Under Fire? : Is anti-Catholic sentiment increasing? Some say yes and declare they’re not going to take it anymore.

Los Angeles public television station KCET airs “Stop the Church,” a controversial documentary about the Catholic church and AIDS, in which members of the activist group ACT UP disrupt Communion services at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral and sprawl on the floor in a “die in.”

Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder asks, “How much allegiance is there to the Pope?” in reference to Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, who went to Catholic grade schools and who publicly thanked the nuns who taught him.

National Public Radio and ABC-TV correspondent Cokie Roberts mentions on “This Week With David Brinkley” that she is a Catholic and is flooded with “vitriolic” hate mail blasting her religion.

Is the United States experiencing a rise in anti-Catholic sentiment? Some Catholics would say yes. “If you say: ‘Anti-Catholicism is alive and well,’ most people will look at you as if you’re crazy,” said Roberts, “but it’s true.”

On Thursday, a newly formed group whose spokesmen include William Bennett, former Secretary of Education and U.S. drug czar, took the offensive. The Catholic Campaign for America announced at a Washington, D.C., press conference that it has “had enough of Catholic-bashing.”

“We will attempt to speak in a level, even-tempered voice--nevertheless, a strong one--to say that as Catholics we don’t like to be bashed, ridiculed, made fun of,” said Bennett. “Sooner or later, Catholics were bound to say: ‘Look, we’re tired of being the easy target.’ ” Bennett and others are quick to point to comments about Thomas, whose confirmation hearings are scheduled to start Tuesday.

Father Gregory Coiro, a spokesman for the Los Angeles archdiocese, says that suggesting that American Catholics have divided loyalty is as offensive as saying American Jews are torn between the United States and Israel, which “is always looked upon as an anti-Semitic canard.”

Questions about Clarence Thomas’ religious beliefs amount to a religious test for public office, argues John W. Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, a religious liberties group in Charlottesville, Va. “If I were Catholic, I’d be pretty upset right now,” he said.

Other observers within the church--and without--say at the very least that prejudice against the nation’s 55 million Catholics persists and that bigotry in any form deserves attack.

Arthur Teitelbaum, Southern area director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith in Miami and supervisor of chapters in California, sees anti-Catholicism in sources ranging from “gutter-level extremist groups” to “casual cocktail party conversation, which is often innocuous in its intent but is poisonous in its effect.

“It is part of the mosaic of bigotry that exists in America,” Teitelbaum said, adding that any form is insidious and infectious. “When anti-Catholicism raises its ugly head, it is the responsibility of every Catholic and non-Catholic alike to repudiate it and attempt to quarantine it.”

Sociologist, author and Catholic priest Andrew Greeley, who wrote “An Ugly Little Secret: Anti-Catholicism in North America,” said anti-Catholicism is a “consistent and durable component of American life.”

Greeley and others say anti-Catholic ideas emanate from both fundamentalist Christian and intellectual circles.

“It’s this snobbish, ‘We know better’ intellectualism,” said Roberts. The idea persists “that anybody who is a practicing Catholic has got to be a little bit stupid or at least naive.”

A study released in April by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, commissioned by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and the Knights of Columbus, concluded that “long-term trends in (news) coverage have been less than favorable to the Church” and that “the language used to describe the Church increasingly carries connotations of conservatism, oppressiveness and irrelevance.”

Los Angeles experienced its biggest wave of anti-Catholic hate crimes--as defined by the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations--from October, 1989, to July, 1990. Nine churches were vandalized a total of 15 times, with graffiti, smashed and decapitated statues and painted swastikas. Some of the incidents were related to the church’s stand on homosexuality and abortion. On Aug. 29, parishioners at St. Bruno’s Catholic Church in Whittier arrived at early Mass to find Satanic graffiti spray-painted on statues and on the church--and an unexploded pipe bomb.

