When a Catholic church got the Near Ground Zero Mosque treatment

“There is nothing new under the Sun”—that goes for the Near Ground Zero Mosque fight too.

That’s the message of the Rev. Kevin V. Madigan, the priest of the oldest Catholic church in New York state, which faced nasty resistance when it was proposed in 1785. You know how those Episcopalians can be.

Paul Vitello at The New York Times explains:

City officials in 18th-century New York urged project organizers to change the church’s initial location, on Broad Street, in what was then the heart of the city, to a site outside the city limits, at Barclay and Church. Unlike the organizers of Park51, who have resisted suggestions they move the project to avoid having a mosque so close to the killing field of ground zero, the Catholics complied, although they had no choice.

Then there were fears about nefarious foreign backers. Just as some opponents of Park51 have said that the $100 million-plus project will be financed by the same Saudi sheiks who bankroll terrorists, many early Protestants in the United States saw the pope as the enemy of democracy, and feared that the little church would be the bridgehead of a papal assault on the new American government.

Read the rest and the see the comparisons to the Park51 project here. Then let me know if you’re persuaded.