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  • Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620–1860 by Maura Jane Farrelly
  • James M. Woods
Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620–1860. By Maura Jane Farrelly. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2017. Pp. xviii, 205. $24.99 paperback. ISBN 978-1-316-61636-9.)

Professor Maura Jane Farrelly has written a short, yet significant new book on an old topic, anti-Catholicism in antebellum America. Eighty years ago, Ray Allen Billington and Sister Mary Augustine Ray addressed this topic, yet it has certainly drawn real academic interest over the past two decades. Although anti-Catholicism has dissipated over the last half-century, it has not altogether disappeared. As Farrelly observes, for much of the nation's early history, American religious and political leaders viewed Catholicism as a threat to "national identity individual liberty, personal salvation, and the stability of free government" (p. xi.). Certainly the Catholic Church represented different threats to various Americans during distinct eras. Over the course of the colonial and early national period however, one anti-Catholic theme remained constant, the Church and its adherents represented a major threat to American freedom. (p. xii).

This book is more thematic than a comprehensive retelling of the vast amount of anti-Catholic statements in the U.S. prior to 1860. Divided into six chapter, the opening one retells of story of Catholicism from Old to New England. Despite the fears and outright persecution of the Church, Catholics did exist in seventeenth-century colonial America, primarily in Maryland. Farrelly's third chapter is her most important in that she portrays Catholicism within the context of the American Revolution. The fourth chapter surveys the surprising lack of anti-Catholicism as the church leadership sought to find its place in the new republic. However, a large influx of Catholic immigrants ignited a firestorm against the Church in the three decades prior to the Civil War.

This book is based on strong research in the primary and secondary sources. Her thesis is really contained in chapters two and three, where she builds upon her earlier book Papist Patriots: The Making of American Catholic Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Farrelly maintains that the colonial Americans identified with Protestantism in a way that Catholics could not. Before the political revolution erupted against British hegemony, colonial Catholics had decades earlier already cast off any association with England. In their minds and hearts, Catholics had already declared their independence long before their Protestant countrymen ever attempted the effort. Simultaneously, there was another revolution taking place in the American Catholic perspectives regarding religious freedom. Catholics not only rejected American identity with Protestantism; they also rejected the confessional [End Page 555] state idea that church and state should be one. While I have not emphasized it in my own book, I agree with Farrelly. In my treatment of southern Catholicism, I quoted Charles Carroll, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, as stating that he supported religious toleration for all. "Based on an earlier Maryland tradition, Carroll supported religious freedom, no religious tests, and the separation of church and state, positions that the Second Vatican Council would accept almost two hundred years later" (Woods, A History of the Catholic Church in the American South, 1513–1900 [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011], p. 149).

This Americanization process then extended into the early national period regarding the trustee controversy. Many Catholic parishes followed the example of Protestants in having a board of trustees manage and even run the local church. This went against a Catholic tradition of clerical control. This caused some major conflicts between the American clergy and the laity, especially in places like Norfolk, Charleston, and even more dramatically, Philadelphia. Moreover, the early founders of our government did not mind if the people were religious, "they also wanted the American people's religiosity to be a choice" (p. 112). Then Bishop, later (after 1808) Archbishop of Baltimore, John Carroll certainly supported this situation. Carroll believed that the reasonableness of the Faith, plus a respectful approach to their fellow non-Catholic countrymen, would win souls for the Church.

All of this changed abruptly with the massive, mainly Irish Catholic, migration after 1830. As Professor Farrelly points...

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