Today Americans in general do not discriminate against a Catholic candidate just for being Catholic. Indeed, the majority of the Supreme Court is now Catholic.

But on the other hand, a new attitude of suspicion of the Catholic Church has arisen among some in the U.S. due to the sexual abuse of children by priests and the apparent cover-up by church authorities.

The astonishing popularity of the grade-B novel by Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, is instructive. I was amazed at how many people have asked me (and stilll ask me!) about The Da Vinci Code as though it was some new, hitherto undiscovered, 5th Gospel. It’s a pretty good suspense novel, but then so are the novels of John Grisham and nobody thinks of his work as religious revelation.

The huge response to Brown’s novel, I believe, is due, at least in part, to the fact that he cleverly used the device of a Catholic “secret society” (Opus Dei) to create the dramatic tension in the novel and used the Catholic Church’s actual invention of the falsehood that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute (she wasn’t) to make his fictional projection of secret-keeping onto the Catholic Church more plausible.

Many, many people, both Protestants and Catholics, ask me ‘what other secrets do you think they are hiding?’ This is a remarkable response to an otherwise unremarkable work of fiction.

I think The Da Vinci Code simply tapped into the national revulsion over the fact that some in the hierarchy of the actual (i.e. non-fictional) Catholic Church were knowingly passing sex abusing priests from one unsuspecting church to another and keeping their history secret, thus increasingly the number of victims. This came into vivid relief with the deposition of Cardinal Law in Boston.

I think the net cultural result was an increasingly negative view of the American Catholic Church; at least that has been my unscientific observation.

Has this undercurrent of suspicion translated into discrimination against Catholics per se? Well, not in the case of John Kerry or Samuel Alito, clearly. Discrimination equals prejudice plus power, the ability to enforce your prejudice and create patterns of discrimination in hiring, housing, education and so forth.

While I think this climate of suspicion has had a negative effect on the views of Americans of many religious persuasions about the Catholic Church hierarchy, I do not myself observe a new pattern of discrimination against individual Catholics.

I will be interested to read what my Catholic colleagues write this week.