Could a Catholic Become an American?

Could a Catholic become an American? The short answer is, Yes, with difficulty. This struggle was somewhat ironic because, as historian Sydney Ahlstrom points out, “The Roman Catholic church has a longer history in America—even in the United States—than any other Christian denomination.”¹ What follows is a longer, detailed answer to this question, focusing on the colonial period and the early years of the republic until the Civil War.

James Hutson, at the beginning of Religion and the Founding of the American Republic, observes that European countries sought religious uniformity, either Protestant or Catholic: within almost every nation-state, only one profession and observance of religion was acceptable, and the Catholics and Protestants who settled the New World generally brought their intolerance with them.²

Catholics had a presence in North America from the beginning of colonization. North of the English colonies along the Atlantic seaboard, there was Catholic New France (present-day Canada). The French spread throughout North America, giving names to various American places. To the south there was New Spain, also Catholic, and, like the French, the Spanish had a presence in the region that is now the United States, in Florida and in the West.

The colonies settled by the English, which eventually became the original thirteen states, were almost entirely Protestant. John Adams wrote of New England in 1765, “Roman Catholics are as scarce as a comet or an earthquake.”³ One exception to the generally Protestant colonies was Maryland. In 1632, George Calvert (Lord Baltimore), a convert to Catholicism in 1624, obtained a charter from Charles I, and in 1634 the Ark and the Dove sailed for Maryland. During the next twenty-five years the fortunes of religious toleration within Maryland waxed and waned with the religious passions characteristic of the English Civil War. Maryland enacted a “General Toleration” so that “all sorts who profess Christianity . . . might be at Liberty to worship God in such manner as was most agreeable with their Judgments and Consciences,”⁴ but the Catholic establishment in Maryland was in continual conflict with the Protestants in that colony as well as with those from Virginia. Religious liberty for Catholics in Maryland died out after the “Glorious Revolution” of 1689, with the establishment of the Church of England in Maryland in 1692. The Quaker regimes in Pennsylvania and Delaware allowed Catholics unqualified and universal religious liberty, and many Catholics moved north from Maryland.

John Tracy Ellis, in his excellent survey American Catholicism, sums up the situation of the few thousand Catholics in colonial English America in these four points: (1) There was a universal anti-Catholic bias; (2) Catholics were few in number and clung stubbornly to their faith; (3) When they were twice in positions of power in the colonies (seventeenth-century Maryland and New York), Catholics promoted the principle of religious toleration; (4) In the absence of one overwhelming Protestant denomination, Catholics benefited from some resultant, if grudging, toleration.⁵ To quote Ahlstrom, “The period from 1692 to the American Revolution justifiably became known as the Penal Period, during which the church subsisted on a private, almost clandestine basis, while individual Catholics constantly were threatened or visited with legal actions.”⁶

The American Revolution brought together citizens from colonies with varying traditions of religious tolerance. In his recent popular biography of John Adams, David McCullough tells a revealing story about Adams during a session of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.⁷ “Led by curiosity and good company,” Adams wrote to his wife, he went with George Washington and others to an afternoon mass at St. Mary’s Catholic Church on Fifth Street. Adams was greatly intrigued by the strangeness of the entire experience; the music, bells, candles, gold, and silver were so “calculated to take in mankind” that he wondered the Reformation had ever succeeded. The New Englander found remarkable both what he did and did not like: he felt pity for “the poor wretches fingering their beads, chanting Latin, not a word of which they understood,” but the music and chanting went on “most sweetly and exquisitely,” and he liked the “good, short moral essay” the priest gave on the duty of parents to see to their children’s temporal and spiritual welfare. What is most interesting about this episode is how completely unfamiliar Adams was with Roman Catholic worship and how daring he imagined his visit to be.

Catholic leaders figured into the Revolution out of proportion to their actual numbers. Charles Carroll, a Catholic from Maryland, signed the Declaration of Independence. Catholics from France and Poland figured as heroes in the Revolution, including Lafayette, Pulaski, and Kosciusko. John Barry, the first commander of the American Navy, was a Catholic. In 1776, the Continental Congress asked Charles Carroll and his cousin John Carroll, a Jesuit priest, to accompany Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Chase to Canada to win Canadian support for the Revolution, which they were not able to do. About the same time, 1775, George Washington, commander of the Continental Army, forbade the popular tradition of burning the pope in effigy, condemning the “observance of that ridiculous and childish custom,” because “insulting their religion is so monstrous as not to be suffered or excused.”⁸ Besides, the practice was not designed to endear Americans to the French or the French Canadians.

