Category: Washington Fears

• The "Vatican" Tunnel to DC

  This theory claimed that the Vatican possessed or planned a secret tunnel running under the Atlantic to Washington, D.C., allowing the pope or his agents to enter the United States in secrecy and assume hidden control over the republic. The story is a twentieth-century resurgence of older anti-Catholic panic traditions that treated Catholicism as a foreign political power rather than merely a church. The transatlantic tunnel version became especially visible in later anti-Catholic electoral politics, but it built on a much older nativist suspicion that Rome sought direct physical and political passage into American government.