In other words, you are telling me that Maryland was more than 25% Catholic, while another poster is informing me that they were less than 8% of the MD population.
Which was it?
A colony whose government was rabidly anti-Catholic would surely not allow a Catholic to represent them in the Continental Congress - unless those who supported resistance and independence in the colony were precisely those colonists who were less bigoted against Catholics than the colony's general population.
In that there were only four signers of the Declaration from Maryland, it would be hard for someone to represent quite precisely 8% of the population. I don't know that the Catholic population of Maryland at that time was that low. Today, it's a little less than a quarter of the population.
But Mr. Carroll wasn't a signer of the Declaration because of the colony's acceptance of an "influential" Catholic minority. LOL.
Charles Carroll's entry into the revolutionary politics of the day was done IN SPITE of the fact that he was disqualified from holding office in the colony of Maryland, and his subsequent success in revolutionary (and post-revolutionary) politics was a result of his own outstanding personal attributes, that OVERCAME the deep, anti-Catholic bigotry and hatred of Maryland Protestants.
“A colony whose government was rabidly anti-Catholic would surely not allow a Catholic to represent them in the Continental Congress - unless those who supported resistance and independence in the colony were precisely those colonists who were less bigoted against Catholics than the colony's general population.”
It was quite literally his own personal example that caused his fellow Marylanders to elect him IN SPITE of their deep anti-Catholic bigotry. It was because of his singular political and personal gifts that the citizens of the colony actually elected him to represent them, in violation of Maryland's Catholic-hating laws that were actually in force at the time of his election.
sitetest
I was the one who brought up the figure of 8%—that was Maryland’s share of the population of the United States in 1790. I don’t know what the percentage of Catholics was in Maryland—the US census didn’t ask religious affiliation. If there were something like 40,000 Catholics in the US as a whole, and some of them were in Pennsylvania or other states, then the proportion of Catholics in Maryland would have been under 1 in 8 (12.5%).