Ping!
Could it have been that Catholicism is incorrect?
After the French revolution the Vatican wisely renounced all of the church's claims to confiscated lands in France.
Well, there was a long history of persecuting Protestant “heretics”. And also the fact that as late as the late 1800s the official position of the Pope was that republican government was against the will of God, and the only acceptable form of government was a Catholic monarchy.
Fear of divided loyalties was legitimate but not specific to Catholics. Franklin wanted Germans gone because so many had fought as mercenaries for the British. Today we Americans of German lineage are probably the single largest group in the country.
Today we Protestants mostly see Catholics as natural allies and assets in our fight to save America.
Anti-catholicism was justified in the past, back in the days when Popes issued papal bulls calling for the oppression of ‘heretics’ and compelling adherents of the Catholic faith to turn against any government or ruler that was not Roman Catholic. It gave ideological support to the concept of monarchical absolutism and theocratic despotism. I fully understand why the Whigs of old equated ‘Popery’ with slavery.
That said, that was the Catholic Church of old, back in the days when the Pope got far too involved in temporal affairs. It is different now, and the Catholic Church of today is for the most part a force for good with a moral influence and authority that acts as a check on the worst excesses of secular government, but it wasn’t always so.
Our founders were not fond of state religions. Catholicism is the original state religion.
The really interesting thing about America’s founding is that as much as Protestants feared being dominated by the Church of Rome, the ideas which Jefferson immortalized in the Virginia Declaration of Rights and Declaration of Independence are uniquely Catholic.
Jefferson captured three main ideas: that our rights are endowed by God and cannot be denied by the state; that rulers rule by consent of the governed; and that power within governments should be distributed among multiple branches at both the local and central levels where they can best be addressed and absolute power is never attained by a tyrant. He based these ideas on his reading of De Laicis: Treatise on Civil Government by Catholic Cardinal (and Saint) Robert Bellarmine. Bellarmine had written the treatise in response to the consolidation of power over the Church in England by Henry the VIII. — Jefferson had a copy of the book in his library and it had his handwritten notes in the margins throughout. — It is also interesting to note that the divine right of the kings was defended by Sir Robert Filmer in “Patriarcha or of the Natural Power of Kings.” Filmer wrote in direct response to Bellarmine to defend the King’s control of the Church in England. So the mostly Protestant Founders embraced Catholic doctrines in order to protect religious freedoms which many Protestants at the time feared were threatened by the Catholic Church. —Ain’t history fun?
Who’s Charles Carroll of Carrollton?
He is a signer of the DoI.
Bookmarked.
Ironic that it is Catholics that are leading battles in the courts today and not the Bornigans.
“And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.” —Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823
According to a book I have, the reason Hessians were sent to America was because Baron Von Hesse told English buyers of mercenaries, that they should not buy mercenaries from the other provinces of Germany, because those rulers might send (gasp) CATHOLICS! who would march on London, depose the King and make the Pope the new king!
If the buyers bought only from Von Hesse he would make sure all HIS mercenaries were Protestants.
Von Hesse was himself Catholic.
With a large influx of Catholic-Irish immigrants, Massachusetts has become much more favorably inclined toward Catholicism.
But they didn't do that. Instead, they worked to put all religions into the free market, to rise or fall each on their own merits.
Our Founders put their own prejudices on the back burner and worked to have freedom of religion and not just mere tolerance.
Otherwise, we would never have had a Bill of Rights nor a Constitution designed to include all religions, including Catholic.
I am not particularity against Catholicism.
But I cannot help but notice, or at least this is my opinion, that most of the countries south of the Rio Grande down to the tip of South America are one or all of the following: very poor, very corrupt, socialists, full of drug cartels, very backwards. I believe the predominant religion south of the Rio Grande is Catholic.
I pointed out this coincidence to a devout Catholic a few years ago and was severely chastised. I expect no different here.
It probably had something to do with the historical facts that caused the COUNTER reformation.