Francis Parkman, Jr. on the Jesuits and Freedom

The American historian Francis Parkman, Jr. was born on September 16, 1823 and died on November 8, 1893. He is best known for his work The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life (1849) and his seven-volume work France and England in North America (1865–1892). He's also known for his opposition to Women's Suffrage and indeed the extension of suffrage to anyone other than white males.

His interpretation of the colonial era as both England and France settled in North America has been challenged for its anti-Catholicism, as in this biography by W.J. Eccles in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography:

Parkman brought to his study of the French and British empires in North America certain preconceived beliefs and a priori assumptions that gave his work cohesion but resulted in a depiction of colonial society and events that bears little relation to fact. His work perhaps compares best to that of his contemporary, George Alfred Henty, the British writer of jingoistic historical novels for a juvenile audience. The British have long since shrugged off Henty, but the Americans, and many Anglo-Canadians, cling to Parkman’s version of their history. The past he judged by the values of a mid-19th-century Boston Brahmin, which, of course, he was. He believed, fervently, in the concept of progress, in American manifest destiny, and in the inevitability of the British conquest of New France since that last had been essential to ensure the subsequent independence of the United States. Thus he committed the mortal sin for a historian: because it happened, it therefore had to happen.

Britain’s struggle with France in the colonial wars was, to him, a Manichæan conflict between the forces of light and of darkness: between the fledgling American nation, representing progress and Anglo-Saxon Protestant liberty, and New France, embodying Roman Catholic absolutism. As Parkman put it in Montcalm and Wolfe (1884): “It was the strife, too, of the past against the future . . . of barren absolutism against a liberty, crude, incoherent, and chaotic, yet full of prolific vitality.” Thus the New Englanders were possessed of an “uncommon vigor, joined to the hardy virtues of a masculine race.” The Canadians, on the other hand, exhibited serf-like subordination to their feudal lords: brave soldiers and explorers, certainly, but foreordained to give way before the disciples of progress. This basic concept gave his works the dramatic force of a Greek tragedy.

Yet Parkman was no believer in democracy and he spoke out vigorously against it. He regarded the granting of the suffrage to the lower classes, white or black, as “the most dangerous enemy of liberal government.” He was also bitterly opposed to women’s suffrage and the temperance movement. With the anti-slavery movement he had no sympathy. He was an ardent proponent of what came to be known as Social Darwinism. Nothing succeeds like success, and success is justification enough of the means used to achieve it.

If one believed in the "cancel culture" of our era, one could say that the Society for American Historians should stop awarding the Francis Parkman Prize for the best work of American History each year because of these ideas. He was a man of his era, obviously--the real problem that Eccles cites is that Parkman may misused primary sources, especially in French, because of his lack of facility in that language--and his works may be more suitably admired for their style, but not for their substance.

Just a dip into his second volume of France and England in North America, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century, displays the common animus of Protestant America against Catholic authority and those who represent it, including the French of the colonial era:

From the Preface: 

Few passages of history are more striking than those which record the efforts of the earlier French Jesuits to convert the Indians. Full as they are of dramatic and philosophic interest, bearing strongly on the political destinies of America, and closely involved with the history of its native population, it is wonderful that they have been left so long in obscurity. While the infant colonies of England still clung feebly to the shores of the Atlantic, events deeply ominous to their future were in progress, unknown to them, in the very heart of the continent. It will be seen, in the sequel of this volume, that civil and religious liberty found strange allies in this Western World.

And from the last chapter, "The End":

With the fall of the Hurons, fell the best hope of the Canadian mission. They, and the stable and populous communities around them, had been the rude material from which the Jesuit would have formed his Christian empire in the wilderness; but, one by one, these kindred peoples were uprooted and swept away, while the neighboring Algonquins, to whom they had been a bulwark, were involved with them in a common ruin. The land of promise was turned to a solitude and a desolation. There was still work in hand, it is true,—vast regions to explore, and countless heathens to snatch from perdition; but these, for the most part, were remote and scattered hordes, from whose conversion it was vain to look for the same solid and decisive results. . . .

The cause of the failure of the Jesuits is obvious. The guns and tomahawks of the Iroquois were the ruin of their hopes. Could they have curbed or converted those ferocious bands, it is little less than certain that their dream would have become a reality. Savages tamed—not civilized, for that was scarcely possible—would have been distributed in communities through the valleys of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, ruled by priests in the interest of Catholicity and of France. Their habits of agriculture would have been developed, and their instincts of mutual slaughter repressed. The swift decline of the Indian population would have been arrested; and it would have been made, through the fur-trade, a source of prosperity to New France. Unmolested by Indian enemies, and fed by a rich commerce, she would have put forth a vigorous growth. True to her far-reaching and adventurous genius, she would have occupied the West with traders, settlers, and garrisons, and cut up the virgin wilderness into fiefs, while as yet the colonies of England were but a weak and broken line along the shore of the Atlantic; and when at last the great conflict came, England and Liberty would have been confronted, not by a depleted antagonist, still feeble from the exhaustion of a starved and persecuted infancy, but by an athletic champion of the principles of Richelieu and of Loyola.