The American Revolution marked an advance in Catholic toleration in America. At the end of the war, several states willingly granted toleration for Catholics. According to Ellis, “The patriotic part played by the Catholics during the war, the influence of the French alliance, and the growing consciousness of the extreme complexity of the American Religious pattern—all helped to dilute the anti-Catholic-bias.”⁹ Indeed, Charles Carroll expressed the hope that “freedom and independence, acquired by united efforts and cemented with the mingled blood of Protestant and Catholic fellow citizens should be equally enjoyed by all.”¹⁰ While Carroll’s cousin Daniel Carroll of Maryland and Thomas FitzSimons of Pennsylvania would both sign the Constitution of the United States, Charles’s hope was not to be entirely realized. In 1789, George Washington became the new nation’s first President and Father John Carroll was appointed the first Catholic bishop in the new country. Nevertheless, Catholics had equal citizenship with Protestants in only five of the original thirteen states. Religious liberty was spotty for Catholics in New England. Until 1833 they were barred from public office in Massachusetts, and in New Hampshire the religious test for holding public office was abolished only in 1877, twelve years after the end of the Civil War.¹¹

In 1785 the United States had a population of almost 4,000,000 persons, only 25,000 of whom were Roman Catholics, located mostly in Maryland and Pennsylvania.¹² After 1820 the story of the country and the American Catholic Church was one of enormous and rapid population growth. Between 1820 and 1860, the general population grew from 8,000,000 to 27,000,000, and the Catholic population grew from 200,000 to 3,000,000. In 1789 roughly one half of 1 percent of the nation was Catholic; by the beginning of the Civil War the figure was 11 percent. (In 2002, 23 percent of Americans were Catholic.) By 1850, Catholics had become the largest religious denomination in the country. In that same year, Germans constituted one-half of all the foreign-born persons in the United States, but German Catholics settled in Midwestern villages and farms, thus attracting less attention. The Irish (numbering one million in mid-century) clustered in the cities of the Eastern seaboard and alarmed American Protestants as an “invasion” of persons who seemed alien in culture, ethos, worldview, and religious practice.¹³

Analyzing the situation of American Catholics in 1850, Ellis observes that they suffered from the traditional prejudice most Americans entertained for the Catholic Church, and the organized attacks of Protestants drove Catholics back among themselves in schools, in the press, and in social apartness. The Harvard historian Professor Arthur Schlesinger Sr. once remarked to Ellis, “I regard the prejudice against your Church as the deepest bias in the history of the American people.”¹⁴ In Innocents Abroad, the honest and direct Mark Twain admitted, “I have been educated to enmity toward everything that is Catholic, and sometimes, in consequence of this, I find it much easier to discover Catholic faults than Catholic merits.”¹⁵ Twain was probably speaking for many of his fellow citizens, though with considerably more self-awareness.

The lack of self-awareness in anti-Catholics in 1850 was important. Yet, the virulent antipathy toward Catholicism during the middle decades of the nineteenth century in this country must be understood in context. It cannot be excused but it can be better understood and explained. One Catholic historian has observed that because of the flood of newcomers and the rapid growth of the cities, “the feeling of a world awry easily slipped into a racist reaction against the new immigrants.”¹⁶ Another has remarked that the opposition to Catholics was more than bigotry and prejudice; it was “the turmoil of an entire society experiencing the stress of changing identity and self-definition.”¹⁷ Indeed, nativism, rapid economic change, population growth, and urbanization, coupled with religious bigotry, all factored into the conflicts between evangelical Protestants and Catholics throughout nineteenth-century America.

