one of the two co‐workers at this final exchange laughed,” according to Murray.

Surerus does not dispute the incident.

After this happened, Wilson texted with the supervisor, objecting to what he had said.

Wilson described the comments as “uncalled for”, and that it made her feel “awkward and uncomfortable in front of the whole crew”.

Wilson later went on a stress leave. She was unable to return to work, and was later laid off. She filed a complaint of discrimination on the basis of sex and mental disability in employment.

Surerus applied to have the complaint dismissed, claiming it has acted to resolve the issue.

However, Murray wrote in her reasons that the company “may not have actually disciplined the Supervisor with a written warning”.

In addition, Surerus has acknowledged that the supervisor, “in thegroup was treated.”

Anti-Catholicism stretches back to the nation’s colonial times, when some states barred Catholics from holding office, and continued through the mid-1800s, which saw the Know-Nothing party’s campaign against Catholic politicians. Lynch mobs killed Italian immigrants and arsonists burned down Catholic churches.

Perhaps no publication captures the animus toward Catholicism at the start of the 20th century as vividly as the Menace, launched in an old opera house in Aurora in 1911, when the city’s population was only a little over 4,000.

The Menace wasn’t the country’s first anti-Catholic newspaper, but it quickly became one of the biggest, eventually selling anti-Catholic books and launching a lecture series. Its editor, the Rev. Theodore C. Walker, claimed its target was not rank-and-file Catholics but the Catholic Church itself.


“It begins a kind