Liberty may thank the Iroquois, that, by their insensate fury, the plans of her adversary were brought to nought, and a peril and a woe averted from her future. They ruined the trade which was the life-blood of New France; they stopped the current of her arteries, and made all her early years a misery and a terror. Not that they changed her destinies. The contest on this continent between Liberty and Absolutism was never doubtful; but the triumph of the one would have been dearly bought, and the downfall of the other incomplete. Populations formed in the ideas and habits of a feudal monarchy, and controlled by a hierarchy profoundly hostile to freedom of thought, would have remained a hindrance and a stumbling-block in the way of that majestic experiment of which America is the field.

The Jesuits saw their hopes struck down; and their faith, though not shaken, was sorely tried. The Providence of God seemed in their eyes dark and inexplicable; but, from the stand-point of Liberty, that Providence is clear as the sun at noon. Meanwhile let those who have prevailed yield due honor to the defeated. Their virtues shine amidst the rubbish of error, like diamonds and gold in the gravel of the torrent.

But now new scenes succeed, and other actors enter on the stage, a hardy and valiant band, moulded to endure and dare,—the Discoverers of the Great West.

Those passages also exemplify the power of Parkman's style, which Eccles acknowledges while warning the reader against falling under its spell. This is exactly the view of American Freedom against Catholic Authority described in Maura Jane Farrelly's Anti-Catholicism in America! Parkman had obviously grown up with this view and was never challenged.

More on Francis Parkman's The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century here and here from The Dawson Newsletter, via EWTN.

Catholic Continental Ambitions

This book is on my wish list. Stefan McDaniel reviews it for First Things (access may be limited, unless you are a subscriber):

In his final book, Continental Ambitions: Roman Catholics in North America; The Colonial Experience, the late Kevin Starr set out to dispel this perception. Continental Ambitions tells the story of Catholic conquest, exploration, and settlement in North America (involving Norse, Spanish, French, and British Catholics), emphasizing the relevance of this story to understanding the present-day continental United States. “The history of Catholicism in America,” says Starr in his preface, “is not simply Catholic history. It is American history . . . part of the warp and woof, the very fabric and meaning, of American life.” . . .

Starr also brings out general issues in Catholic history, providing much matter for meditation. He is keenly aware, for instance, that as the Church works the hard clay of cultural, political, and economic reality, the resistance always generates contradictions and anomalies. How are Spanish Franciscans in the Southwest to create their Indian-Catholic utopia without the protection of the very Spanish soldiers whose criminality alienates and scandalizes the Indians? How to sustain the apostolate of Ville-Marie, meant to make the Indians sons of God, without selling them the guns and brandy that enthrall them to the devil? How can there be any Catholic freedom in Maryland without wealth from black slavery?

One general moral to be drawn from the history Starr relates is that intellectual clarity and practical competence are much more valuable in creating an authentic Christian society than is the mystical exuberance that is currently in fashion. This becomes clear when one compares the North American record of the Franciscans on one hand with that of the Jesuits and Dominicans on the other. Franciscans indulged extravagant theologies of Indians as the new chosen people, but it took cold Dominican pedantry to define and guard the Indians’ most basic rights as human persons. Franciscans let fly thunderous condemnations of the soldiers who abused their Indian charges, but it was the Jesuits, with their traditional insistence on (as Starr says) “polity, power, results,” who got Spanish soldiers on their payroll—that is, on a leash.

While praising many aspects of Starr's book, McDaniel also recommends another to fill some gaps he finds in Continental Ambitions--Our Land and Our Lady by Daniel Sargent:

. . . Our Land and Our Lady is an irenic and refreshing book. It reminds us that America, like many of its current residents, may have been raised Protestant, but it was baptized Catholic. Almost every region was first discovered, explored, and charted by ultra-Catholic Spaniards and Frenchmen. From the Bay of the Mother of God (the Chesapeake) to the River of the Immaculate Conception (the Mississippi) to the Bay of San Francisco, these Catholics christened the land with Catholic names. Far too often, these Catholics (especially the Spanish) went on to promptly profane the land with slaughter and slavery. But they also consecrated it with the blood of martyrdom—profusely in the Southwest, but also in Auriesville, New York, and by the Rappahannock, near Bull Run. Even British Catholics managed to play their part, discreetly devoting a Chesapeake colony to Mary, and there instituting a regime of tolerance based on Catholic humanism and prudence, not on the axioms of Locke. Even in the era of the Anglo-Protestant republic, the Church blessed our country with a true Enlightenment: heroic Catholic evangelization, such as Pierre-Jean De Smet’s work with the Indians of the Northwest, and the accessible Catholic education provided by vast armies of nuns. Finally, Catholics like the fathers of Maryknoll brought America to a sort of Catholic maturity when they harnessed its legendary wealth, energy, and goodwill for foreign missions, making it a spiritual center from which the Gospel is proclaimed to the ends of the earth.

