Latter-day Saints and Catholics had expressed sympathy for each other as religiously persecuted minorities. For instance, the previous year, Willard Richards wrote a letter to Hugh Clark, a Catholic alderman in Philadelphia. Referring to the anti-Catholic riots in Philadelphia that year, Richards expressed “our sympathies for a people, who are now being mobbed, in the city of brotherly Love (Phila.) as we have been, for many years, in Missouri;— and for what? for our religion although called by another name.” Richards further stated, “The Mormons and the Catholics are the most obnoxious to the sectarian world of any people, and are the only two who have not persecuted each other & others in these United States, and the only two who have suffered from the cruel hand of Mobocracy.” (Willard Richards, Nauvoo, IL, to Hugh Clark, Philadelphia, PA, 24 May 1844, draft, Willard Richards, Papers, CHL, underlining in original; Full and Complete Account of the Late Awful Riots in Philadelphia, 27.)

Richards, Willard. Journals and Papers, 1821–1854. CHL. MS 1490.

A Full and Complete Account of the Late Awful Riots in Philadelphia. Philadelphia: John B. Perry, [1844].