Catholic Heritage, Obamacare, and Mitered Dramaqueens

Catholicism has a long tradition of educational ministry going back to Cassiadorus’ monastery at Vivarium at the end of the sixth century and continuing up through the Middle Ages with the great Abbey Schools mandated by Charlemagne, the medieval Cathedral Schools, and the medieval universities.  One of the first undertakings of American Catholicism after our revolution was the establishment of Georgetown College (now University).  John Carroll not only established this educational facility for men but asked Elizabeth Seton to organize a religious sisterhood to educate girls as well as boys—something the public schools of the day were not doing.  In 1799 Father Leonard Neale, president of Georgetown College, persuaded a small group of women to takes vows as Visitation nuns and open a girls school which even today is one of the finest secondary academies in the United States.  Likewise health care has always been a priority for Catholics.  In 651 the bishop of Paris organized the Hotel Dieu—the oldest hospital in the city. It was the model for other institutions to care for the sick poor.  Religious communities such as the Brothers of Saint John of God and the Daughters of Charity were organized specifically for care of the sick.  One of the most distinguished of these Orders is the Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem.  The Hospital itself was established in Jerusalem under the Patronage of Pope Saint Gregory the Great around the year 600.  In 1023 Blessed Gerard Thom, a knight from Amalfi, organized a pious brotherhood of noblemen to care for pilgrims who came to visit the Holy Places.  These were knights but they were also solemnly vowed religious.  They continue today and are popularly known as the Knights of Malta or the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.  Most of the Knights and Dames of Malta are lay associates, but even today there is a core of solemnly vowed religious brothers (of noble blood) at the heart of the Order.  They are among the most unique, or even idiosyncratic, religious orders in the Church.  And the Lay Associates, usually well-to-do Catholic laity, undertake some very humble and direct ministries to the sick poor including those with AIDS/HIV.
In the United States, religious women were very quick to undertake ministry to the sick.  In an age (nineteenth century) where hospitals were almost invariably private clinics run by physicians and affordable only by the wealthier segments of society, the various congregations of the Sisters of Charity, the Irish immigrant Sisters of Mercy, and other groups of nuns opened hospitals that cared for all irrespective of their religious affiliation or ability to pay. 
We always have to be careful about speaking in generalities, but by and large the American Protestant view of the Church and its mission prioritizes worship.  The mission of the Church is seen as to build a sanctuary, hire a pastor to preach and lead worship, develop a music program to aid worship.  Sunday school, of course, is important but other than the Lutherans most American Protestants had never concentrated on building schools until the public schools were desegregated in the 1960’s. Catholics, on the other hand, realize that a school or a hospital or an adoption agency or a homeless shelter or a university or center for abused women or a counseling agency is as central to the mission of the Church as any cathedral, basilica, or parish church. 
I have been severely disappointed in the Obama administration’s decision to exempt from the contraceptive/sterilization/abortifacient requirement of the Patient Affordable Care Act of 2010 only those religious institutions directly involved with worship.  It may make sense from a Protestant perspective to define “Church institution” in this narrow way but it fails to respect the many ways in which our Catholic family continues to serve not only its own members but the larger community.  Actually, what I am disappointed in is the administration’s stupidity in picking a fight with the Catholic Church. It really wasn’t necessary.  It left a lot of Catholics who have been enthusiastic supporters of the President feeling betrayed.  It has sucked the enthusiasm out of a lot of us Catholics who continue to believe that the Democratic Party continues to offer a more moral vision of society than the opposition party.  Frankly, while many of us will still vote for the President in November it has taken motivation from some to give time, energy, or money to the effort.  It just didn’t need to be this way.
On the other hand, bishops, to start ringing a tin copy of the Liberty Bell saying that we are in danger of losing our First Amendment Rights of Free Exercise is not only a bit histrionic, it smacks of political alarmism.  But more about that in future posts.     

Let's Hear It For The Ladies cont.

