AMERICAN
CATHOLICISM
 

 John Carroll

Junipero Serra


Adapted in Part from Madden, Catholicism in the Modern Age


THE Catholic Church in North America was regarded as a missionary church, under the jurisdiction and control of the Congregation for Propagation of the Faith. In the early nineteenth century, the largest concentration of North American Catholics still in Canada. Although Quebec had become part of the British Empire, it remained Catholic. And had been given the extraordinary right by the British Parliament to have Catholicism as the established religion of the province.  The American Continental Congress expressed its outrage at this in 1774:

Nor can we suppress our astonishment, that a British Parliament should ever consent to establish in that country a religion that has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed bigotry, persecution, murder and rebellion through every part of the world.

The anti-Catholicism of the Thirteen Colonies played a significant role in the refusal of Quebec to join the American Revolution as separatist colony. Strict laws existed in most colonies (as in England) against “Popery”.  Many would remain in effect until the mid-nineteenth century, particularly those forbidding Catholics from holding important civic or governmental positions.  Catholicism was regarded as corrupt and spreading the corruption of (among other evils) preference for monarchy

On the West Coast there were significant Catholic populations in California, where first Jesuits, then (after the suppression of the Jesuits) Franciscan missionaries in Mexico had established missions along the coast of California.

In the thirteen American colonies, there were only about twenty thousand Catholics on the eve of the Revolution. And most of those were in Maryland, some in Pennsylvania (the only colony that enacted complete religious freedom)

The only American Apostolic Prefecture (John Carroll - bishop in 1779 was Baltimore. In general, Americans saw Catholicism as a vestige of the old world and they had little patience or sympathy for it.

What changed the minds of American leaders was the response of Catholic countries to the Revolution. The strongest supporters were France and Spain. The French clergy alone contributed large amounts of money to the American cause. Benjamin Franklin in Quebec and then Paris won Catholic support and affirmed that the new country would allow complete religious liberty. Catholics remained a tiny minority, largely dependent on priests and religious leaders from France.

Everything changed with the massive immigration of the 1830s to the 1860s. During those years around five million people came to America—half of them Irish Catholics. Many of the rest were German or Polish Catholics. By 1860 there were some four million Catholics in the United States and forty-one bishoprics—mostly staffed by Irish priests.

This led to strong nativist move­ments such as the Order of United Americans, or the Know Nothings. These organizations even moved into government. They believed that the Catholics were an invasion led by the pope to take over the United States.

 

Violent anti-Catholicism ended with the Civil War, but it continued to be a strong force in American culture and politics. In 1928 a Catholic, Al Smith, was nominated for the presidency. He lost. The opposition assured the electorate that a vote for Smith was a vote for “a private telephone line between the White House and the Vatican.” Even in 1960, the same worries were expressed when John F. Kennedy was nominated. He insisted that the pope would not control his actions

 

 


AMERICAN CONTINENTAL CONGRESS
to the People of Great Britain
21 Oct. 1774 Journals 1:83, 87--88


THAT we think the Legislature of Great-Britain is not authorized by the constitution to establish a religion, fraught with sanguinary and impious tenets, or, to erect an arbitrary form of government, in any quarter of the globe. These rights, we, as well as you, deem sacred. And yet sacred as they are, they have, with many others been repeatedly and flagrantly violated. [. . .]

And by another Act the dominion of Canada is to be so extended, modelled, and governed, as that by being disunited from us, detached from our interests, by civil as well as religious prejudices, that by their numbers daily swelling with Catholic emigrants from Europe, and by their devotion to Administration, so friendly to their religion, they might become formidable to us, and on occasion, be fit instruments in the hands of power, to reduce the ancient free Protestant Colonies to the same state of slavery with themselves.

This was evidently the object of the Act:--And in this view, being extremely dangerous to our liberty and quiet, we cannot forebear complaining of it, as hostile to British America.--Superadded to these considerations, we cannot help deploring the unhappy condition to which it has reduced the many English settlers, who, encouraged by the Royal Proclamation, promising the enjoyment of all their rights, have purchased estates in that country.--They are now the subjects of an arbitrary government, deprived of trial by jury, and when imprisoned cannot claim the benefit of the habeas corpus Act, that great bulwark and palladium of English liberty:--Nor can we suppress our astonishment, that a British Parliament should ever consent to establish in that country a religion that has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed bigotry, persecution, murder and rebellion through every part of the world.

The Founders’ Constitution
Volume 5, Amendment I (Religion), Document 19
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_religions19.html

The University of Chicago Press
Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774--1789. Edited by Worthington C. Ford et al. 34 vols. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904--37.
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