Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity (review)

Every so often a book comes along that presents a dramatically different interpretation of known historical facts in a way that is, well, convincing. This is one of those books. Maura Jane Farrelly confronts one of hoariest historiographical issues in the study of American Catholicism: Can one be a good Catholic and simultaneously a good American? It was an issue that rose to the forefront of American religious scholarship in the nineteenth century, given a historiographical predisposition (at the time) to see Protestantism, Puritanism in particular, as giving rise to American democracy. After all, given the perfect fit seen to exist between Protestantism and American democracy, it only made sense to ask if Catholics could be good Americans—and the answer, of course, was usually “no.” Although it is common to suggest that such a blatant anti-Catholic bias is no longer in evidence, the question (in my view) continues to shape work of many Catholic writers (like Jay Dolan, quoted on the back cover of Farrelly’s book) who still seem concerned with demonstrating that good Catholics can be good Americans.

Farrelly begins by pointing out that pre-existing scholarly attempts to address the good Catholic/good American issue have focused on Catholics (mainly Irish American and Italian American Catholics) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She argues that we need to leap-frog over these groups and confront a question about the Colonial period—why was it that Maryland Catholics were such staunch supporters of the American Revolution despite the fact that so many of their Revolutionary compatriots were virulently anti-Catholic? The answer to that question lies in how Catholics in the late-eighteenth century perceived the earliest days of the Maryland colony. Basically, those early days were seen as a Golden Age in which religious toleration had been the norm. Farrelly is careful to note that there was not really as much toleration in the early Maryland colony as later generations of Maryland Catholics likely imagined, but also that it did not matter. What mattered was only that for Catholics in the late 1700s, their Catholic forebears had once lived in a tolerant society that was distinctively “American,” not “British,” and that this Golden Age had been brought to an end by Britain. The only way to restore that Golden Age, then, was to sever ties with Britain and once again develop a distinctively American society founded on toleration. Farrelly, of course, fleshes all this out with a detailed consideration of life in Maryland in the centuries before the Revolution, but this is her core argument, and for her it explains the strong support that Maryland Catholics provided the Revolution. It is also explains, Farrelly argues, why Catholic leaders like John Carroll, archbishop of Baltimore, tried to obtain more independence from Rome for the American Church.

The book is based on Farrelly’s 2002 PhD dissertation for Emory University, and there are sections that should likely have been excised or revised by her editor. The relevance of an early section on Catholicism in pre-Reformation England, for example, is unclear and in any event does not really take account of the revisionist and postrevisionist scholarship over the last fifteen years that establishes, far more clearly that Farrelly allows, that English Catholicism was thriving on the eve of the Reformation. There are also a few (but only a few) sections where discussion of the genealogical connections amongst the political leaders who shaped life in Maryland is simply mind-numbing and adds little to her core argument.

Still, these are minor flaws in a book that will become a standard reference work on the history and historiography of American Catholicism.