American Catholic Apologetical Dissonance in the Early Republic?: Father John Thayer and Bishop John Carroll

AMERICAN CATHOLIC APOLOGETICAL DISSONANCE IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC? FATHER JOHN THAYER AND BISHOP JOHN CARROLL Thomas W. Jodziewicz* In his discussion of the religions of the generally tolerant Utopians, in Book II of Utopia, St. Thomas More seems to have unintentionally anticipated the character and activities of a late eighteenth-century American priest, Father John Thayer. While I was there, only one of the Christians got into trouble with the law. As soon as he was baptized, he took on himself to preach the Christian religion publicly, with more zeal than discretion. We warned him not to do so, but he soon worked himself up to a pitch where he not only preferred our religion, but condemned all others as profane, leading their impious and sacrilegious followers to the hell-fires they richly deserved. After he had been going on in this style for a long time, they arrested him. He was tried on a charge,not ofdespising their religion, but ofcreating a public disorder, convicted, and sentenced to exile. For it is one of their oldest rules that no one should suffer for his religion.1 If one recognizes Thayer's name at all, it is a name and person easily connected "with more zeal than discretion," a Puritan convert to Roman Catholicism who seemed surely to condemn Protestant Americans to "hell-fires" and to promote much "public disorder." Thayer was himself in effect "sentenced to exile," evidently for breaking one of the Utopians "Oldest rules," but a fairly new American reality, that regarding toleration . He did then appear to "suffer for his religion," for the evangelizing of his countrymen, a bittersweet reality that did not escape the attention of Father Thayer. Of course, there is usually more than one way to look at things, and Father Thayer's eventful moment in the early American republic is no *Dr.Jodziewicz is an associate professor of history in the University of Dallas. 'Thomas More, Utopia, edd. George M. Logan and Robert M.Adams (Cambridge, 1992), p. 97. 455 456AMERICAN CATHOLIC APOLOGETICAL DISSONANCE IN THE EARLY REPUBUC? exception. Despite the obvious displeasure of Bishop John Carroll with his occasionally insubordinate subordinate, Thayer shared with his religious superior, and fellow apologist, a passion both for their common faith and for their republican homeland. Neither Thayer nor his bishop doubted the good things that might occur in a new nation founded in religious freedom and, hence, open to evangelization. Neither understood the American commitment to the separation of church and state, and to religious liberty, then, to be a commitment to religious indifferentism or any other sort of modern relativism or agnosticism regarding religion and morality. While both men were committed to the liberal values of the new republic, indeed proud of those values, both were also passionately aware ofthe timeless quality of Christ's commission to his followers:"Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" (Matthew 28: 19-20). Each man was a willing participant in the continuing development in the early republic of what would later be deemed by many observers as the pre-eminent American Catholic contribution to the universal Church, the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom. In many ways a distillation of and a reflection upon the American Catholic experience, that document would affirm the validity of religious freedom, but yet also reaffirm the fundamental and perennial evangelizing mission of the Church.2 The rub here is that, unburdened not only with episcopal responsibilities but also unburdened, or rather not blessed, by Bishop Carroll's natural disposition toward peace and lowered voices, Father Thayer seemed hardly a consistent model of "love, prudence, and patience in his dealings with those who are in error or in ignorance with regard to the faith," as the Declaration counseled . While Carroll was content to initiate a long-term building of the Church in the United States, and to react as might be necessary to attacks on the faith or the Church, Thayer was anxious to bring about the immediate realization of the...