Ven.Anne of Saint Bartholomew

who resisted outside control by

the Cardinal Berulle over the

Discalced Carmelite nuns in 17th

century France

Yesterday I wrote about women religious who resisted the efforts of bishops to exercise control over them and their congregations.  We looked at such outstanding figures as Saint Mary MacKillop, Mary Ward, Margaret Anna Cuscack, and Saint Teresa of Avila.   There are also stories of women who lost the battle—often to the detriment of their congregations. 

      Pierre de Bèrulle is a figure in Church history who, for the most part, I have always admired.  He was ardent for the reform of the Church of France in the early seventeenth century. You see, for a variety of reasons more political than religious, France had not yet accepted the Decrees of the Council of Trent (that only happened in 1615—some 53 years after the Council concluded) and there were a lot of leading French Catholics who saw the great need for reform.  Many of these devout Catholics (actually they were known as the parti dévot) gathered in the home of the wealthy French widow,  Madame Barbe Acarie to discuss plans for reform.  (Francis de Sales, Bennet Canfield, Jean Jacques Olier, and others were all regulars at the Salon Acarie.)  Bérulle understood that the key to reform of the Church was reform of the clergy and religious.  Olier established the Society of Saint Sulpice to prepare candidates for the secular priesthood.  John Eudes established the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament as well as the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of the Refuge.  Bérulle himself established the French Oratory.  He also invited the two closest companions of Saint Teresa of Avila, Anna of Jesus and Anna of Saint Bartholomew, to come to France and established the Discalced Carmelite nuns.  It was a worthy cause, but as soon as French nuns were professed, Bérulle sent the Spanish Madres packing.   Like Teresa, they did not want the nuns to be subject to external authority and Bérulle wanted them to be under his thumb, er “guidance.”  The Spanish daughters of Teresa went up to the Netherlands where they established the Carmels from which are descended the majority of American monasteries of Carmelite nuns.  The French nuns buckled under and there has long been an argument among Discalced Carmelites whether the French Carmels preserved the heritage of Teresa or not, whether they are authentically “Teresian” or are they “Bérullian.”

     Here in America the disputes over the independence of the religious Sisters has also been a battle.  Bishop John Carroll persuaded the widowed convert, Elizabeth Ann Seton to establish the American Sisters of Charity modeled on the French Institute founded by Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac, but Carroll, a very busy man, gave Mother Seton a pretty free hand in her enterprise.  In 1817, just a few years before her death, Mother Seton sent three Sisters from Emmitsburg up to New York City.  When John Hughes became Bishop of New York, one of his first acts was to demand that the New York Charities be withdrawn from the jurisdiction of the Emmitsburg Sisters and placed under his jurisdiction.  He named his sister, Mother Angela Hughes, as the second Mother General of the New York Sisters.  Again, John Hughes is another figure whom I have always admired, but he had a tremendous psychological need for control that went far beyond the Sisters of Charity in his diocese.  His entire style as bishop was “one man rule”—sound familiar?

      Hughes was not exceptional in this matter.  Many religious congregations—both those founded in the United States  (The Charities, the various Newman Communities of Franciscans, the IHMs) as well as those coming from other countries (the Sisters of Mercy) met with demands from American bishops that they sever their ties outside the diocese and place themselves under the jurisdiction of the local bishop.  For the sake of the work that needed to be done for the immigrants, for the poor, for women, or orphans, the nuns acceded to these demands for control.  Other congregations such as the School Sisters of Notre Dame successfully resisted.   The Benedictines were always particularly successful in resisting Episcopal control—but their monastic roots gave them strong precedence on which to stand.  Today’s nuns are well and wise to insist on their autonomy and self-governance.  But a lot of the men just don’t get it—the world has changed.  Collaborative models work in our contemporary world, hierarchical models are as archaic as the Mastodon.  Of course, the danger that both bishops and Rome fear is that if the nuns can take responsibility for their own decision making, will others in the Church see possibilities for collaborative rather than hierarchal models of authority?  Why is always about power and never about the Gospel?

