The Sad Saga of America's Catholic Refuge

Reader Mark comments,

"You make no mention of colonial Maryland - which pretty much destroys your disjointed and quarrelsome argument. It was founded in 1632 by royal charter issued to the second Baron Baltimore who was a staunch Catholic and has had a continuous Catholic present up to this day."

Here's what actually hapepened. Maryland was indeed established explicitly as a refuge for Catholics. An English Catholic convert named George Calvert, a.k.a. Lord Baltimore, was given the land grant by King Charles I in 1632. But in 1644, an influential Virginian, William Claiborne, launched a military attack and captured Kent Island in the name of fighting the "Papist devills." Eventually, Baltimore recovered the land and resumed efforts to create a religious safe haven. In part to prove that he was not establishing the Catholic Church as the official religion, he worked with the Assembly to pass in 1649 a law allowing tolerance of all (except, of course, for "blasphemers and Jews"). The Act Concerning Religion declared that no one "professing to believe in Jesus Christ shall from henceforth be in any ways troubled, molested or discountenanced for or in respect of his or her religion…."

The lofty spirit of tolerance faded from the document in the penalty section, which proscribed the death penalty for anyone who blasphemes God, denies or criticizes the divinity of Christ, or criticizes any component of the Trinity. While the death penalty for non-Christians might strike some of us today as a bit extreme, Baltimore's more pressing problem was trying to appease Protestants, who had come to outnumber Catholics in Maryland.

In one sense this gesture of tolerance worked—in 1649 several hundred Puritans, oppressed in Virginia by the Anglicans, fled to the freedom of Maryland. But with no good deed going unpunished, the Puritans soon allied with Lord Baltimore's enemies and claimed that he was "professing an establishment of the Romish Religion only," "suppressing 'poor Protestants," and making citizens swear to "uphold Antichrist."

By 1681, Protestants outnumbered Catholics 30 to 1 in Maryland. In 1689, the Glorious Revolution was underway in England and rumors of Catholic-Indian plots now spread rapidly. In July, a group calling itself the Protestant Association again seized the Maryland government. After that, the Church of England was established and followed patterns similar to those in Virginia. They used taxes to build churches, set up vestries and compensate the Anglican clergy. In 1700, the colony prevented Catholics from inheriting or purchasing land and established life imprisonment for priests. Informants who spotted priests saying mass could get a 100 pound reward. In 1704, they prohibited Catholic worship. In 1715, they required that children of a Protestant father and Catholic mother be forcibly removed from the mother if the father died. The next year, public officeholders were required to swear allegiance to the Church of England and, in 1718, Catholics were denied the vote unless they took the same oath.

So much for Maryland's experiment in religious tolerance.