Fringe groups continue to publish hate literature, available in some L.A. religious bookstores. In May, anti-Catholic comic books were found on car windshields in Oceanside. Comics by Jack Chick Publications of Chino, Calif., say for example, that the Pope is the Anti-Christ. The Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation, founded in Southern California, has been a well-known distributor of anti-Catholic literature across the country. One Alamo pamphlet claimed that Pope John Paul II, as a young Polish salesman, sold cyanide to the Nazis for use in Auschwitz. (Tony Alamo was recently arrested in Florida on charges of child abuse and tax evasion.)

“What we’re seeing is hatred. Not just hatred, but we’re seeing that hatred tolerated,” said Michael Schwartz, author of “The Persistent Prejudice: Anti-Catholicism in America.”

Schwartz said church officials have told him it is unofficial policy to downplay anti-Catholic vandalism or sentiment, hoping it will wither on its own. That attitude is “extremely mistaken,” he said, adding that American Catholics should follow the example of American Jews, calling attention to religious prejudice and making it unacceptable.

Coiro of the L.A. archdiocese said he has never heard of such a policy, but church officials do choose to ignore some incidents rather than draw attention to them.

“Part of the blame I place upon ourselves,” said Coiro. “We have not been vociferous enough in demanding equal treatment from our neighbors.”

Schwartz points his finger at some “upwardly mobile” Catholic politicians and academics as well.

“To certify themselves as independent thinkers, they have to lead the charge against the church,” said Schwartz, now a resident fellow in social policy at the Free Congress Foundation, a conservative public policy think tank in Washington. “When they’re leading the attack on the church, it’s open season for anyone else.”

One lay organization founded in 1973 has tried to be vociferous. The 18,000-member Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, based in Philadelphia, believes anti-Catholic incidents are on the rise and fights them by issuing statements, writing columns, aiding lawsuits and publishing newsletters, according to director for government affairs Patrick Riley.

Anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States can be traced back to this country’s Protestant foundations. It continued through waves of Catholic immigrants in the 19th Century and, many observers say, with the current wave of Latino and Asian immigrants.

Bias was fanned by such nativist groups as the Know Nothings in the 1850s and the American Protective Assn. in the 1880s. Churches were burned, convents attacked. The 1936 book “Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal,” a fraud, alleged that there were tunnels between monasteries and convents and that the resulting babies were strangled--and the book sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The Ku Klux Klan was actively anti-Catholic in the 1920s; such feeling helped defeat presidential candidate Al Smith in 1928.

Many Americans believed the election of John F. Kennedy as President in 1960 was an indication that anti-Catholic feeling in the United States was dying--or dead. But for others, recent events have disproved that notion.

Catholic teaching on issues such as abortion and homosexuality is a lightning rod for protest. But the distinction between criticizing a church position and unabashed Catholic-bashing can be a judgment call.

On Thursday, Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony said “Stop the Church” was the most “blatantly anti-Catholic” film he had ever seen and urged Southern Californians not to send donations to support KCET. Gay activists and free-speech proponents say Mahony is guilty of squelching free expression.

And Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice in Washington, a group that supports legal abortion, said: “Whenever (the bishops) are criticized for their position on abortion, they revert to ad hominem attacks--’This is anti-Catholicism, this is Catholic-bashing’--when this is part of the normal give-and-take of political life.”

“Sometimes bigotry is in the eye of the beholder, I have to admit that,” said Ted Mayer, executive director of the Southern California chapter of the Catholic League, who is an Episcopalian. He recalled sharing a stack of purportedly anti-Catholic cartoons with a group of Catholics; some roared with anger, others with laughter.

Some Catholics caution against hypersensitivity. In the June issue of Commonweal, an independent magazine edited by Catholic lay people, David R. Carlin Jr., a Democratic state senator and sociology professor in Rhode Island, wrote: “Let’s not toss the charge of anti-Catholicism about too casually, thereby adding Catholics to the list of those who refuse to debate, who prefer to silence their critics by charging them with some psychological infirmity or moral depravity.”

The solution may be more speech, not less. Said Coiro, “If someone wants to say something vehemently anti-Catholic, fine, let him say it. But I want everyone else to be able to say: ‘That man, that woman, is a bigot.’ ”