01/25/2006 Let None Dare Call it Liberty: The Catholic Church in Colonial America (Part 3)
Marian T. Horvat, Ph.D.
https://www.traditioninaction.org/History/B_001_Colonies.html Despite the more restrictive government imposed by Penn after 1700, Catholics were attracted to Pennsylvania, especially after the penal age began in neighboring Maryland. Nonetheless, the Catholic immigrants to Pennsylvania were relatively few in number compared to the Protestants emigrating from the German Palatinate and Northern Ireland. A census taken in 1757 placed the total number of Catholics in Pennsylvania at 1,365. In a colony estimated to have between 200,000 and 300,000 inhabitants, the opposition against the few Catholics living among the Pennsylvania colonists is testimony to an historic prejudice, to say the least. (20)
Even in face of incessant rumors and several crises (e.g. the so-called "popish plot'" of 1756), no extreme measures were taken and no laws were enacted against Catholics.
A good measure of the prosperity of the Church in 1763 could be attributed to the Jesuit farms located at St. Paul's Mission in Goshehoppen (500 acres) and Saint Francis Regis Mission at Conewago (120 acres), which contributed substantially to the support of the missionary undertakings of the Church. (21) The history of the Jesuits has been called that of the nascent Catholic Church in the colonies, since no other organized body of Catholic clergy, secular or regular, appeared on the ground till more than a decade after the Revolution. (22)
Relaxation of anti-Catholicism in the revolutionary era
This phase of strong, blatant persecution of Catholicism came to a close during the revolutionary era (1763-1820). For various reasons, the outbreak of hostilities and the winning of independence forced Protestant Americans to at least officially temper their hostility toward Catholicism. With the relaxation of penal measures against them, Catholics breathed a great sigh of relief, a normal and legitimate reaction.
However, instead of maintaining a Catholic behavior consistent with the purity of their Holy Faith, many of them adopted a practical way of life that effectively ignored or downplayed the points of Catholic doctrine which Protestantism attacked. They also closed their eyes to the evil of the Protestant heresy and its mentality. Such an attitude is explained by the natural desire to achieve social and economic success; it is, nonetheless a shameless attitude with regard to the glory of God and the doctrine that the Catholic Church is the only true religion.
As this liberal Catholic attitude continued and intensified, it generated a kind of fellowship that developed among Catholics with Protestants as such.
And so, an early brand of an experimental bad Ecumenism was established, where the doctrinal opposition between the two religions was undervalued and the emotional satisfaction of being accepted as Catholics in a predominantly Protestant society was overestimated.
These psychological factors help to explain the first phase of the establishment among our Catholics ancestors of that heresy which Pope Leo XIII called Americanism.
Posted on January 25, 2006
1. Theodore Maynard, The Story of American Catholicism, 2 vol. (NY: 1941); Theodore Roemer, The Catholic Church in the United States, (St. Louis, London: 1950); John Gilmary Shea, The History of the Catholic Church in the United States, 4 vol. (New York, 1886-1892).
2. Thomas T. McAvoy, A History of the Catholic Church in the United States, (Notre Dame, London, 1969), 50-1.
3. Ibid., 387.
4. James Hennesey, S.J., American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States, (New York, Oxford: 1981), 36-7.
5. Peter Mancall, Envisoning America: English Plans for the Colonization of North America 1580-1640, (Boston/New York: 1995), 8-11.
6. "The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America" in Colonial America, Essays in Politics and Social Development, eds. Stanley N. Katz and John M. Murrin, (New York: 1983), 47-68.
7. Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present, (New York: 1985), 70-1.
8. A useful collection of quotations and sources was gathered by Sister Mary Augustina Ray in her 1936 work, American Opinion
of Roman Catholicism in the Eighteenth Century (New York: 1936).
9. Ibid., 27.
10. Francis Curran, S.J., Catholics in Colonial Law, (Chicago: 1963), 54.
11. Patrick Conley and Matthew J. Smith, Catholicism in Rhode Island, the Formative Era, (Providence: 1976), 7-9.
12. Ellis, Catholics in Colonial America, 315-359.
13. Alfred Pearce Dennis, "Lord Baltimore's Struggle with the Jesuits, 1634-1649" in Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1900, 2 vols., (Washington: 1901), I, 112; C. E. Smith, Religion Under the Barons Baltimore, (Baltimore: 1899).
14, Kenneth Campbell, The Intellectual Struggle of the English Papists in the Seventeenth Century: The Catholic Dilemma, (Lewiston, Queenston, 1986).
15. Solange Hertz, The Star-Spangled Heresy: Americanism. How the Catholic Church in America Became the American Catholic Church, (Santa Monica, 1992), p. 33
16. John Tracy Ellis, Catholics in Colonial America, (Baltimore, Dublin: 1965), 344-46; 367-8;
17. Ibid., p. 363.
18. Ibid., 360-370.
19. Sally Schwartz, "A Mixed Multitude": The Struggle for Toleration in Colonial Pennsylvania, (New York, London: 1987),
17-19, 31-34; Joseph J. Kelley, Jr., Pennsylvania: The Colonial Years 1681-1776, (Garden City, New York: 1980), 15-16.
20. Ellis, Catholics in Colonial America, 370-80.
21. Joseph L. J. Kirlin, Catholicity in Philadelphia, (Philadelphia, 1909), 18.
22. Thomas Hughes, The History of the Society of Jesus in North America: Colonial and Federal, Vol. 1, (London, New York, Bombay, and Calcutta: 1907, 2nd ed. 1970).
(End Part 3)