Description

"The persons in America who were the most opposed to Great Britain had also, in general, distinguished themselves by being particularly hostile to Catholics." So wrote the minister, teacher, and sometime-historian Jonathan Boucher from his home in Surrey, England, in 1797. He blamed "old prejudices against papists" for the Revolution's popularity - especially in Maryland, where most of the non-Canadian Catholics in British North America lived.

Many historians since Boucher have noted the role that anti-Catholicism played in stirring up animosity against the king and Parliament. Yet, in spite of the rhetoric, Maryland's Catholics supported the independence movement more enthusiastically than their Protestant neighbors. Not only did Maryland's Catholics embrace the idea of independence, they also embraced the individualistic, rights-oriented ideology that defined the Revolution, even though theirs was a communally oriented denomination that stressed the importance of hierarchy, order, and obligation. Catholic leaders in Europe made it clear that the war was a "sedition" worthy of damnation, even as they acknowledged that England had been no friend to the Catholic Church. So why, then, did "papists" become "patriots?"

Maura Jane Farrelly finds that the answer has a long history, one that begins in England in the early seventeenth century and gains momentum during the nine decades preceding the American Revolution, when Maryland's Catholics lost a religious toleration that had been uniquely theirs in the English-speaking world and were forced to maintain their faith in an environment that was legally hostile and clerically poor. This experience made Maryland's Catholics the colonists who were most prepared in 1776 to accept the cultural, ideological, and psychological implications of a break from England.

Features

• Part of an emerging body of scholarship that re-examines the history of "pre-immigrant" U.S. Catholicism
• One of the few books in this emerging category that considers Anglo-American Catholicism (as opposed to Spanish-American Catholicism in the southwestern borderlands or French-American Catholicism in the Louisiana territory)
• Separates a fear of Catholicism from a fear of actual Catholics, explaining how Catholics embraced the independence movement in spite of the anti-Catholic rhetoric that characterized that movement

Reviews

"A thoughtful and often surprising assessment of Catholicism and its fate in colonial Maryland, and how Catholic Marylanders became patriots in a deeply Protestant nation."
--John T. McGreevy, author of Catholicism and American Freedom: A History

"Maura Farrelly has a fresh and challenging perspective on the Americanization of Roman Catholicism, one that tracks its origins to early Maryland. Papist Patriots bears close reading by all students of American history and religion."
-- Christine Leigh Heyrman, author of Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt

"Distinguished by impressive research and a well-written, lively narrative, Farrelly's study will change the way historians think about Catholics in colonial America. The author argues that the foundation for the making of an American Catholic identity rests in Maryland's 1649 Act of Religious Toleration. Over time, Maryland's Catholics became more American than English so that by the 1770s these Papists had become ardent Patriots. By endorsing the republicanism and individualism of the independence movement they created an American Catholic identity that has endured into the twenty-first century."
-- Jay P. Dolan, author of In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension

Product Details

324 pages; 3 halftones; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4; ISBN13: 978-0-19-975771-8ISBN10: 0-19-975771-2

About the Author(s)