The Maryland Catholic Tradition: Ahead of its Time

Bishop John Carroll

I have made several entries on the style of Catholicism in colonial and early Republican Maryland and how much it has in common with modern Catholic practice.  Churches were plain and without much decoration—the Cathedral in Baltimore not even having statues.  While the Mass was in Latin (despite Bishop Carroll’s desire for it to be in the vernacular), Carroll and other clergy had translated much of the sacramental ritual from Latin into English.  Despite Roman prohibitions on ecumenism, American Catholics were used to cooperating with their Protestant countrymen and even worshipping with them on occasion. Churches usually had lay trustees—something that would cause Carroll and other bishops enough headaches that they would eventually do away with them.  (Bishop John England of Charleston, on the other hand, wrote a Constitution for his diocese and had an annual convention of lay and clergy to help in the decision making.)  Carroll had been elected bishop by the clergy and he hoped that Rome would permit future bishops to be elected as well.  (Rome did not permit.)  Carroll and other clergy routinely wore lay clothing, albeit in dark colors, while on the street.  When Carroll brought the first religious women to the United States—four Carmelite cloistered nuns from the Netherlands (three of whom were Maryland natives) they arrived in secular dress and resumed their habit only when they were ensconced in their monastery at Port Tobacco.  Several years later when he asked Elizabeth Ann Seton, a widowed convert from Episcopalianism, to organize an American religious sisterhood based on Vincent dePaul’s Daughters of Charity, it was decided that they would wear the plain black dress and bonnet of widows rather than the cornettes of their French counterparts or the more traditional wimple and veil of nuns.    Carroll, his priests, and the American faithful had no qualms of “fitting in”—indeed that was their goal.  They saw no reason why they had to stand aside from their countrymen believing that Americanism and Catholicism were perfectly compatible. The Catholic faith was to be packaged in American homespun rather than European brocade. 
     Maryland Catholics would never have worked their way into the untenable position of the Leesburg Knights of Columbus who insisted on a religious display on the Courthouse lawn only to find that their campaign opened the door to atheist displays that mocked not only Catholicism but faith itself.  In Carroll’s day Catholicism was known for what it stood for; today Catholicism is too often better known for what it is against.  Evangelism doesn’t work when the message is what we are against.  