Beginning in the 1830s, nativism was a movement directed against foreigners in general and Catholics in particular. In the good times of expansion, before the financial panic of 1837, immigrants had been welcomed. In tougher economic times, hostile attitudes developed. For example, take Samuel F. B. Morse, of Morse code fame. As one Catholic writer has quipped, he electrified the country in more than one way. A passionate bigot, Morse founded and financed journals, such as Foreign Conspiracy, directed against Catholics.¹⁸ Such publications had their effect, as did some of the preaching in Protestant pulpits. In 1834 in Charlestown, a suburb of Boston, the Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher, father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, preached a sermon, “The Devil and the Pope of Rome.” This and other sermons by Beecher are considered largely responsible for incitement of the mob that burned down the local Ursuline convent and school—the nuns and their students narrowly escaped with their lives.¹⁹ For a year after the burning of the convent, Catholics in Boston and Charlestown had to post armed guards around their churches. In 1835, Bishop Fenwick was burned in effigy, and in 1837 another mob burned down most of the section of Boston where the Irish lived.

In 1844 conflicts between nativists and Irish, much of which focused on the use of Protestant Bibles in public schools, erupted into a three-day riot, during which two Catholic churches were burned down, many Catholic houses were plundered, thirteen people were killed, and fifty were injured.²⁰ During this same period, pitched battles between rival mobs were a feature of almost every big city election day. The fracas in Philadelphia emboldened anti-Catholic nativists in New York City, who had assumed, incorrectly, that the forceful Bishop John Hughes would be as mild and deferential as Philadelphia’s Bishop Kenrick. Hughes stationed armed guards around the city’s Catholic churches and threatened that the Catholics would turn New York into a “second Moscow” if Catholic churches were burned. The mayor and his council tried to put the blame for the dangerous situation on the bishop, pleading with him to restrain his flock. Hughes responded: “I have not the power; you must take care that they are not provoked.”²¹ The nativists decided not to provoke the Catholics, and the crisis passed.

Nativism, however, had not passed. In 1852 the nativists organized a national political party, pledged to “resist the insidious policy of the Church of Rome and all other foreign influence against our republican institutions in all lawful ways; to place in all offices of trust, honor or profit in the gift of the people or by appointment, none but native American Protestant citizens.”²² This resolve was often sealed with Masonic-style secret oaths and gestures, which gave the popular name “Know-Nothings” to the members. Between 1854 and 1856, the Know-Nothings were quite successful politically, electing governors in New York, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. In 1856 they ran former president Millard Fillmore as their candidate for president of the United States. A year earlier, the New York state legislature had passed the Putnam Act, forbidding Catholic bishops to hold property in their own names.²³ It was quietly repealed in 1863, when the government needed the Church’s support for unpopular conscription procedures during the Civil War.

The heightened sectional tensions that were to erupt into the American Civil War overshadowed the nativist controversy and ultimately led to the downfall of the Know-Nothing party. Likewise, the violence and secrecy that Know-Nothingism engendered were decried by the majority of “native Americans.” Further, many Americans did take seriously the American principle of freedom of conscience. Abraham Lincoln was one of these, and, as on most issues, was ahead of his time on the subject of religious bigotry. The political landscape was chaotic during the 1850s, populated by old-fashioned Whigs and Democrats and newly arrived Republicans and Know-Nothings. When challenged to declare his allegiance, Lincoln said:

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain . . . How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it, ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read, ‘all men are created equal except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].²⁴

Years earlier, in 1844, at a meeting of the Whigs in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln introduced the following resolution:

Resolved, That the guarantee of the rights of conscience, as found in our Constitution, is most sacred and inviolable, and one that belongs no less to the Catholic, than to the Protestant; and that all attempts to abridge or interfere with these rights, either of Catholic or Protestant, directly or indirectly, have our decided disapprobation, and shall ever have our most effective oppositions.²⁵

Mr. Lincoln’s was the direction the country chose, though not without detours aplenty. By the end of the Civil War, Americans had grown more comfortable with both immigration (western European at least) and the Catholic religion to which many of these immigrants adhered. Gradually Americans came to see that the melting pot may obscure, but it does not obliterate, our differences, including our religious differences—and the nation is the richer for it. The election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 marked a final triumph in the process of American acceptance of Catholicism. As one Catholic historian claimed, “The election . . . signified not only the decline of anti-Catholicism but also the fact that the country had actually redefined its identity in such a way as to render Catholicism compatible with America.”²⁶ Thus, America’s rocky progress toward religious tolerance had reached a major milestone.