a culture that treats religious faith as a private eccentricity with no place in public life.

And too often, we are passive. We accept restrictions on our freedom. We go along to get along. We don't want to make waves or seem intolerant or old-fashioned. We've traded the clarity and courage of our ancestors for comfort and respectability.

The men who fought the Klan in the 1920s would not recognize us. They would wonder what happened to the fighting spirit, the willingness to sacrifice, the understanding that some things are worth defending no matter the cost.

They would ask us: If we're not willing to stand up for our faith when the costs are relatively small, when persecution means lawsuits and media criticism rather than burning crosses and street violence, what exactly do we believe? What are we willing to fight for?

The Knights of Columbus today, over two million strong, still exist as a force for Catholic faith and family values. They still support Catholic education, sponsor pro-life initiatives, provide charitable aid, and strengthen Catholic community. But do they have the same fire, the same willingness to confront evil directly, the same courage their predecessors showed in the 1920s?

That's a question every Catholic man must answer for himself.

The legacy of the Knights versus the Klan is not just about history. It's about identity. It's about understanding what it means to be a Catholic man in a culture that often views Catholicism with contempt or indifference.

It means standing for truth even when lies are more popular. It means protecting the vulnerable even when it costs you. It means organizing with other faithful men rather than facing the world alone. It means being willing to fight, legally and politically and if necessary physically, when evil threatens what you love.

It means understanding that the faith was not handed to us as a comfortable inheritance to be enjoyed in private. It was passed to us by people who suffered for it, who fought for it, who gave everything to preserve it. And we have a duty to pass it on to the next generation, equally strong or stronger.

The men who fought the Klan understood something essential: religious liberty is not a gift granted by government. It is a right inherent in human dignity, a right that comes from God. When government or mob tries to take it away, faithful men don't ask permission to defend it. They defend it.

The Klan thought Catholics were weak, divided, and fundamentally un-American. The Klan thought Catholics would fold under pressure, accept second-class citizenship, and abandon their distinctive faith to fit in.

The Klan was wrong. And the proof was written in courtrooms and in streets, in newspapers and in the halls of power, in the courage of ordinary Catholic men who refused to bow.

That same courage lives in us, if we choose to claim it. The same faith that inspired Father McGivney to found the Knights of Columbus, that drove the legal team in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, that sent Notre Dame students into the streets, that kept Father Matthew Smith walking despite threats against his life, that faith is ours.

The question is what we'll do with it.

Will we be men who stand firm when the culture demands we compromise? Will we organize and fight for truth and justice? Will we protect our children's right to an education formed by faith? Will we defend religious liberty for ourselves and for all people?

Or will we be the generation that squandered the inheritance bought with the blood and sweat and courage of those who came before?

The Knights of Columbus versus the Klan is a story about what Catholic masculinity looks like when tested by fire. It's about men who loved God and family and freedom more than they feared persecution or violence. It's about men who understood that faith without courage is dead, that belief without action is meaningless.

It's a story we need to remember. And more than that, it's a story we need to live.

Because the fight is not over. It never is. Every generation faces its own test, its own challenge to defend the faith and pass it on. The crosses burning on Catholic lawns in the 1920s have given way to more subtle but no less real attacks on Catholic belief and practice today.

The question remains the same: What will we do when the faith is under attack? Will we fight or will we fold?

The men of the Knights of Columbus in the 1920s have given us their answer. They fought. They stood firm. They won.

Now it's our turn. God give us the courage to be worthy of their example.

~by Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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