Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity

Abstract

Anti-Catholicism was ubiquitous in the rhetoric of the American Revolution. Yet, Maryland's Catholics supported the independence movement more enthusiastically than their Protestant neighbors. In fact, support for the war may actually have been greater among Catholics in Maryland than it was among Protestants in Massachusetts. Catholics embraced the individualistic, rights-oriented ideology that defined the Revolution, in spite of not just the rhetoric, but also the reality that 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 leading up to 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.