CHAPTER XVI THE FIRST CATHOLIC COLONY IT has been well said by Bancroft that "the United States were severally colonized by men, in origin, religious faith, and purposes, as varied as their climes "; and by another American writer that "in travelling from Massachusetts to the Carolinas one passed through communities of such distinct individuality that they were almost like different nations. Each had been founded for a reason and purpose of its own, each had a set of opinions and laws peculiar to itself, and it was not uncommon to find the laws and opinions of one a contradiction to those of another"; and we have only to turn to the early history of Maryland to recognize the truth of these observations. Thrust like a wedge between the older colony of Virginia and the younger of Massachusetts Bay, the one in everything so unlike the other, Maryland, in that early day, was the connecting link between North and South; southern, because of its geographical position and climate and soil; northern, because by one of those whims of fate it practiced tolerance and gave asylum to the intolerance of Puritanism and the narrowness no less of those Virginia "butterflies" who, lightly as they regarded theological dis pute, had all the stubbornness of ignorance in defending the faith. Maryland interests us as being the first and only American colony established to afford a refuge to Roman Catholics. To escape persecution, to be permitted to lead their lives in their own way unhindered by civil or ecclesiastical law, the Puritans went to Massachusetts. It was with the same purpose that George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, led his company of adventurers first to Newfoundland and then to Virginia, which would have none of him because of his religion; and later found shelter in Maryland. We are interested in Maryland, in tracing American development, because of the influence exercised on the American character by the religious faith of its first settlers, which made Maryland so different from both Massachusetts and Virginia. "The darkened and gloomy mind of the Puritan" gave to the American the strength and moral purpose that made Ethan Allen demand the surrender of Fort Ticonderoga " in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress"; the Virginian gave him imagination and the love of reckless adventure that drove the frontier ever forward and spread a handful of men to fill a vast continent; the Marylander sowed the seeds of a church with its discipline and traditions that were the needed counterpoise. A plant is nurtured no more by its sun than by its snow. Virginia and Massachusetts and Maryland take away any one of 66 those elements and you subtract from American psychology. With the political history of Maryland we need not concern ourselves, deeply interesting as it is to the historical student because of the extraordinary powers it vested in its proprietor. Baltimore died a month after he had received his grant, and the work of colonization was carried on by his son Cecilius, a remarkable man in an age of remarkable men, to whom may be accorded the honor of having been one of the first English colonial administrators worthy of the name; who during the forty years that he governed the province had its welfare always at heart and displayed much wisdom, tact and liberality. Among other things, Baltimore's charter conferred upon him the patronage and advowsons of all churches, “together with license and faculty of erecting and founding churches, chapels and places of worship," and "of causing the same to be dedicated and consecrated according to the ecclesiastical laws of our kingdom of England." Doyle, whose painstaking research and sound judgment have made his work so invaluable to students of colonial history, finds in Baltimore's acceptance of this clause in the charter that "it quite dispels the idea that he intended his colony as a special refuge for his own sect, a stronghold for persecuted Romanism"; and other writers, American as well as Eng1 Scharf: History of Maryland, vol. i, p. 54. lish, have asserted that Baltimore could not establish Catholicism in his province as he was pledged to maintain the established Church of England. But it was a casuistical age, and kingly consciences were not overburdened with scruples when favorites were to be rewarded. The first Lord Baltimore was well known to be a Catholic and so was his son, and in granting the charter to them Charles had inserted no prohibition against freedom of religion. A Protestant king ruling a Protestant people would find it necessary to insist in the terms of the charter that Protestantism should be the religion of the colony, but having nominated the bond he need not be over-particular as to its observance. At any rate, in November, 1663, Baltimore equipped two ships, the Ark and the Dove, for Maryland, which carried twenty gentlemen adventurers and some three hundred servants and two Catholic priests; the first time we find mention made of Catholic priests in an English colonizing expedition to America. What proportion of Baltimore's gentlemen adventurers and servants were Protestants has never been authentically stated, but in his first advertisement for settlers he significantly announced that he would accept people of all religious faiths, and with that wisdom that always distinguished him, forbade "all unreasonable disputes on points of religion tending to disturbance of the public peace and quiet and to the opening of faction in religion." On arriving at their destination one of the priests records that "on the day of the Annunciation of the most Holy Virgin Mary in the year 1634 we celebrated the mass for the first time, on this island. This had never been done before in this part of the world. After we had completed the sacrifice, we took upon our shoulders a great cross, which we had hewn out of a tree, and advancing in order to the appointed place, with the assistance of the Governor and his associates and the other Catholics, we erected a trophy to Christ the Savior, humbly reciting, on our bended knees, the Litanies of the Sacred Cross, with great emotion.”1 To speak of religious freedom in the seventeenth century is to link antipodal forces. There was no religious liberty in the modern sense. The Puritan was no more narrow than the Catholic, and neither was exceeded in liberality by the Episcopalian, but all were anxious to have their own creed established by law and certified to as the only certain way by which salvation could be found. Sons of the Church might occasionally disgrace their mother, but the worst churchman, whether Puritan, Episcopalian, or Catholic, was better than the best heretic; for the good heretic was a perversion of nature on which the Church had never laid eyes. "For howsoever bitterly Catholic and Protestant divines have hated and persecuted each other, they have united like true brethren in their hatred and their persecution of heretics; for such was their inexorable destiny." 1 Scharf: op. cit., vol. i, p. 75. |