Eugenics in America: The Catholic Response

After posting excerpts from Amity Shlaes' review of two new books on the Eugenics movement in the United States in the early twentieth century, I wondered about the Catholic Church's response to the legislative efforts. There was a response of course, and a 2013 book from the University of Chicago Press describes it:

During the first half of the twentieth century, supporters of the eugenics movement offered an image of a racially transformed America by curtailing the reproduction of “unfit” members of society. Through institutionalization, compulsory sterilization, the restriction of immigration and marriages, and other methods, eugenicists promised to improve the population—a policy agenda that was embraced by many leading intellectuals and public figures. But Catholic activists and thinkers across the United States opposed many of these measures, asserting that “every man, even a lunatic, is an image of God, not a mere animal."

In An Image of God, Sharon Leon examines the efforts of American Catholics to thwart eugenic policies, illuminating the ways in which Catholic thought transformed the public conversation about individual rights, the role of the state, and the intersections of race, community, and family. Through an examination of the broader questions raised in this debate, Leon casts new light on major issues that remain central in American political life today: the institution of marriage, the role of government, and the separation of church and state. This is essential reading in the history of religion, science, politics, and human rights.

The author, Sharon M. Leon, is director of public projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and research associate professor of history at George Mason University.

This blog by attorney and author Ed Mannino provides an overview and review of Professor Leon's book:

While the Catholic Church supported positive eugenics initiatives, including encouraging married couples to have more children, and enactment of legislation providing for social welfare programs, it vigorously opposed negative eugenic proposals, including compulsory sterilization and restrictions on immigration from certain countries. This opposition was based on two separate grounds, only one of which was based on Catholic doctrine. In the words of Professor Leon, Catholic opposition centered first on attacking eugenic science as not being “rigorous,” as having its roots in concealed “ethnic, racial and class prejudices,” and as ignoring the the importance of environmental and other factors in the development of an individual’s character. A second, religious objection argued that the state could not “violate the bodily integrity of an innocent individual, regardless of the supposed biological improvements that will result.”

Professor Leon concludes that “Asserting their rights as citizens to participate in the public debate about the importance of environment and heredity and about the proper role of the state and the responsibility of the individual, Catholics transformed public discourse.”

In the public debate, Catholics developed the points that genetic makeup does not dictate the inheritance of mental defects in children, and that environmental factors play an important role in individual development. In addition, the Catholic hierarchy and lay groups such as the Knights of Columbus lobbied for the passage of legislative initiatives promoting both social and economic justice. Moreover, Catholics opposed legislation banning mixed-race marriages, and the view that the “white race” was somehow superior.

Read the rest there.

Book Review: American Church (pka The Gibbons Legacy) by Russell Shaw

According to the publisher, Ignatius Press:

Has the Americanization of American Catholics--their cultural assimilation, that is--been a blessing or a curse for the Church in the United States? Or has it been a bit of both?

In American Church Russell Shaw takes a searching look at that question and reaches a disturbing conclusion. Cultural assimilation, which was ardently championed by churchmen like the great Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore around the turn of the last century, has undoubtedly conferred many benefits on Catholics. Their absorption into the secular culture of America, however, now threatens the Catholic identity of millions of faithful and of their institutions, such as schools, universities, and hospitals.

Shaw does not offer this conclusion as an unsupported generalization. American Church is a richly documented analysis of a process extending over two centuries. Colorful characters and dramatic incidents abound, including the nineteenth-century intellectual feud between Orestes Brownson and the Transcendentalist convert to Catholicism Isaac Hecker, Pope Leo XIII's condemnation of Americanism, the anti-Catholicism that greeted the presidential campaigns of Al Smith and John F. Kennedy, and the numerous intra-Church conflicts that have divided American Catholics since the Second Vatican Council.

In concluding his study, Shaw offers a number of thought-provoking suggestions about what the Church in America needs to do now in the face of an ongoing decline that is sapping its strength and may threaten its very survival.

Russell Shaw is a widely published author and journalist who has written twenty previous books, including To Hunt, To Shoot, To Entertain: Clericalism and the Catholic Laity and Nothing to Hide: Secrecy, Communication, and Communion in the Catholic Church. For 18 years, Shaw directed media relations for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and the United States Catholic Conference. From 1987 to 1997 he oversaw media relations for the Knights of Columbus. Since resigning from that position, he has worked full time as a freelance writer.

American Church: The Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall, and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America surveys recent history as a personal memoir, analyses the efforts of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Church leaders to chart a path for Catholics in America, and provides some ideas to strengthen Catholic culture in America, ideas which build on movements and efforts already in place. The first several pages of this book presented some confusion as evidently Ignatius Press had changed the title of the book sometime after the text was printed and bound. The original title was "The Gibbons Legacy" and therefore the Foreword by Archbishop Chaput and the Introduction kept mentioning that title. I see that the Kindle edition on amazon.com has cleared up that confusion but it was off putting for a time as I read the paperback edition, which I purchased..

(This is an interesting note for the present and future production of books--the printed and electronic editions can be different: it's much easier to address changes and even corrections in the electronic version. Which one is the official version? Does the Library of Congress decide?)

