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American Catholics have a compelling reason to regard, with affection and gratitude, America’s founding.
Prior to the American War for Independence, the anti-Catholic Penal Laws—officially called the Laws for the Suppression of Popery—governed the treatment of Catholics in Great Britain, Ireland and, with the exception of Francophone Quebec, the British Empire.
That empire included the thirteen colonies of British North America.
Described by Edmund Burke as “a model of vicious perfection,” the Penal Laws were the most comprehensive system of organized oppression before the rise of 20th century totalitarianism.
These laws were not only intended to crush the Catholic Religion and deprive Catholics of their civil and political rights, but to destitute them, dispossess them of their land and destroy their family life.
Their property would be forfeit, their inheritance rights impeded, and they would be prohibited from receiving an education, either at home or abroad.
Primogeniture was set aside. Catholic estates were divided by gavelkind, that is to say, equally among all the sons.
An apostate son who conformed to the King’s religion by law established, could expropriate his father’s estate, reducing him to tenant on his own land.
The Catholic widow of a Protestant husband was in danger of having her children separated from her. No Catholic could serve as the guardian of a minor.
In civic life, Catholics could not vote, practice law or hold any office, civil or military, under the crown. They could not be employed as a teacher or as a schoolmaster, or be called as a juror in a Crown court.
The severity of the Imperial Parliament was imitated and re-enforced by colonial legislatures.
In the Royal Province of Massachusetts Bay, which then included the District of Maine, the law prescribed the death penalty for any Jesuit priest who ventured into its territory.
Among the Thirteen Colonies, only the Proprietary Province of Pennsylvania, founded by the Quaker William Penn, permitted public worship for Catholics.
In a colony founded by Catholics, Maryland Catholics were forced to hear Mass in private chapels, the existence of which depended upon legal sufferance, that is to day, the discretionary non-enforcement of anti-Catholic laws still on the statute books.
With the outbreak of the War for Independence, three centuries of state sanctioned anti-Catholicism in the Anglosphere began to dissolve.
With his famous General Orders of November 5, 1775, George Washington, Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, then encamped in Cambridge, forbade the celebration of Guy Fawke’s Day—known in New England as Pope Night—where the Pope was burned in effigy.
In their conflict with Britain, Americans sought military, diplomatic and financial support from the most powerful state in Europe, the Eldest Daughter of the Church, Catholic France.
In 1778, France entered the war and the young American republic signed its first Treaty of Alliance, with the Most Christian King, Louis XVI.
In 1779, a second Catholic great power, Spain, declared war against Britain, and came to the aid of the United States.
By the end of war, Catholics enjoyed freedom of public worship in all thirteen states.
With the passage of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786, Catholics possessed full civil rights as citizens and enjoyed legal equality with Protestants in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Virginia.
Then came the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
The last line of Article VI of the U.S. Constitution states: “…no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”
For American Catholics, this was the 18th century equivalent of Constantine’s Edict of Milan. For the first time in the English speaking world, since the Protestant Revolution of the 16th century, Catholics could now attain full rights of national citizenship, including the right to hold elective office.
It would be more than four decades later before Catholic Emancipation finally came to Great Britain and Ireland in 1829.
With the ratification of the First Amendment in 1791, the “free exercise of religion” was guaranteed to all Americans, including those who practiced the Catholic Faith.
Happy Independence Day!
God Bless America!
God Save The United States!
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