Catholicism in Colonial and Revolutionary America: An Interview with Maura Jane Farrelly

Maura Jane Farrelly is assistant professor of American studies and director of the journalism program at Brandeis University. She has worked with National Public Radio, Public Radio International, Voice of America, and the British Broadcasting Corporation. Her work covers Catholics in the South in the 18th and 19th centuries and Methodism in the 19th century. In early 2012 Farrelly's book Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity was published by Oxford University Press. Historically Speaking editor Randall J. Stephens caught up with Farrelly recently and spoke with her about her book.

Randall Stephens:

You begin the book with a 1960 quote from Catholic theologian John Courtney Murray, who insisted that early American Catholics, as you put it, understood the "individualistic, rights-oriented language of America's founders." Would that have come as a shock to many Americans in that famous election year?

Maura Jane Farrelly:

Well "shock" is kind of a strong word. I suspect most people in 1960 didn't think enough about early American Catholics to be shocked one way or the other! It was contemporary Catholics—not the dead ones—that interested them. But did many Americans still believe in 1960 that the Catholic mindset was and always had been incompatible with the American mindset? Yes. And not without reason, I might add. Remember, prior to Vatican II—and specifically the adoption of Dignitatis Humanae in 1965—the Vatican did not formally endorse the kind of church-state separation that is embodied in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. "Error has no rights" was the understanding that animated the church's relations with secular authorities, and the Catholic church, as the only earthly institution that contained the fullness of divine truth, was believed to be the proper partner for the state. John Courtney Murray insisted that Western culture had developed a fuller understanding of human dignity—one that accorded individuals the right and the responsibility to assume ownership of their religious beliefs and identities— and he argued that the dictates of natural law obliged the church to grow in conjunction with this fuller understanding of human dignity. The Vatican silenced him for these ideas in the mid-1950s but then invited him to Rome in 1963, where he helped to craft Dignitatis Humanae. Murray firmly believed that at the time of the founding there was a natural fit between Catholicism and a commitment to individual rights and religious pluralism—or what he called "the American consensus." This fit, he insisted, was a consequence of the Catholic understanding of natural law. I agree with him that the Catholics living in the British colonies in the 1770s had embraced the American consensus, but I'm not sure their natural-law mindset was the reason why. I think it was their unique experiences as a politically—but not economically— oppressed minority in an English colony where Catholicism had been tolerated—and then wasn't—that "prepared" colonial Catholics to accept the ideology of the founding.

Cecilius Calvert from William Hand Browne, George Calvert and Cecilius Calvert: Barons Baltimore of Baltimore (New York, 1890).

Stephens:

How and why did Protestant views of Catholics in colonial America change over time?

Farrelly:

It really depends upon what part of colonial America you're talking about. In New England— home to the descendants of a group of Calvinists who had traveled across the Atlantic so that they could purge the Church of England of its "popish relics"—there was never much love for Catholics. Indeed, New Englanders made no real distinction between "Catholics" and "Catholicism"; both were synonymous with "slavery" and "arbitrary power." People in Massachusetts and Connecticut could not conceive of the possibility that someone might be able to deny the legitimacy of sola scriptura (and believe that the truths revealed in Christ were too great to be accessed entirely on one's own) and yet still embrace the so-called "rights of Englishmen." I believe this was because Catholics were an unknown quantity to New Englanders. They were, according to John Adams, "as rare as...