I presume Ignatius and Shaw changed the title because of concern no one knows who "Gibbons" was--James Cardinal Gibbons, the ninth Archbishop of Baltimore (from 1877 to 1921). Shaw's book comes at a time when others are writing about the renewal of Catholic culture in the U.S., including George Weigel and Ryan N. S. Topping. I have not read those books, so I cannot compare them, but Shaw's book traces the path of assimilation of Catholics in American culture--and as that culture became more and more secularized, then Catholics on that path became more and more secularized. Then he addresses, often from personal experiences, the effects of the implementation of the "spirit of Vatican II", changes in Catholic higher education, reform movements in the episcopacy--and he uses his personal recollections well, without falling into the trap of becoming anecdotal.

On the other hand, I did not think another thread Shaw weaves through the narrative was that effective: he uses the story of The Cardinal, a 1950 novel by Henry Morton Robinson, usually thought to be based on the life of Cardinal Spellman, the Archbishop of New York, as an example of trends and issues in the Catholic Church in America in the early twentienth century. Shaw uses scenes from The Cardinal to exemplify certain changes and events--if you are interested, TCM will be showing the movie based on the novel this summer.

Overall, the story Shaw tells is sad--how the Church lost its influence on American culture because it tried to assimilate too much into American culture. Shaw's hope for the restoration of that influence is in the development of a Catholic subculture, which I think exists--EWTN, Catholic bloggers, the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, the youthful pro-life movement--and I think will remain small. Primarily, I think Shaw is correct that it is the formation of the laity, as inspired by the documents of the Second Vatican Council that is most important--instead of pursuing "ministries" inside the Church, we should be working to influence our culture--exactly through the sub-culture Shaw outlines. Perhaps the institutional Church should not aspire to the great influence of former days as it may come at the same cost of assimilation or accomodation. Thought-provoking, to say the least.

Believers and Patriots in OSV's The Catholic Answer Magazine

My husband kindly called me at work yesterday to tell me that the March/April 2013 issue contained a feature article written by me! "Believers and Patriots: What is colonial Maryland's legacy of religious freedom?" by Stephanie A. Mann. (Page 30 of The Catholic Answer Magazine; subscription required for on-line access.) It is a very well illustrated article. I wrote it during the Fortnight for Religious Freedom last summer and start off with the installation Mass homily of Archbishop William Lori in Baltimore, Maryland:

On May 16, 2012, Bishop William Lori, the chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishop’s Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty, was installed as the Archbishop of Baltimore.

In his homily at his installation Mass, he stressed the need to defend religious liberty, harkening to the foundation of the oldest diocese in the United States of America and its first bishop: “We defend religious liberty . . . because Archbishop John Carroll’s generation of believers and patriots bequeathed to us a precious legacy that has enabled the Church to worship in freedom, to bear witness to Christ publicly, and to do massive and amazing works of pastoral love, education and charity in ways that are true to the faith that inspired them in the first place.”

Archbishop John Carroll’s “generation of believers and patriots” were heirs to the great Maryland experiment in religious liberty in the middle of the 17th century — an experiment that did not last then and has not received the attention it deserves since.

George Calvert founded the Maryland colony as a commercial venture and to demonstrate that it was possible for a person to be a Catholic and loyal to the monarch, a combination long thought impossible in England. He and his heirs struggled to establish the Maryland colony and to maintain religious liberty in its laws and culture. They were swimming against the tide of European religious settlements: subjects were expected to go with the flow of their sovereign’s religion.

Next Saturday, March 9, the Kansas Authors Club District 5 monthly meeting is a read-around by members, and I plan to read from this article. I will also have my book for sale, and distribute information about the Catholic Martyrs of England pilgrimage. The meeting is held at the Wichita Public Library Rockwell Branch, 5939 E. 9th Street, Wichita, KS, 2:00- 4:00 pm--meetings are free and open to the public, so if you're in Wichita, please feel welcome to attend. Refreshments are served!

Some Current Events

Four Items of Note:

The 50th Annual International Eucharistic Congress appears to have been a great success in Ireland: crowds larger than expected with international pilgrimages encouraging the Irish Catholics who have been through a rough time with the revelations of abuse by both priests and religious and inaction by the bishops. The program of events began with Mass on Corpus Christi Sunday and wrapped up yesterday: Masses, Eucharist Processions and presentations on the Most Holy Body and Blood of Jesus and the other Sacraments, including Reconciliation.

The third Personal Ordinariate for Anglicanorum Coetibus (groups of Anglicans) has been established in Australia: Our Lady of the Southern Cross. Former Anglican bishop Harry Entwistle is the first Ordinary (although, since he is married, he will not be ordained a bishop)--he's not just a former Anglican bishop, however. He was a bishop (since 2006) of the Anglican Catholic Church in Australia, which is part of the Traditional Anglican Communion.

