Catholics in the Early American Republic: An Exhibition Overview

In January 2017 Jean McManus, the Catholic Studies Librarian, and Rachel Bohlmann, the American History Librarian at the University of Notre Dame's Hesburgh Libraries, opened a temporary gallery exhibition on Catholics in the early American republic. The show drew upon collections held in the library's Rare Books and Special Collections Department and in the University Archives. In June we launched the online version (https://collections.library.nd.edu/Catholics-early-american-republic). Displayed in the library's Rare Books and Special Collections Department, "'Preserving the Steadfastness of Your Faith': Catholics in the Early American Republic," showed how American Catholics cultivated print culture—pamphlets, newspapers, and books—to carve out space for themselves in a predominantly Protestant nation. Simultaneously, Catholics used printed sources to foster ties with a trans-Atlantic Catholic community. Through print they combatted Protestant prejudice and violence, strengthened lay piety (through bible reading and devotional practice), built a pluralist church, and argued for religious liberty. Highlights of the show included a copy of Mathew Carey's 1790 Douai-Rheims bible and Elizabeth Seton's annotated copy of Thomas à Kempis's The Imitation of Christ. In selecting the well-handled and marked-up pieces, we wanted to convey the fullest possible representation of Catholics in the early republic. This article offers an overview of the show's content and online features and discusses some further research it has inspired.

The show's main title came from John Carroll's Address to the Roman Catholics of the United States of America, which he wrote in 1784 as head of the Catholic Church in the United States. He defended Catholicism from an attack by a convert to Anglicanism who had published a pamphlet denouncing his former faith. In Carroll's reply he also argued that Catholicism and American Catholics should be and were fully part of the new democratic republic. In one of the pamphlet's most pastoral passages, Carroll explained, "Under these distressful feelings [caused by this anti-Catholic attack], one consideration alone relieved me . . . and that was, the hope of vindicating your religion to your own selves at least, and preserving the steadfastness of your faith."¹ Carroll's letter is an example of the kinds of polemical, devotional, and descriptive literature American Catholics produced in the 1780s and 1790s. Again and again Catholics addressed accusations that they were less free than Protestants to read and to think for themselves, and that their first loyalty was to Rome, not to their own states or to the Constitution.

John Neagle, Portrait of Mathew Carey, 1825. Library Company of Philadelphia. Digital image from the Library of Congress.

In the exhibition's first section, "A Catholic Bible for a New Republic," we showed two Douai-Rheims bibles published by Mathew Carey, one in 1790 and the other in 1805. They represented the optimism many Americans—Catholics and Protestants—felt during the first years of the republic, when a spirit of relative religious openness prevailed, however briefly. Carey published his 1790 bible with fine bindings and large margins to make it stand out on a shelf, not blend in, a political statement that Catholics generally could not have afforded to make earlier.²

The show's second section continued the theme of Catholic devotional literature with "The Many Editions of the Imitation of Christ," in which we showed the copy of Thomas à Kempis's work owned by Elizabeth Seton after she converted to Catholicism (she had used a different edition when she was an Episcopalian). We placed Seton's heavily annotated copy in context with a variety of editions available at the time in the United States.

The show's third section, "Flying Pamphlets," focused on an example of controversialist literature by tracing the dispute between Charles Henry Wharton, a former Jesuit and protégé of Carroll's, and Carroll in 1784–1785. This debate sparked a lively exchange of inexpensive pamphlets that circulated within America as well as across the Atlantic in Great Britain, Ireland, and on the Continent. We were...