Its official rhetoric focused on the threat of the Catholic Church, using anti Catholicism and nativism.

The larger lesson is that this monarchical model of Catholicism, together with the hierarchy that attends it, has remained pretty much the same since the Counter Reformation.

But observers who have drawn comparisons to the Know Nothings, the racist, paranoid, anti Catholic, and anti immigrant party that surged in the 1850 s, are reading the movement far too superficially.