Centennial moment: 1928 presidential election

With the Republican National Convention under way in Tampa and the Democratic National Convention set for next week in Charlotte, N.C., the 2012 presidential election is kicking into high gear. Catholicism is one of the big headlines in this year's contest, not least because both vice presidential candidates — Republican U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan and Democratic Vice President Joe Biden — are Catholic, the first time that's occurred in U.S. history.

That got us thinking about another milestone in U.S. presidential election history — the 1928 nomination of Al Smith as the Democratic candidate for U.S. president. Smith's nod marked the first time a Catholic had been nominated for the highest office in the land, and it unleashed a wave of anti-Catholic vitriol across the nation.

Leave it to Our Sunday Visitor founder Bishop John F. Noll to take up his pen to defend the Church against the hateful accusations leveled against it at the time. In a chapter dedicated to the prelate in his book "Patriotic Leaders of the Church," author John Fink details Bishop Noll's actions:

"Bishop Noll assembled a huge scrapbook of the anti-Catholic literature that suddenly flooded the country. He duplicated them by Photostat and distributed them to other members of the hierarchy, important priests, and various civil leaders.  …

"Each week in Our Sunday Visitor, Bishop Noll took up the latest batch of accusations and patiently answered them point by point from the writings of historians and theologians. At the same time he was careful not to urge his readers to vote for Smith or to impugn the Republican Party in any way. As a matter of fact, the entire Catholic Church in the United States was careful in this respect. No cardinal, archbishop, or bishop endorsed Smith. The annual bishops’ meeting, usually held in October, was purposely postponed until mid-November so nobody would suspect that the bishops met to discuss politics. The convention of the National Council of Catholic Men was also postponed for the same reason, and when the Knights of Columbus met in August, the chairman opened the proceedings by declaring that “if any delegate should so much as mention the name of either candidate for the presidency, he will be declared out of order.” …

 "Al Smith, 'The Happy Warrior' as Franklin D. Roosevelt had called him, went down in what has been called 'the most glorious defeat ever experienced by a presidential candidate.' However, Bishop Noll felt that this defeat did no lasting harm to the Catholic Church. In fact, it might have done some good because it brought bigotry out into the open and gave many fair-minded people an opportunity, for many of them the first such opportunity, to learn the truth about the teachings of the Catholic Church."

To read more about Archbishop Noll's many patriotic contributions to the country, check out Fink's chapter on him.