All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

Greg Kandra is a writer for the CBS Evening News. He's also a Roman Catholic deacon for the Diocese of Brooklyn, N.Y.

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Watching Pope Benedict step out of his limousine this morning and wave to the thousands cheering on the White House South Lawn, one thought crossed my mind: What would my grandparents think?

They were immigrants from Austria-Hungary (later known as Czechoslovakia) who settled in the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania, where my grandfather spent most of his life deep under the earth, mining coal. Their English was spotty, and their education slim. I don’t think my grandfather ever graduated high school. Together they raised five children in a rickety wooden row house not far from the coal mines. All the Hungarians and Poles and Slovaks clustered in one corner of the town. I don’t know that I’d call it a Catholic ghetto – but it was definitely off the beaten path.

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Greg Kandra is the Editor of Couric & Co.

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Well, it looks like the kerfuffle over John Edwards’ bloggers has blown over. They’ve both quit. But he certainly didn’t help matters. Edwards evidently hired people whose previously published comments in the blogosphere were, to put it mildly, distasteful. In fact, I’ll go one step further. They were offensive – especially to Catholics, some of whom were unstinting in their condemnation of Edwards and his employees.

It goes without saying that Edwards should have vetted these people better and displayed a little curiosity about what they had written, and what they believed. (Or, perhaps, he did vet them, did read what they had written, and didn’t see a problem with it – which opens a whole other can of worms and calls into question Edwards’ judgment.)

But the episode has drawn attention to an issue that strikes close to my own life – and the lives of about 60 million other Americans. It involves a particularly insidious form of bigotry, and the nagging suspicion that there is one remaining permissible prejudice in America. It is anti-Catholicism...

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