And finally, the really big news: my husband and I went to see For Greater Glory this weekend. I've been writing and talking about the connections between the Cristeros crisis and the English Reformation, but after watching the movie, one of the great distinctions between the two really came to me: The spirit of irreligion and, indeed, the animus and fear of religion as an influence in society that animated the Calles oppression of the Church. During the English Reformation and its aftermath, the English people came to fear Catholicism and Catholics (and exported that fear among the emigrants sent to New England) but both Anglicans and Catholics in England agreed that religious faith was essential to England. The essential religious faith was Christianity; the issue was which Christian church should be at the center of the culture: the Church of England or the Roman Catholic Church (or even the Reformed Church). For Greater Glory begins with President Calles warning against the dangers of the Church to the State, so he makes the State a grave danger to the Church.

Like any historical epic, the movie had to compress some timelines and smooth out some complexities, yet it expressed the sweep of the events during the 1920s. For instance, President Calles remains the main antagonist in the conflict with Church, yet he was out of office by the time the peace treaty negotiated with input from Dwight Morrow in 1929. Although the end titles might make the audience think about the aftermath, the movie ends with the good news that the treaty allows the Church to function again: the interdict Pope Pius XI proclaimed was lifted, and the church bells rang again in Mexico. Yet even after the treaty was signed, government oppression continued. The hint of trouble is that Tulita Gorostieta, widow of  General Enrique Gorostieta, had to remain in hiding four years after the end of the war, as one of the closing titles informs us.

It's an effective movie--this is the review that I thought summarized the film's ethos:

Like Steven Spielberg’s “War Horse,” “For Greater Glory” is a film displaced in time. This historical adventure feels like a fifty-year-old film minus Charlton Heston. Director Dean Wright (a visual effects master on films like “Lord of the Rings” and “Titanic”) keeps things old fashioned but never crosses the line to pastiche. With sun-soaked cinematography, beautiful panoramic vistas, a lush James Horner score and multitudes of idealist characters and pious speeches, “For Greater Glory” feels like a war movie from a much more innocent time. Though Wright deftly uses that old Hollywood glory against us; he alternates between Hallmark card sentimentality and raw contemporary violence. As the war progresses, the film becomes increasingly violent but never loses its classic film visage, which, whether intentional or not, is eerie and memorable.

Finally, EWTN will be broadcasting a series on The History of Catholicism in the United States by Father Charles Connor tonight -- tomorrow night's episode will focus on Maryland, I'm sure, as the title is "The British Colonies".

Jacobite Ships and Exiles in Maryland

Maura Jane Farrelly mentioned the Jacobite exiles who were shipped to Maryland and "purchased" by Catholic gentry--and the tensions their presence created between Catholics and Anglicans in Maryland in her book Papist Patriots. Here is some information about those ships and the two that landed in Maryland, The Friendship of Belfast and The Goodspeed in 1716. This book, Scottish Emigration to Colonial America, 1607-1785 by David Dobson, also provides some detail. In fact, it seems to be that David Dobson is the specialist in this research, with quite a list of publications! It looks like a fascinating topic, for genealogical studies especially.

Book Review: Papist Patriots, Part Two

To conclude my long review and analysis of Maura Jane Farrelly's Papist Patriots, I pick up at the middle of the book, with the fourth chapter:

Chapter 4, “Catholic Commitment in an Inhospitable Climate” is crucial for Farrelly’s second argument or purpose in this book, to demonstrate that Catholic laity developed a cisalpine attitude toward the Catholic Church hierarchy. She introduces that term in the Introduction, noting that Catholics in England, in attempting to prove their trustworthiness and loyalty to their nation and their king, sometimes expressed limitations on the temporal authority of the pope. In Chapter 1 she also addresses the divisions between Catholics, particularly between the Jesuits and the seminary clergy, about whether one could swear James I’s Oath of Allegiance. As the Society of Jesus was founded with obedience to the pope as a central purpose, they said Catholics couldn’t. Others, called the Appellants, even at the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, tried to argue that they could be loyal to both the Queen and the Pope, appealing to divisions between spiritual and temporal authority. What Farrelly tries to do in this chapter is extend that cisalpine spirit to issues of doctrine, devotion, and discipline, creating a conflict between the laity and the (mostly) Jesuit clergy in Maryland in the eighteenth century.

I think this attempt fails, partially because, reading it as a Catholic, I immediately noticed that Farrelly does not use the correct Catholic vocabulary when discussing devotions and the Sacraments. She refers to limited access to the Sacrament of Confession, for instance, by saying that the laity could not regularly “give their Confession”—that’s not what Catholics do: we “confess our sins”. Farrelly states that “The Church told Catholics that the Eucharist was a Sacrament and as such, it must be venerated.” The correct term for Catholics’ response to the Eucharist, the Real Presence of Jesus, is worship and adoration, not veneration. Latria, worship and adoration, is offered only to God; dulia (or hyper-dulia for the Blessed Virgin Mary) is the veneration Catholics offer saints. Furthermore, Farrelly tries to develop a conflict between the Eucharistic devotion Catholics in Maryland practiced in sodalities and the veneration (sic)—worship of the Mass and reception of Holy Communion. That does not work, especially since by the eighteenth century, Eucharistic adoration outside of Mass was a regular part of devotions throughout Catholic Europe. She sets up a control issue between laity and clergy, stating that the clergy tried to control the laity by encouraging certain devotions. Nathan Mitchell’s The Mystery of the Rosary: Marian Devotion and the Re-invention of Catholicism argues the opposite—that the development of Marian devotions, for example, demonstrates that Early Modern Catholicism offered the laity a great variety of spiritualities and prayers.