Apostles of Charity

Saint Vincent de Paul
model of Christian Charity

Yesterday I had some thoughts pertaining to Saint Vincent de Paul because of the homily at mass that triggered me to reflect on Paul VI’s great line that if you want peace work for justice and Mother Teresa’s equally important insight that justice is founded on charity.    But as the day went on my thoughts turned from Saint Vincent de Paul and the work he did in Paris to the Saint Vincent de Paul Society.  I haven’t heard of the Saint Vincent de Paul society for years, but I remember that when I was young it was one of the key societies in our parish and I believe most parishes.  My grandfather, an immigrant from Ireland, was devoted to the Society and every Monday evening was out at Church with the other men who belonged.   I sort of recall that the Holy Name Society—to which my father belonged—was for younger men and the old men of the parish all belonged to the Saint Vincent de Paul Society.  That may explain why one doesn’t hear of them anymore.  A society that becomes an old men’s club (or old women’s club) is doomed to extinction—something to which religious communities today had better pay attention.
      Frédéric Ozanam is generally credited with beginning the society and in the strictest sense of the matter, he should be so credited.  However there was a Daughter of Charity, Sister Rosalie Rendu, who worked among the poor of Paris in the cities slums and it was Sister Rosalie who guided Ozanam and his associates in the project of organizing poor relief in Paris.  At the time (1833)  Frédéric Ozanam was a young man of only twenty years of age studying in Paris!  He would go on to become a noted lawyer and a professor at the Sorbonne and was beatified by John Paul II in 1997.  His family were of Jewish origin and he was actually born in Milan.  Ozanam and his fellow students organized the Conference of Charity to help the poor of Paris.  The Society really understood the mission of Vincent de Paul and continued the work he had begun of motivating the urban bourgeois of looking with compassionate interest on the poor who so often were not only suffering materially but also spiritually as too often the Church was doing far too little for their needs.  The French Church of the nineteenth century was linked inextricably to the moneyed classes—blue-blood and Bourgeoisie — and too often indifferent to the needs of the poor.  Clergy and many Religious were not interested in serving the poor.  The Catholic Church in France had become like the State Church of England—the ‘Conservatives at prayer.’  But at least in England one had the Methodists and the Baptists to keep the Gospel giving hope to those at the bottom of the social heap; in France they were left without any real access to faith. 
     Oznam and his associates, at the urging of Sister Rosalie and in the example of Vincent de Paul went into the homes of the poor and discovered what they needed—medical care, food, clothing, schooling for their children—and worked to provide it for them.  They did this on a one-to-one basis—not as some sort of charitable program but as a fraternal relationship with the poor.  And they used the relationships that developed not merely to provide material needs but to catechize the poor and reconcile tens of thousands to the Church.  They stood godfather to infants and sponsor to those being confirmed.  They provided wedding dinners and trousseaus for those wishing to marry.  They pleaded with the Jesuits and the de la Salle Brothers and the Madames of the Sacred Heart to take the children of the poor into their schools and give them an education.  Too often charity means writing a check but these men knew that true charity is always one to one.  True charity is far more than giving, it is a relationship.  In this way they anticipated the theology of Solidarity long before the writings of John Paul II.
    The Society spread from Paris to other French towns and cities and then across the channel to England and Wales in 1844.   Shortly thereafter it came to the United States, a country in which many of the Catholics were immigrant and poor.  But no one is ever more dedicated to helping the poor than those who are themselves poor.  The Saint Vincent de Pal Society  has always been part of the Vincentian Family, like the Daughters of Charity, the Vincentian Priests and Brothers (also known as the Congregation of the Mission, or in Europe, the Lazarists), The Ladies of Charity, and the Sisters of Charity of the Seton heritage.  Non-Catholics may join and many have come into the Church through their cooperation with the Saint Vincent de Paul Society.  Today the Saint Vincent de Paul Society comprises almost a million members in over a hundred and thirty countries!  I don’t know why we don’t hear more of them here in the United States—or at least in the part of our nation where I live.  There is as much a need as ever for such an organization today when so many in our nation are without work.  When countless immigrants are being lost to the faith because the institutional Church is not capable of supporting sufficient ministries to Hispanic and Pacific Rim Americans and when many parishes—and parish priests—see liturgies and catechetics for Hispanics, Haitians, Vietnamese, and other immigrant Catholics an inconvenience.  And it is not only the immigrants, or the Catholics, for that matter who need to be on the helped end of a helping relationship.  Our “new translation” or restored communion rails or keeping women out of the sanctuary is not the greatest need of the American Church today—fulfilling the Gospel of Christ to bring Good News to the Poor is, always has been, and will be forever our first priority if we are to truly be the Church of Jesus Christ.       

Those Lovely Ladies, the American Nuns (and why is the Vatican so worried?)

I want to find my way back to the topic of the American Civil War so that I can do a blog on the nursing Sisters who played such an important role in winning the confidence of Americans towards the Catholic Church in the middle of the nineteenth century.  Before I treat of the sisters who nursed the wounded and sick soldiers of both the North and the South, however, I really need to give a brief history of the American Sisters of Charity as they played such a major role in this work and so this brings us back to the series “Let’s Hear It For the Ladies” where we have been treating of American Religious women in light of the “Vatican Investigation of American Nuns.”

At the time of our independence from Britain, there were no convents for women Religious in the original thirteen States.  If a woman wanted to pursue a religious vocation, she had to go to Europe and enter a monastery there—as approximately thirty-five colonial Americans had, all from Maryland, in the approximately century and a half between the Catholic settling of Maryland and our Revolution.  It was in 1790 that Bishop John Carroll brought four Carmelite nuns, three Americans and an Englishwoman, from the Netherlands and settled them on an estate in Port Tobacco, Maryland—not far from modern Washington DC.  This was the heart of Catholic Maryland and three of these women were related to each other and to many of the local plantation owning families.  We are not going to focus on this monastery however as they were “nuns”—that is cloistered religious—and we are focusing on “sisters”—that is women religious who are not monastics and enclosed.  (We will do a blog on these women at a later time—I am fascinated by their story.)

