Let us resolve to banish the phrase “Catholic ghetto” from our language forever. Or, if we do use it, let us use it precisely in the sense of Fr. John Tracy Ellis.
Arguably, “Ghetto” should never have been turned into a metaphor at all. It began in the 16th century as the proper name of the district in Venice where Jewish people were forced to live, walled-off and under the watch of armed guards. For 300 years it was only applied, by extension, to similar Jewish districts in European cities. In the 20th century, the Nazis created new ghettoes during their short-lived Reich. How appropriate, then, if the name had remained forever affixed to such censurable practices, discarded once the Jewish Ghetto was abolished! “Ghetto” then might have joined “Pogrom” and “Race Law” in a linguistic museum of anti-Semitism.
Or, we might say, if it were allowed a metaphorical use, the Jewish people should have possessed it by right. Well, in fact, the first metaphorical use of the term was in an 1892 bestseller by Israel Zangwill, Children of the Ghetto, about the immigrant Jewish community of London. These people were not forced by law into anything. Rather, the Ghetto in which they lived, Zangwill says, was “of voluntary formation”:
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