Farrelly also undercuts her own argument by showing how flexible the Jesuits were in addressing practical issues among the laity in the inhospitable climate of eighteenth century Maryland—dispensing them from fasts during particularly hard winter Lents, allowing work on Sunday during harvest, and understanding certain family issues on Fridays (not forcing Protestant servants or family members to abstain from meat). She even notes that the Jesuits serving in England would not permit these kinds of variations from Catholic disciplines and teaching—and they were in the same dependent circumstances, supported by and living with Catholic nobility. Certainly Catholic priests could not dispense Catholics from their Sunday obligation in usual circumstances, because Sunday worship is an indispensable part of being Catholic. And certainly Farrelly notes that Catholics often demonstrated their devotion to their faith, even choosing distinctly Catholic names for their children.

In chapters 5 and 6, Farrelly is back on surer historical footing. She analyzes different aspects of Anti-Catholicism in Anglican Maryland, as issues of English identity and a kind of knee-jerk reaction to the idea of Catholicism that exempted individual Catholics from condemnation. The exile of Jacobite rebels from Scotland after the Pretenders’ attempts in 1715 and 1745 revived fears of Catholics plotting against king and country and increased the tensions between Anglicans and Catholics, but Chapter 5 lives up to its title, “The Inconsistency of Intolerance.”

In Chapter 6, “Papists Become Patriots,” Farrelly continues to investigate the Carroll family, focusing of course on Charles Carroll of Carrollton and his efforts, again, to prove to the other Founding Fathers that Catholics could be loyal and true allies in the cause of independence. She covers the anti-Catholic reaction to The Quebec Act, by which King George III and his government, recognizing that the vast majority of the inhabitants of Quebec were Catholic, allowed the free practice of Catholicism there. Farrelly notes that the American colonists’ reaction to the Quebec Act was “overwrought” because George III did not establish the Catholicism as the official Church of Quebec--the Church received no funding, for example. But officials did not have to deny Transubstantiation in their Oath and citizens did not pay taxes to support the Church of England’s presence in Quebec. To those who wanted independence, The Quebec Act was another argument against the tyranny of England.

When His Most Christian (Catholic) Majesty, the King of France, Louis XVI sent troops and money to the revolutionary army, American patriots had to think about this seeming contradiction—they associated Catholicism with tyranny and yet here were Catholics helping them fight against tyranny! George Washington forbade the burning of the Pope in effigy on the Fifth of November: things were changing. Although the mission failed, Charles Carroll of Carrollton and his cousin, Father John Carroll, SJ (the Society of Jesus had been suppressed by the Holy See) went on a diplomatic mission to Montreal with Benjamin Franklin. Catholics could be trusted, after all.

Farrelly ends her history with the 1776 Constitution of Maryland, to which Charles Carroll, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence contributed. It disestablished the Church of England in Maryland and established freedom of religion for Catholics, and others. She summarizes her work by hinting at the shifts in “American Catholic identity” that would come as Irish, Italian, and German Catholic immigrants changed the difference expressions of Catholicism in the coming centuries. On balance, this is an intelligent and well-narrated view of this crucial experiment in religious liberty and its effects on American independence, with one weak effort to bolster part of the author’s argument with a faux conflict between laity and clergy over Eucharistic adoration and Church discipline.

More on Catholics in Colonial America

From Laudem Gloriae: Only three of the original thirteen colonies allowed Catholics to vote. Every colony save Rhode Island prohibited Catholics from holding public office, and no colony allowed Catholic schools except for Pennsylvania. Virginia passed a law ordering the arrest of any priest who entered the state. It was regular practice to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day as their English counterparts did overseas, by burning the Pope in effigy and chanting anti-Catholic slogans. (George Washington, to his credit, attempted to do away with this bigoted festival, and rumor has it he died a Catholic.) When British Parliament passed the Quebec Act*, permitting the Catholic Church to be the official church of Quebec, colonists raised an uproar against "the popish threat" looming from the northern border.

Founding Father Alexander Hamilton said, “Does not your blood run cold to think that an English Parliament should pass an Act for the establishment of arbitrary power and Popery in such an extensive country? ...Your loves, your property, your religion are all at stake.” The Quebec Act, in his mind, would attract Catholics from all over Europe to America and thus destroy his fair country.

Hero of the Revolution Paul Revere drew a cartoon mocking four mitred Anglican clergy for drawing up the Quebec Act, a dark, winged Luciferian figure hovering behind them whispering his counsel in their ears to encourage their "approbation and countenance of the Roman religion." . . .

Christine Niles, the blogger, also quotes two letters of John Adams to Abigail in which he mocks Catholic devotions and prayers. She then concludes:

Enough with the romanticized view of early colonial America and the so-called purity of intention of our revolutionary forebears. Simply to know the Founding Fathers sympathized with the French Revolution is enough to make me wonder--as it should any thinking American Catholic.

