The presence of “a great abominable church which is most abominable above all other churches” (I Nephi 13:26) is given considerable attention at the beginning of the first two books of Nephi. This may have been occasioned by the arrival of the Irish immigrants who worked on the construction of the Erie Canal, or, as is more likely, it may have been merely the usual accompaniment of the left-wring Protestant mentality, the little-understood inheritance of an honored past. At any rate the content was as old as the Reformation, and, when the Rochester Observer referred to the Roman Catholic church as “the beast” and the “mother of combinations” and the Rochester Albumpublished (on February 29, 1828) a counterfeit letter form “Pope Leo XII” to the “elect elders of Rochester” which spoke of using “our holy rack, our thumb screws, our Iron Bed, and many other such arguments” in order to convince the unbelievers “of their damnable heresies,” no one could have been either surprised or upset. There is no evidence that Catholic baiting in New York was excessive by national standards, and it is certain that it did not reach the dimensions of the later nativism in many parts of the country or of the anti-Catholicism of England in 1851 when Catholic bishoprics were re-established for the first time since Elizabeth I. If anything, the “very progress of ‘the Mother of Harlots’ served as one of the prominent prophetic signals of the approaching judgment,” as millennial hopes rose in the late 1830’s and 1840’s.