New Perspectives on Transatlantic Anti‐Catholicism in the Modern and Late Modern Eras

In 2015, the Journal of Religious History published a special issue on transnational anti-Catholicism edited by Timothy Verhoeven.1 As the latter explained in his introduction, the subject of anti-Catholicism easily lends itself to a transnational historical analysis, as hostility to the Church of Rome was manifested periodically in writings and deeds throughout different countries. Indeed, opponents to the international Roman Church were active in all parts of Europe and the Americas. In an earlier article, Verhoeven had also called for new studies on personal and institutional networks, ideas and people going beyond national boundaries, for ‘[i]n the United States, where a deeply entrenched belief in national exceptionalism has favoured historical narratives that emphasize difference rather than exchange, the originality of the transnational approach has been particularly striking.’2 Hence, building on the recent and dynamic historiography of anti-Catholicism, this selection of articles aims at shedding new light on transatlantic anti-Catholicism.3 Anti-Catholicism designates a prejudice that varied in its nature, expression and chronology during the early and late modern eras. What types of anti-Catholicism were expressed on both sides of the Atlantic? As an ideology, this form of religious animosity was first exported from Britain to the colonies in the late sixteenth century. There it developed a life of its own, even though it was also fuelled by newcomers from the other side of the Atlantic.4 From a global perspective, anti-Catholicism fits mainly into three categories. First, it encapsulated a traditional form of anti-popery: Catholics were ‘popish slaves’ spiritually and politically subservient to the Roman prelate. Second, from a constitutional point of view, Roman Catholics, as subjects of a foreign ‘tyrant,’ were perceived as a menace to the Protestant state, both in Britain and in North America. This type of hostility to Catholicism was manifest in the resistance exhibited against religious toleration acts—such as the 1774 Quebec Act in Canada or Catholic emancipation in 1829 in Britain. Third, anti-Catholicism could exhibit socio-national traits – in this form of hatred, Catholics were considered a threat to the existence of an ‘organic’ Protestant Anglo-Saxon race. This brand of religious animosity was closely associated with an anti-Irish rhetoric.5 Overall, those three types of anti-Catholicism co-existed, varied in degrees and time and could be expressed together or separately. In other words, anti-Catholicism was adaptable and variable. Its malleability, which allowed it to materialize even in places where no Catholics were ever to be seen or met, proved vital to its longevity. Furthermore, anti-Catholicism, from a transatlantic perspective, thrived whether it was expressed in lands with state churches—Britain and Canada to a certain extent—as well as in places where there was separation of state and church—the post-revolutionary United States. …the real awakening to a more fully Atlantic or Reformed framework—my own awakening, if not always shared by others—happened in the wake of scholarship that reclaimed the richness of theological speculation on the other side of the Atlantic and, in doing so, altered our understanding of theological controversy in New England.7 The same kind of claim is made by Evan Haefeli who returns to early and later modern British religious politics to make sense of religion in North America, thus warding off fragmentary and teleological approaches which tended to overlook the transatlantic bond between the metropole and the colonies.8 Haefeli asserts that his own ‘approach complements the current trend in studies of modern anti-Catholicism to emphasize international and transnational links.’9 In 2006, Owen Stanwood stressed the importance of ‘religious networks in the seventeenth-century Atlantic,’ while demonstrating the necessity for historians to look at anti-Catholicism in a more global context.10 Accordingly, historians of early America have shown how anti-Catholicism was central to the transatlantic connections between the metropole and its colonies. Likewise, the eloquent first chapter title—‘Old England and New’—of Maura Jane Farrelly's book Anti-Catholicism in America acts as a useful reminder of the Englishness of early America. Farrelly further considers anti-Catholicism as fundamental in shaping American identity.11 Anti-Catholicism was pervasive in the Anglo-American world. A highly adaptable paradigm, it changed according to time and circumstances.12 Adam Morton defines it as ‘[a] hazy blend of theology, nationalism, eschatology, xenophobia, rationalism and cultural memory.’13 The early modernist Mark Valeri refers to ‘Anglo-American Protestants’ and underlines the various strands of anti-Catholicism: ‘[t]here was no fixed and singular Anglo-Protestant ideology from the Restoration to the American Revolution and beyond,’ he writes, ‘not even of anti-Catholicism.’14 Still, while being aware of the protean nature of anti-Catholicism, historians, including Morton, have warned against reducing anti-Catholicism to irrational fears and paranoia and suggested instead several ways to analyse it—in theological, anthropological or ideological terms.15 To that effect, Kyle Haden has invited researchers to focus on the ‘anthropological analysis that considers how identity needs, basic to each individual, play an important, if not dominant, role in shaping anti-Catholic or anti-other, attitudes.’16 In this selection of articles, we favour the ideological approach and argue that the lasting success of anti-Catholicism on both sides of the Atlantic can be explained by the fact that it was not just the expression of irrationality and bigotry, but rather an adaptable and transferable ideology which resulted from ‘hostility to the religious and political example of the Roman Catholic papacy.’17 In the early modern period, on both sides of the Atlantic, this type of anti-Catholicism was often termed ‘anti-popery.’ Peter Lake defined it as an ‘anti-religion, a perfectly symmetrical negative image of true Christianity,’ specifying that ‘every negative characteristic imputed to Rome implied a positive cultural, political or religious value which Protestants claimed as their own exclusive property.’18 One of the reasons for the appeal of anti-popery among seventeenth-century Protestants, he explains, was that ‘it incorporated deeply held beliefs and values and it helped to dramatize and exorcize the fears and anxieties produced when those values came under threat.’19 Political imaginaries played a major role in ideological anti-Catholicism, as Michael Carter has shown: ‘the anti-Catholicism of the early modern English-speaking world rarely had anything to do with actual Roman Catholics or with Roman Catholicism itself. Rather, it was an opposition to imagined Catholic beliefs, practices, and political realities…’.20 Furthermore, before the American Revolution, anti-Catholicism acted as an imperial ideology that shaped British colonial expansion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as argued by Carla Gardina Pestina. The latter contends that there was a unique form of political anti-Catholicism which provided a more effective glue for Britons in the Atlantic world than ‘the practice of any particular reformed Christianity.’21 This ideology of anti-popery, which brings together the religious and the political, provides a valuable key to understanding the history of colonial America.22 Anti-Catholic prejudices among reformed settlers had deep roots, reaching back to the persecution of Protestants under Mary Tudor. Anti-popery did not abate under Elizabeth or James I but was further revived by William Laud's anti-Puritan policies under Charles I, reinforcing the perception that the Church of England had become tyrannical, corrupt and popish.23 This revival formed one of the chief reasons why English Puritans in the 1620s and 1630s emigrated to the New World, seeking a society more in line with their vision of a truly reformed religion. This ideological framework of anti-popery persisted long after the initial waves of emigration, shaping colonial attitudes even in a context where there were very few Catholics locally. In the late seventeenth century, anti-popery continued to be fuelled by events (whether real or imagined), especially by Charles II and James II's deeply unpopular connections with Louis XIV and Catholic France. When the so-called Glorious Revolution broke out, the ‘Roman Catholics were definitively excluded from the throne – to the hearty delight of most colonists, for whom anti-popery became a cornerstone of their loyalty to the empire.’24 In the American colonies, polemics and reports about the Revolution of 1688–89 soon sparked anti-Catholic uprisings, for instance in New York and in Maryland.25 These risings were not mere local revolts, but can be construed as reactions against the ‘perceived resurgence of global Catholicism under the banner of the French king, Louis XIV.’26 In effect, the Protestant colonists who rebelled in 1689 saw ‘their struggle not as English, Dutch or British but as global and universal, a key moment in the age-old struggle between Protestantism and popery.’27 The bond between colonial and metropolitan Protestant Britons was challenged in the latter part of the eighteenth century, particularly when the toleration of Roman Catholicism was introduced in 1774 in Quebec. The Patriots rose against the ‘the Intolerable Acts’ and took up arms against their British King with whose policy they disagreed. For them, the toleration of popery in Quebec was a direct threat to the religious freedom for which their ancestors had fought and on which they had built their new homeland.28 This eighteenth-century denunciation of tyranny echoed the rhetoric that had been mobilized earlier during the English Civil War (1642–1649) and the Revolution of 1688–89.29 At the time of the American Revolution, some Catholics embraced the Patriots' anti-tyrannical ideology which exalted liberty. As Maura Jane Farrelly has argued, they had come to share the same values of liberty as their Protestant neighbours.30 This was for instance the case in Maryland, where Catholics fought alongside Protestants against the tyranny of the British monarchy in defence of their liberties and of independence. The aftermath of 1783 was marked by a brief quieting down of anti-Catholicism, as Farrelly explains: ‘America's Catholics took full advantage of the spirit of freedom and limited ecumenism that characterized the religious landscape in the decades immediately after the Revolutionary War.’31 Yet, this respite