When I read the excerpts from Adams's letters, I was reminded of Blessed John Henry Newman's impressions of Rome and Catholic ceremonies and churches there when he visited in 1833. The International Centre of Newman Friends offers this 2008 newsletter, written by Dr. Brigitte Maria Hoegemann FSO, including some of those reactions. They also reminded me of a later period of American history which Protestant churches started to adopt some Catholic architectural and liturgical practices (stained glass windows, Latin Crosses, Gothic architecture, flowers, candles, etc), even as their ministers descried Catholic liturgies as mysterious and superstitious. As Ryan K. Smith quotes one Presbyterian minister in his book Gothic Arches, Latin Crosses: Anti-Catholicism and American Church Designs in the Nineteenth Century: "Why do we abuse the papists, and then imitate them?" They recognized, like Adams, the attractions of beauty and even of the sublime.

*"And, for the more perfect Security and Ease of the Minds of the Inhabitants of the said Province, it is hereby declared: That his Majesty's Subjects, professing the Religion of the Church of Rome of and in the said Province of Quebec, may have, hold, and enjoy, the free Exercise of the Religion of the Church of Rome, subject to the King's Supremacy, declared and established by an Act, made in the first Year of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, over all the Dominions and Countries which then did, or thereafter should belong, to the Imperial Crown of this Realm; and that the Clergy of the said Church may hold, receive, and enjoy, their accustomed Dues and Rights, with respect to such Persons only as shall profess the said Religion."!

American English Catholics of the Revolutionary Era

Based on the Introduction, available in this Google book preview, Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity by Maura Jane Farrelly from Oxford University Press looks like a fascinating study (I've ordered my copy, you can be sure):

"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.

In the Introduction, Farrelly begins a re-examination of John Courtney Murray's analysis of how Catholics could fit into the pluralistic society of the modern United States; from reading it on-line it seemed to me that she was questioning the historical facts on which he based his confident trust in the moral and social structures of U.S. culture and government supporting Catholic morality based upon natural law and revelation. Farrelly seems prepped for deeper investigation into the experience not only of English Catholic colonists in Maryland, but of English Catholics in their homeland during the Stuart and Hanoverian dynasties. My copy should arrive tomorrow and I look forward to diving into it soon. When I come up for air I'll write a review.

Constitution Day, Daniel Carroll, Thomas Fitzsimmons, and "Bleeding Kansas"

Today is Constitution Day in the U.S.A., although it was really "celebrated" on September 16. Here is a link to the official website, which includes profiles of Daniel Carroll and Thomas Fitzsimmons, the two Catholic signers of the Constitution. Carroll was the cousin of Charles Carroll of Carrolltown and brother of John Carroll, Jesuit priest (until the Society of Jesus was suppressed by the pope) and first Catholic bishop in the U.S.A. More about the Carroll family here:

Charles Carroll of Carrollton (1737-1832) was the most illustrious and best-known of the Carrolls. He was the only signer whose property — Carrollton — was mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. Carrollton was the 10,000-acre estate in Frederick County, Maryland, that Charles Carroll's father had given him on his return to America from his education in Europe.

At the time he signed the Declaration, it was against the law for a Catholic to hold public office or to vote. Although Maryland was founded by and for Catholics in 1634, in 1649 and, later, in 1689 after the Glorious Revolution placed severe restrictions on Catholics in England, the laws were changed in Maryland, and Catholicism was repressed. . . .

Daniel Carroll of Rock Creek (1730-1796) was a member of the Continental Congress (1781-1783), and a signer of the Articles of Confederation. He was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and one of only two Catholic signers of the United States Constitution. (The other Catholic signer was Thomas Fitzsimons of Pennsylvania.) At the Constitutional Convention, Daniel Carroll played an essential role in formulating the limitation of the powers of the federal government. He was the author of the presumption — enshrined in the Constitution — that powers not specifically delegated to the federal government were reserved to the states or to the people.

Daniel Carroll later became a member of the first United States Congress (1789-1791). He was also a member of the first Senate of Maryland, where he served up to the time of his death. He was appointed by Washington as one of the first three commissioners of the new federal city that is now known as the District of Columbia. In today's terminology, he would have been considered the mayor of Washington, D.C.

John Carroll (1735-1815), Daniel Carroll's younger brother, was educated in Europe, joined the Jesuit order, and was ordained a priest. He founded a private school for boys and named it after the town where it was located, Georgetown, a port on the Potomac River that later became part of Washington, D.C. He went on to be elected — by all the Catholic priests in America — to become America's first Catholic bishop. He later became archbishop of Baltimore. In any procession of American bishops, the archbishop of Baltimore always goes last in recognition of its role as America's oldest diocese. In 1789, John Carroll founded the college in Georgetown that later became known as Georgetown University.

I mentioned the Carroll family attending the Catholic college in St. Omers founded by Father Robert Parsons in Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation.

