>>17649308Because they were Catholic, yes. America was founded largely as a Protestant nation of primarily English and Dutch stock - the Germans (Lutherans), Irish (Catholic), Italians (Catholic) and the like came in later as immigrants, not as settlers conquering a hostile land but as the disaffected poor moving into an established nation to steal opportunities for themselves.
It really doesn't help that Catholics and Protestants have a rather bloody history in continental Europe that involves all sorts of small regional pogroms that include, but are not limited to, allowing the Ottoman Turks into parts of Eastern Europe to slaughter or enslave populations of the opposing denomination, which is the sort of religious persecution that often comes up in discussions about early America. If you flee to the other side of the world and put up with Yellow Fever and Dysentery to get away from Catholics, and then they move to your land and want to become part of it, you'd look at it warily too. We just come from a generally secular modern background where people just don't care as much about that stuff anymore, OP.