The delusion that your hands were clean arose due to the majority of your current number, who were late-arriving immigrants presuming themselves removed from the whole matter. They were woefully ignorant of the histories of both the Palatinate Of Maryland and the Louisiana Territory, not to mention pockets of Catholicism scattered across the south dating in some instances to the seventeenth century. Most modern Catholics in the US still are. Thus, we get ridiculous hand-wringing articles such as this.
Maybe you didn’t read this reply from above.
“I never said that Tonto. I posted an article about the Catholic Church and slavery. The Catholic Church is made up of men, and as such made mistakes like anyone else. No one is perfect, but you want to tar and feather the Catholic Church for all the sins of the world”.
Here’s a little bit of American history for you. Most Catholics in the United States lived in the Northeast during the slavery days, not the South.
Bishop Lynch of Charleston, South Carolina, in ordering a Te Deum on the occasion of (presumably) the assault by Pierre G. T. Beauregard, a lesser CSA general, might have been engaging in an act combining Catholicism and patriotism as a citizen of South Caroline (one of THESE United States) but, in fact, if you check out the Wikipedia article on the Te Deum (which includes in Latin and in English the thoroughly non-political lyrics of Te Deum), it is a very eloquent song praising Almighty God and is sung, inter alia, on all Sundays other than those in Lent. Were the Northern bishops and the Vatican itself Confederates for ordering what Canon Law required to be ordered regardless of any context of historical events or absence thereof. We Catholics also "celebrate" the Mass every day, historical context or not. We do not normally think of it as a political statement, simply the praise and worship of God, no more political than Amazing Grace or A mighty Fortress is Our God, and perhaps less so.
As to Maryland, it was founded and granted by Charles I on the Calvert Family to be a specifically Catholic colony. Its proprietors welcomed Reformed Christians to its territory and that turned out to be a tragic mistake when the Catholics became outnumbered by aggressive Reformers who took control of the colonial government in 1689, moved the state capital from St. Mary's City to Annapolis and then burned St. Mary's City to the ground to show that there was no going back. Look at Wikipedia's entry for St. Mary's City, Maryland for more atrocities.
AND, the fact is that most Catholics in the US, by far, are descended from Irish fleeing the Potato Blight of the 1830s-1840s, Germans coming here after the general European revolutionary uproar of 1848, and later waves of Italians, Ples and others. There were a relative handful of French and Spaniards (Florida and New Orleans) and a small number of English Catholic refugees from the likes of regicide Oliver Cromwell and the later misnamed "Glorious" Revolution of 1688 which deposed James II.
You omitted at least three relevant facts. Confederate General Patrick Ronayne Claiborne was Irish by his birth in County Cork which heavily suggests his having been Catholic. He urged upon fellow leaders of the Army of the Tennessee that the slaves be freed and enlisted as Confederate soldiers. Also Pope Pius IX was quite sympathetic to the Confederacy in general and to Jefferson Davis in particular. The pope fashioned a crown of thorns with his own hands to be delivered to Davis in his prison cell after the war. Pius IX was elected as a "liberal" in Church terms but was soon turned by the Masonic invasion of the Papal States. Jefferson Davis was, though Protestant, educated in Dominican order Catholic schools in Kentucky after his parents moved to Mississippi. Lieutenant General James Longstreet converted to Catholicism after the war in 1877.
I do agree with you that we are all human and fallible. If you find any of the foregoing inaccurate, be assured that I welcome correction.
God bless you and yours!
“There were Catholic Confederates numbering in the thousands.”
In a country (the CSA) of 9 million Confederates and their slaves you think “thousands” of Confederates is worth noting?