With few clergy and no religious women—other than the small monastery of cloistered Carmelite nuns—Bishop Carroll was well used to depending on the laity to take an active and collaborative role in the necessary ministries of the Church.  Meanwhile, a widowed convert to the Catholic Church, Mrs. Elizabeth Ann Seton, had met the Rev. Louis Dubourg, SS, an émigré from the French Revolution.  The Abbé Dubourg was one of those brilliant souls who travels fast through life proving the axiom “still waters run deep.”  In other words, Dubourg razzle-dazzled  his contemporaries with his accomplishments without laying good foundations for his work.  He was better at starting projects than following through on them.    

Seton came from a socially prominent family in upper-crust Manhattan society, but her husband had gone bankrupt shortly before his death and her conversion to Catholicism lost her the support and friendship of most of her relatives and practically all of her social set.  In an effort to support herself and her five children, she had opened a hospital in New York but it failed—in great part due to her being ostracized from New York Society for her becoming a Catholic.  She heard Dubourg preach in New York and was deeply impressed and at his suggestion she moved with her family to Baltimore where Dubourg had established a seminary for Archbishop Carroll.  Mrs. Seton opened a small school and was joined by five other women whom Dubourg thought should be organized into a sisterhood based on the model of the Daughters of Charity, the community founded by Saints Vincent DePaul and Louise de Marillac.  Dubourg guided the small group along the paths of the Vincentian spiritual life and on March 25, 1809, Elizabeth Seton professed her vows—renewable annually on the Vincentian model—to Bishop Carroll.  The Sisters—like their French counterparts—did not adopt the guimpe and veil of nuns but wore the black dress and bonnet typical to widows.  (The French Daughters of Charity had originally worn the highly starched bonnets of serving-women of their day.)  Several months later the Sisters relocated to Emmitsburg Maryland where a benefactor had donated 269 acres for the establishment of a school.  The school, St. Joseph’s, opened the following February and the Sisterhood itself grew remarkably fast despite the hardship and consequent illness and early deaths of some of the Sisters.  By 1814 Mother Seton was able to send sisters to Philadelphia to open an orphan’s home.  In 1817 Sisters went to New York at the invitation of Bishop Connolly to make a foundation and take care of orphans.   In 1829 a foundation was made in Cincinnati.

In 1847 Bishop John Hughes of New York—a bishop noted for his autocracy as you might remember from earlier blogs—insisted that the Sisters of Charity in his diocese become independent of Emmitsburg and he named his sister, Mother Angela Hughes, their superior.  Other bishops followed suit, either breaking the sisters in their various dioceses off from the jurisdiction of groups in other dioceses or, as in the case of the Sisters in New Jersey, recruiting candidates from their own dioceses, sending them to an established group for their formation, and then bringing them home to establish a new Congregation.  Today autonomous congregations of Sisters of Charity in New York, Convent Station NJ, Halifax NS, Cincinnati, and Greensburg PA, all trace their origins back to the Seton heritage. The original community at Emmitsburg, affiliated themselves with the French Daughters of Charity, in 1850, at which time they traded Mother Seton’s widows’ bonnet for the starched cornette of the French Daughters of Charity.  In 1964 that was exchanged for a simple modern habit designed by Christian Dior.  Meanwhile, some of the daughter congregations had traded the bonnet for a more traditional veil. 