was short-lived, and strands of renewed anti-Catholicism were manifest from the 1810s onwards. Older tendencies in North American historiography have insisted on the hysterical and violent anti-Catholic outbreaks that peaked in the 1830s and 1840s with the arrival of Catholic Irish and German immigrants.32 As a matter of fact, the long nineteenth century in North America was characterized by ‘Bible Wars’ in education, street riots, the fight against the endowment of Catholic schools, and the ever-growing association between ‘Protestant’ and ‘American.’33 In the Reconstruction era, anti-Catholicism was given new impetus with the founding of militant Evangelical societies such as the American Protective Association (1887).34 During the second half of the nineteenth century Canadian anti-Catholicism would experience an evolution, not so much in its assumptions or tenets, as in its emphasis and application. Anti-Catholics would continue to be influenced by external stimuli and to import some of the structures of British and American critics. But they would also begin to modify and reshape the imported prejudices, increasingly so as the century drew to a close.39 A political and ideological approach to transatlantic anti-Catholicism enables us to categorize the various transatlantic strands examined by the three articles in this selection. First, there was a ‘universal politico-theological anti-Catholicism,’ based on the traditional Reformed critique of Rome as a political and illiberal entity; second, there existed an ‘imperio-political anti-Catholicism’; and third, there arose an ‘interconnected secular anti-Catholicism.’ Timothy Verhoeven's analysis fits into the first identified category. Built on accusations that the old Roman Church was illiberal and unpatriotic, anti-Catholicism constituted a key component in the formation of Anglo-Atlantic national identities. The traditional ‘theologico-political’ argument against Catholicism denounced the Vatican as a menace to civil, political and religious liberties. Catholics were deemed necessarily subversive in that they could not serve two masters: the Pope and the monarch in Britain; the Pope and the Republic in the United States. Verhoeven's exploration of a sexual scandal involving a charismatic British priest in North America in the late nineteenth century demonstrates how anti-Catholic familiar tales of lecherous priests were not the only ones to travel the Atlantic—corrupt priests could also undertake the voyage. Monsignor Thomas John Capel (1836–1911), one of the stars of the English Catholic Church in the Victorian era, was dispatched by the Vatican to the United States after being found guilty of breaking his vow of chastity. His adventures in the United States offer a case study of how transatlantic politico-religious anti-Catholicism was fueled by lustful immigrant clerics. A second strand of anti-Catholicism is identified by Jessica Hartland-Jacobs, who introduces another category: that of ‘imperio-political anti-Catholicism.’ Delving into the practical problems of incorporating new Catholic-dominated colonies in the eighteenth century, Hartland-Jacobs explores how anti-Catholicism guided the strategies of colonial governance. With the example of the Catholic Island of Minorca, she shows how the British Lieutenant Governor Richard Kane insisted that the Vatican should appoint a native member of the clergy as a bishop, the better to control the Catholic subjects of the island. In this case, as in those of Quebec and Gibraltar, incorporating new Catholic imperial subjects prompted a shift toward accommodation that nuanced the equation between Britishness and anti-Catholicism. A third type of transatlantic anti-Catholicism was deployed in the nineteenth century by Evangelical militant organizations which connected British and North American individuals working to advance Protestantism in their respective lands. Geraldine Vaughan's article illustrates their strategy in operation in the educational sector, where they militated against Catholic schools that received public funds. To achieve their goal, transatlantic Evangelical associations developed a secular line of thought, in that they ‘secularized’ the ‘Protestant’ Bible to prove that it was the most modern tool available for the making of future loyal citizens in North America and Britain. In the end, however useful categorizations of anti-Catholicism may be, its malleable nature should nonetheless be thoroughly borne in mind.44 Within and beyond attempts at classifying religious attitudes, there is clearly more scope for further examination of transatlantic forms of anti-Catholicism. For instance, the case of southern and rural anti-Catholicism in the United States has been overshadowed by eastern and urban studies of the matter.45 Likewise, the growth of a modern secular anti-Catholicism, which has been fuelled by recent long-awaited reports of sexual and moral abuse within the Catholic Church worldwide, deserves more scholarly attention. Now an acrid odor of the 1920s is in the air. It rises from vast fortunes accumulating around new technology… from a reckless hedonism in popular culture and a resurgent religious conservatism mobilizing against it; from a profound distrust of the state, a reviving isolationism, a baffled concern over illegal immigration…46 The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.