Finally, I want to report on a fascinating lecture I attended this week at Friends University here in Wichita. Friends U. is a Quaker university--they have a chorus called "The Singing Quakers". Anyway, the Garvey Institute of Law at Friends co-sponsored a Constitution Day Program Tuesday evening on "How much did Kansas Really Bleed? Kansas, the Constitution, and the Civil War in History and Today" with support from the Kansas Humanities Council. The speaker was Dr. Brian Craig Miller, Assistant Professor of History at Emporia State University. His talk was excellent, including opportunities for the audience to answer questions and discuss issues. One of our other universities and my alma mater will present a Constitution Day NEXT week. More details here.

Happy Constitution Day!

Oh, and the answer to the question "How much did Kansas Really Bleed?"--for all the exagerration of the newspapers back east at the time: not so much. Fifty-six (56) were killed during the Bleeding Kansas period from 1854 to 1861 (yes, 2011 is Kansas's sesquescentennial year!). During the Civil War, 20,097 Kansas men signed up for the Union Army--more than 8,000 were killed. Kansas always exceeded the quota for enlistment during the Civil War by two or three times.

John Ford, Catholicism and History

Completely off-topic, but it's MY blog, after all:

The American film director John Ford died on August 31, 1973. He directed many of my favorite movies, films that I can watch over and over again (just ask my husband!), enjoying both the familiarity of the story and the unique imagery and nuances I see anew each time. Elena-Maria Vidal pointed out his upcoming commemorative stamp on her blog, Tea at Trianon last week. She also posted this article one time about the themes in his movies.

Among my favorites:

How Green Was My Valley

The Quiet Man

The Searchers

Fort Apache

Rio Grande

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

3 Godfathers

The Fugitive

Young Mr. Lincoln
The Long Grey Line

They Were Expendable

My Darling Clementine

Mogambo

The Horse Soldiers

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

In other words, just about every movie he made. I like his sense of family--Ford featured the same actors in many films, like a production company. John Wayne, Patrick Wayne, Carlton Young, Anne Lee, Ward Bond, Victor McLaglan, Henry Fonda, Maureen O'Hara, Woody Strode, John Qualen, Hank Worden, Thomas Mitchell, his brother Francis Ford, Ben Johnson, Harry Carey, Jr., Mae Marsh, Andy Devine, Ken Curtis, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, etc.

I enjoy his sense of etiquette and order--like when Henry Fonda's martinet character berates John Agar ("Mr. Shirley Temple") in Ward Bond's quarters and the Sergeant reminds Fonda that he has violated the sanctity of his non-commissioned officer's quarters in Fort Apache. Since he was not invited he has no right to be there. But stiff-necked, stone-faced Fonda still has to start the dance with Mrs. O'Rourke before the battle with Cochise.

His movies reflect--almost always indirectly--on one of the greatest events in American history, the Civil War. Ford's westerns always have some echoes of the War between the States, just because the armies are made up of former Confederate and Union soldiers. The Horse Soldiers is the exception. Ford also reflects on the experience of Irish immigrants --Fonda's Thursday is uncomfortable with the all the Irish-Americans at Fort Apache, and his interference in the relationship between his daughter Philadelphia (Shirley Temple) and the O'Rourke is based on his bigotry. Somehow he did not know what the Irish had contributed to Union victory? And don't forget that he deals with bigotry against the Native American Indians in The Searchers and Cheyenne Autumn, too.

Ford's ability to frame a scene to reveal secrets in relationships--how his brother's wife caresses John Wayne's coat in The Searchers, then Wayne kisses her while Ward Bond stares straight ahead, eating his donut and drinking his coffee; John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara's embrace in The Quiet Man even though they are estranged by her desire for her dowry; Vera Miles placing the cactus rose on Tom Doniphan's bare casket (although you never see it--Ford just puts the scene together before your eyes by suggestion) in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; the women waiting to see who comes home from the battle with the Indians in Rio Grande--reminding us that Ford began as a silent movie director.

His use of music: Ken Curtis singing "I'll Take You Home, Kathleen" to Maureen O'Hara and John Wayne in Rio Grande ("This music is not of my choosing, Kathleen"; "I wish it had been, Kirby"); the dances; the priest Ward Bond singing a rather inappropriate song at the wedding in The Quiet Man; the Welsh choirs in How Green Was My Valley.

I think the author Anthony Burke Smith might sum up the reasons I like John Ford movies in his book The Look of Catholics: Portrayals in Popular Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War. He points out that "while a filmmaker like John Ford rarely focused on clerics and the Church . . . his films gave a distinctly ethnic Catholic accent to his cinematic depictions of American community"; religion "is an unbroken thread running through the films of John Ford, providing his movies with some of their most compelling moments." Smith somewhat dismisses other studies of Ford's films that highlight the "sacramental imagination" demonstrated in the movies, but I think that aspect is also important. Ford's movies depict simple rituals, like the family dinner in How Green Was My Valley and the courtship rules in The Quiet Man as signs of holiness and sacredness.

And most of all, I love these films because my father loved them too. We would get together as a family on March 17 to eat baked potatoes, drink Irish whiskey (neat) and watch The Quiet Man.