Mother Seton was not the only foundress of a congregation of Sisters of Charity.   Only three years after her taking vows, Catherine Spalding, the daughter of a prominent Catholic family from Charles County, Maryland and two friends were encouraged by Father (later Bishop) Jean-Baptiste Marie David, another émigré priest, to form a Sisterhood near Bardstown Kentucky—a Catholic stronghold in the Ohio Valley to which settlers were streaming in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  Spalding was only nineteen when she undertook this project, but she, like Seton, modeled her Institute on the French Daughters of Charity.  Their original outreach was education, but they soon took on the care of orphans and nursing.  Like Seton’s Charities, the Kentucky women, known as the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, did not adopts nun’s habits but a plain black dress and bonnet. 

In the midst of an 1829 cholera epidemic, Irish born Bishop John England of Charleston, South Carolina—one of the most progressive prelates in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States—established a congregation of sisters, also based on the Vincentian model, and known originally as the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy. (In the twentieth century they changed their names to the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Mercy.) 

The same year as Bishop Ireland established the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, Father James Nicholas Joubert, like Fathers Dubourg and David, a Sulpician, encouraged an Afro-Caribbean resident of Baltimore, Ms. Elisabeth Lange and a companion, Maria Balas, who were teaching Haitian children in Baltimore to establish a religious community for women of African descent to minister to children of African heritage.  Thus began the Oblate Sisters of Providence.  These sisters too originally wore the black dress and white bonnet common to African-American women servants.  Only later in their history did they adopt a monastic style habit with wimple and veil.  Their original convent was a rented house in Baltimore; their first motherhouse, a row-house so typical of the Baltimore neighborhoods.     Their work traditionally focused on the education of African-American children but they undertook whatever work the Church needed at the time, including domestic service at the Baltimore seminary. 

The Vincentan Rule adopted by the various congregations of American Sisters of Charity was particularly well adapted to American life as it was decidedly and deliberately non-monastic with Vincent dePaul’s   famous admonition to the Sisters: for a monastery, only the houses of the sick, for cell, a rented room, for chapel, the parish hurch, for cloister, the streets of the city, for enclosure, obedience, for grill, the fear of God, for veil, holy modesty.  This gave the sisters a freedom of movement to respond to the needs of their neighbors and it would come in very handy during the American Civil War
The image today is Mother Catherine Spalding, foundress of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth. 

