Reply #72: Actually, you could very well hear it in SE TX [View All]

[lastliberalintexas]

We have a large Catholic population here, due to the French influence on ths region, our proximity to the Cajun regions of Louisiana, and our own Cajun population in Texas. And the only people I've ever heard use the term were Catholics, and though they did use it in a snippy manner, it was not meant as a general insult to Catholicism. They used it to describe a Catholic who was showing more fealty to the Pope than to the Church- which was always somewhat confusing for me as a non-Catholic, since I've always thought that the Pope basically was the Church? But again, I'm not Catholic. I am a backsliding Baptist who is completely removed from organized religion. And though I did hear derogatory things about Catholics from the SBC (and Methodists and Lutherans and...), even they didn't use the term/insult Papist.

So you could very well hear it in various regions, and it not be the insult that most people here believe it to be. Perhaps it is also that the associations of England with Catholicism and the French connections to the Church are so very different. :shrug: