Ritual and Practice in the Maryland Catholic Community, 1634-1776

Ritual and Practice in the Maryland Catholic Community, 1634–1776 Tricia T. Pyne M aryland is referred to as the cradle of Catholicity in this country. Founded by the Catholic Lord Baltimore in 1634, the colony distinguished itself from other British colonies with the promise of religious freedom and the separation of church and state. These policies enabled the Catholics who immigrated to Maryland to lay the foundations that the Catholic Church in the U.S. was built upon. While the political, social, and economic influences that shaped the development of the Maryland Catholic community have been the subject of much study, what has been most visibly absent from many of these works is an examination of the community ’s religious practices. The fragmentary nature of surviving records has only allowed historians to reconstruct a partial and incomplete picture, leaving many questions unanswered as a result. That is until recently. The efforts of a diverse group of scholars, with backgrounds in U.S. church and social history, liturgy, and musicology, have identified new avenues of research that may finally allow us to recreate the conditions that Catholics worshipped under during the colonial period.1 Related studies published on the English Catholic community, religion in England, and the Society of Jesus have also proved invaluable, providing a framework for identifying patterns of 17 1. See, for example, John A. Gurrieri, “Catholic Sunday in America: Its Shape and Early History,” in Mark Searle, ed., Sunday Morning: A Time for Worship (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1962), 75-95; R. Emmett Curran, ed., American Jesuit Spirituality: The Maryland Tradition, 1634-1900 (New York: Paulist Press, 1988); Michael J. Graham, “Meetinghouse and Chapel: Religion and Community in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” in Colonial Chesapeake Society, eds. Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 242-74; Beatriz Betancourt Hardy, “Papists in a Protestant Age: The Catholic Gentry and Community in Colonial Maryland, 1689-1776” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 1993); Tricia T. Pyne, “The Maryland Catholic Community, 1690-1775: A Study in Culture, Region, and Church” (Ph.D. dissertation, The Catholic University of America, 1995), chaps. 1 and 2; Thomas E. Wangler, “Daily Religious Exercises of the American Catholic Laity in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 108, nos. 3-4 (Fall-Winter 1997-1998): 1-22; Joseph Linck, “Fully Instructed and Vehemently Influenced”: Catholic Preaching in Anglo-Colonial America” (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2002); and Robert R. Grimes, “The Emergence of Catholic Music and Ritual in Colonial Maryland,” American Catholic Studies 114, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 1-36. behavior as well as traditions and practices that influenced the development of the local Church here.2 The focus of this article will be on how this research is helping us to reinterpret the significance of these records for learning more about the liturgical and sacramental practices of the Maryland Catholic community. Background The Jesuits of the English Province were the principal missionaries to serve in Maryland. They had been invited by Lord Baltimore to participate in his colonial venture and eventually became responsible for the mission to the British colonies of North America, sending 113 priests and 30 brothers to labor here between 1634 and 1776.3 At the end of the colonial period, they had missions in Maryland and Pennsylvania and were making regular visits to the District of Columbia, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and Virginia. In Maryland, the average number of Jesuits in the colony at any one time did not exceed six until the end of the seventeenth century . This number grew slowly over the eighteenth century, but did not surpass a dozen until after 1740.4 The Jesuits financed the Maryland mission through the profits generated by the five plantations they owned in the colony.5 When Maryland’s first penal laws were enacted in 1704, these plantations were transformed into bases for their missionary activities and became important centers of Catholic life in the 18 U.S. Catholic Historian 2. Of particular importance are: John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976...