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Chapter Two Anti-Catholicism The roots of anti-Catholicism in America stretch back to late antique Europe. Religious movements born in Europe and the Mediterranean that challenged the authority of the Roman Catholic Church or its teachings were common in the first few centuries after the Emperor Constantine (d. 337). Gathering momentum in terms both of their numbers and their ability to attract followers , such movements increasingly emerged as permutations of Roman Catholicism, and especially as representations of altered Catholic doctrine. Because of that, they were considered heretical. Heretics and their followers , as apostates or traitors to the faith, posed a particular danger to Roman leadership as “wolves in sheep’s clothing,” or a kind of malignancy thought to be growing in the body of the true church. Rome was ever watchful against heresy, rooting it out wherever it could be found, brutally punishing or exterminating heretical communities. Believing that secret organizations of apostates , under the controlling influence of Satan, existed undercover within Christendom, biding their time and gaining strength with the aim of ultimately overthrowing the Catholic Church, Roman officials invented various kinds of machinery to destroy such cancers. The most notorious initiative in that regard was the Inquisition, devised to root out persons who claimed to be Christians but who secretly practiced another religion, whether it be a form of Judaism or Islam or—and this was especially important to Inquisitors —a corrupted Christianity. When the Protestant Reformation began in the early sixteenth century, the Catholic Church fought it tooth and nail but could not contain it. Near-genocidal wars of religion followed in which both Catholics and Protestants proved their capability to act out sadistic, unbridled dramas of human butchery, out of fear as well as arrogance. Protestants and Catholics were engaged in such wars even as Europeans were 50 Anti-Catholicism settling North America. The bloody Thirty Years’ War, for example, raged in Europe from 1618 to 1648, and the Puritan Revolution in England took place in the 1640s. In North America, Protestants and Catholics were wary of each other. The St. Lawrence River Valley and some adjacent territories were a flashpoint for violence between the French, who were Catholic, and the largely Protestant settlers of British colonies. Among Protestants, the image of Catholics as power-hungry, morally depraved despots prevailed, and it was that image of the Catholic that permeated English anti-Catholicism. Protestants cast Catholics, and especially the Roman leadership, as enemies in terms strikingly similar to the ways that Catholics had pictured Protestants in Europe: as secretive, conspiratorial, deadly, morally unregenerate, bent on political domination, cruel, duplicitous, and seductive. Many European religious groups immigrated to British North America seeking to escape religious persecution. Some brought with them fairly welldeveloped ideas about religious toleration. Others embraced a rhetoric of religious freedom but responded violently to groups of persons who adhered to even slightly different religious views. Some were especially keen on limiting the rights of Catholics. After the Glorious Revolution in England (1688) replaced a Catholic ruler with a Protestant, the legal status of Catholics in the English colonies changed significantly. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries most of the colonies passed laws against Catholics, forbidding either the practice of Catholicism, or being a member of the Catholic clergy, or other kinds of offenses derived from Protestant anxieties about religious difference. In some colonies, Catholics were disenfranchised, in others, actively hunted and prosecuted. Some were sentenced to whippings and banishment , others to removal to England to be more ambitiously prosecuted there; and in a few cases Catholics were sentenced to death and executed. French Catholicism in North America was crucial background to the French and Indian War (1754–63), fought on the British side largely by New Englanders exercising vigilance in their efforts to ensure that Catholics not be given a foothold in the region. In the South, early eighteenth-century English military campaigns against Franciscan missions had largely erased the string of over fifty mission towns and settlements across the Florida Panhandle. That prepared the region for English control when the Treaty of Paris (1793), which marked the end of the French and Indian War, committed the French to surrendering Canada to the English, and the Spanish to ceding Florida. Intolerance of Catholics during the nineteenth century took a variety of forms, some physically violent, some not. As the Catholic population of the United States increased, intolerance grew more fevered in its pitch; and as [18.226.187.24] Project MUSE...

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