Monday, August 26, 2024

August 26, 2024: American Catholics: Maryland

[250 years ago this week, Elizabeth Ann Seton was born in New York City. The first US-born Saint, Seton is one of the most famous individual examples of an American Catholic, so this week I’ll analyze her and other American Catholic histories!]

On ideals, realities, and why both are important parts of the story.

One of the first things that schoolkids learn about the origins of the English Colonies in America—or at least one of the first things that my aging brain remembers learning, and I think this was the case for my sons in elementary school as well—is that Maryland was founded as a haven for Catholics in that “New World.” As those hyperlinked articles illustrate, that fact is indeed accurate: the Calverts, father George (the 1st Baron Baltimore) and his son Cecilius (the 2nd Baron Baltimore), requested a royal charter from King Charles I to found a new colony between New England to the North and Virginia to the South that would be more welcome to Catholic immigrants than were those two; and they named it Maryland after Charles’ Catholic wife, France’s Henrietta Marie. While the percentage of Catholics in the new colony was never more than 10% of the total English population, it was still significantly higher than in those more exclusionary colonies; and in 1649, Maryland’s assembly passed the “Act Concerning Religion” (also known as the Toleration Act) in an effort to ensure that those Catholics and all those in the colony would have the promised religious freedom.

But the reasons why the Toleration Act was necessary at all begin to reveal some darker realities behind those inclusive ideals. After a group of (Protestant) Puritans founded the new Maryland community of Providence (modern-day Annapolis) in 1642, one of their leaders, William Claiborne, decided to take over the colonial capital of St. Mary’s, using religious prejudices to stir up the population against the Catholics. For two years Claiborne and the Puritans dominated the colony, an era that came to be known as “The Plundering Time” due to their mistreatment of and thefts from Catholics. Although the younger Calvert brother Leonard recaptured St. Mary’s in 1646 and convinced the assembly to pass the 1649 Toleration Act, just a year after that law Puritans took over the legislature and instituted a new colonial government that prohibited Catholicism entirely, leading for example to the burning of numerous original Catholic churches. The two factions continued this back and forth battling in subsequent decades, but regardless of who was in power in a particular moment, clearly this was not a colony where Catholics could necessarily feel any safer nor more secure than they would have in the more overtly Protestant colonies.

A community that professes inclusive ideals yet too often features exclusionary attitudes and actions—feels about right for American origin points, no? But just as I don’t think we can only remember the U.S. founding through the lens of hypocrisy or the like, I’d likewise argue that every layer of Maryland’s founding and early histories comprises an important part of the story. Maryland was the third distinct English colony chartered on the continent (Connecticut and Rhode Island had by this time also been founded but were created by existing New England communities), and it was the first of those not only to de-emphasize Protestantism, but also to carve out an overt and official space for religious diversity (Roger Williams had done the same in his founding of Rhode Island). Even if individuals and communities failed to live up to that promise, and even if those exclusionary forces at times dominated and even led the state (as they have far too often in American history as well of course), the existence of this colony and those ideals makes a huge difference in how we think about both the history of American Catholics and the story of religion and community in America as a whole.

Next CatholicAmericanStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Catholic histories or contexts you’d highlight?

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