A lull in Anti-Catholic America

Continuing with the theme of a history of Anti-Catholicism in America, Catholics in the newly independent nation fared quite well. While society in general and political power in particular remained in the hands of the old English-now-American gentry who were, with the exception of the Marylanders, all but universally Protestants of the Congregationalist or Unitarian types in New England or Episcopalians (New York, Virginia and the Southern States), Catholics had at least been given the freedom to build churches and openly practice their faith. Catholic communities sprang up in Boston, New York, and Charleston. Philadelphia had a Catholic community even before the Revolution and indeed the Continental Congress had, on at least one occasion, repaired to Old St. Joseph’s Church for public prayer. Catholicism was long accustomed to being publically acknowledged in Maryland. Moreover many Marylanders were among the most avid settlers pouring through the Cumberland Gap into the Ohio Valley settlements in what is now Kentucky. Indeed within eighteen years of John Carroll’s being named first Archbishop of Baltimore, his See would be named an archdiocese with four suffragens—Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Bardstown Kentucky. A few years later dioceses were created in Charleston, Richmond, and Cincinnati.
John Carroll, the first Catholic bishop, was well known to the leading figures in American politics. He was a Carroll, of the Maryland Carrols. His cousin Charles had signed the Declaration of Independence. Another member of the family was Daniel Carroll who served in Congress. Several Carrolls, including the Bishop’s Mother, Elizabeth Carroll, and the aforementioned Daniel Carroll, were among the landowners whose estates were purchased for the establishment of the new national Capital, Washington City, on the banks of the Potomac. Daniel Carroll was the owner of Jenkin’s Hill—the site that was picked for the new national Capitol and is now called Capitol Hil. John Carroll had served on a diplomatic mission to Canada with Benjamin Franklin and Franklin was among those who urged the Pope, Pius VI, to confirm Carroll’s election as first bishop in the nascent nation.
That is not to say, however, that Franklin or others—despite their regard for Carroll personally—held Catholicism in high esteem. Many of these founders including George Washington (though not Franklin) were free-masons and free-masonry was ardently opposed to traditional Christianity which they saw as intellectually incompatible with their enlightenment consecration to rationalism. Washington was a nominal Episcopalian—indeed a vestryman in his parish—but he attended church primarily to please his wife, and his participation in Christian worship was limited to attendance at Morning Prayer. Martha would stay for Holy Communion, but the General would leave church before the Communion Service began. From various comments he made, verbally or in writing, it is clear that Washington was not committed to the doctrine of Christ’s divinity and he saw religion’s main purpose as encouraging moral behavior among the less educated populace. This view was shared by Thomas Jefferson who himself might best be described as an Agnostic and who, while baptized an Anglican in infancy and buried according to the Anglican (or technically, Episcopalian) rites, saw Jesus as a great moral teacher and nothing else. Indeed, Jefferson went through his bible and sliced out all the miracle stories (including the Virgin Birth and Resurrection) and claims to Christ's divinity, leaving only the parables and moral teachings of Jesus. Jefferson did make several contributions towards the building of Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian churches because he saw them a offering good moral training to the yeoman farmers of Virginia whose political cause he championed. There is no record of him ever making a contribution towards the building of a Catholic church. (Washington, on the other hand, did make a contribution towards the building of Old Saint Mary’s in Alexandria, mostly because his much favored equerry, a Colonel John Fitzgerald, was among the sponsoring parishioners.) Jefferson and Franklin had served as envoys to the French Court and saw the unattractive side of European Catholicism with the great prelates of France living in lordly splendor at the expense of the underclasses and exerting great (and usually self-interested) influence over the King and his decisions. It did not leave them as admirers of Catholicism.
In the new republic Catholics tended to be Federalists—the party opposed to Jefferson and his “Republicans.” (This will get confusing, but the “Republican Party" of Jefferson is not related to today’s Republicans—indeed, to the contrary, they are the first generation of the modern Democrat party.)
Catholics in the new republic tended to be conservative and in favor of a strong central government. They were, for the most part, Maryland slave-holding gentry farmers. Also, after 1789 Jefferson and his followers were enamored—blindly so—of the French Revolution. The Revolution’s anti-Church fervor was very off-putting to Catholics who, though they might want to see a more democratic France did not think it worth the bloodshed of its king, so many priests and religious, and its many devout laity. Men like Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington were Gentlemen, however, and it was required of gentlemen to show tolerance if not respect; while there may not have been an enthusiasm for the Catholic Church there was no hint that Catholics should not take a full role in American public life.
Catholics for their part were making a contribution to the new republic. Elizabeth Ann Seton’s Sisterhood, the Sisters of Charity, was growing and its women undertook ministries both of education and nursing—needed services in the new nation that had not yet developed much of an infrastructure for these services to be provided at public expense. Only a few years after Elizabeth Seton’s Sisterhood, Catherine Spalding, a nineteen-year-old woman from an old Maryland family—and a family that would prove very prominent in the history of Catholic America—established the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth in 1812. A laywomen, Teresa Lalor, opened a girl’s school on the campus of Georgetown College in 1799. The school drew young women from the best families—Catholic and Protestant—of the national capital. It was a tradition in the school's first two decades that the President of the United States attended the commencement and gave the girls their diplomas. Lalor and her companions had developed into a community of Visitation nuns by 1816. Ursuline nuns had come from Quebec and opened a convent and school in Charlestown, outside Boston. Like the Visitation in Georgetown, it drew young women from the best families and more Protestants than Catholics. This was an age of peace for the Church—but a peace that was not to last. Catholics had successfully integrated themselves into American society. They proved their loyalty to the Republic and their usefulness to the larger society. Their bishops and clergy showed themselves interested not in political clout but in building a Church that was anxious to show its gratitude for its freedom under the laws of the Republic by being the best and most loyal of citizens and making its contribution to a nation that was neither Catholic or Protestant, but granted freedom to all.

The image today is the Cathedral of Saint Joseph, Bardstown