Catholicism in the American Colonies

WEBVTT

00:00.111 --> 00:08.817
[SPEAKER_02]: This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention.

00:09.697 --> 00:11.779
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm your host, Kelly Theresa Pollock.

00:12.539 --> 00:19.424
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do.

00:20.564 --> 00:26.008
[SPEAKER_02]: Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app so you never miss an episode.

00:26.868 --> 00:27.289
[SPEAKER_02]: And please,

00:27.769 --> 00:32.811
[SPEAKER_02]: Tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen to.

00:37.713 --> 00:55.140
[SPEAKER_02]: In Hino II, then President Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Connecticut Baptist Association, quote, believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God.

00:56.191 --> 01:00.154
[SPEAKER_02]: that he owes account none other for his faith or his worship.

01:01.195 --> 01:06.799
[SPEAKER_02]: That the legitimate powers of government reach actions only and not opinions.

01:08.163 --> 01:33.501
[SPEAKER_02]: I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof thus building a wall of separation between church and state, unquote.

01:35.438 --> 01:39.761
[SPEAKER_02]: Of course, that wall has been sometimes porous in American history.

01:40.762 --> 01:46.786
[SPEAKER_02]: But Jefferson was old enough to remember a time before the wall existed at all.

01:48.307 --> 01:55.792
[SPEAKER_02]: When the American colonies were under English control, English religious laws extended across the ocean.

01:56.977 --> 02:05.500
[SPEAKER_02]: By the time the first permanent English colony in the Americas was established in James Town, Virginia, in XVI-O VII.

02:06.501 --> 02:12.443
[SPEAKER_02]: The Church of England was the established church, with the British monarch as its head.

02:13.964 --> 02:22.227
[SPEAKER_02]: King Henry II had famously split with the Catholic Church, when Pope Clement VII refused to grant him a divorce.

02:23.602 --> 02:27.684
[SPEAKER_02]: after Henry's daughter Mary attempted to reverse his actions.

02:28.725 --> 02:42.972
[SPEAKER_02]: His other daughter, Elizabeth, took the throne in fifteen fifty-eight, and a series of laws, including the fifteen fifty-nine act of uniformity, quickly reestablished the Church of England.

02:44.974 --> 02:51.177
[SPEAKER_02]: Regardless of the law, Catholics continued to exist, both in England,

02:51.863 --> 02:54.065
[SPEAKER_02]: and in the English colonies.

02:56.026 --> 03:06.935
[SPEAKER_02]: Most notably, Maryland colony was established in the sixteenth-thirties by a Catholic, Cecilia's Calvert, second-bearing Baltimore.

03:08.436 --> 03:19.924
[SPEAKER_02]: Maryland, named for Queen Henrietta Maria, the Catholic wife of King Charles I, was the site of the first Catholic mass in the English colonies.

03:20.903 --> 03:24.124
[SPEAKER_02]: and it became a haven for English Catholic colonists.

03:26.265 --> 03:33.048
[SPEAKER_02]: In sixteen forty nine, the Maryland legislature passed the Maryland Toleration Act.

03:34.028 --> 03:41.791
[SPEAKER_02]: The first religious tolerance act in the English colonies, although it offered tolerance only for Christians.

03:42.851 --> 03:47.413
[SPEAKER_02]: Anyone denying the divinity of Jesus could be sentenced to death.

03:49.372 --> 03:53.074
[SPEAKER_02]: Not everyone in Maryland wanted to be tolerant Catholics.

03:54.515 --> 04:15.985
[SPEAKER_02]: A band of Puritans who had recently arrived in Maryland from Virginia, revolted in sixteen-fifty, setting up a new government that prohibited Catholicism and Anglicanism, which led to persecution of Catholics and the burning of Catholic churches.

04:17.763 --> 04:25.845
[SPEAKER_02]: When the Calvert family finally regained control in sixteen fifty-eight, they reenacted the toleration act.

04:27.565 --> 04:39.467
[SPEAKER_02]: In sixteen eighty-five, Charles and Henrietta Maria's second surviving son, the Catholic James II, became King of England and Ireland.

04:40.627 --> 04:43.148
[SPEAKER_02]: And Scotland, where he was known as James VII,

04:45.421 --> 04:57.550
[SPEAKER_02]: But he was deposed, three years later, by his Protestant daughter, Mary, and her husband, William of Orange, in what became known as the glorious revolution.

04:59.912 --> 05:15.183
[SPEAKER_02]: Across the Atlantic, Protestants in Maryland, by now a majority of the population, staged their own revolution, forming a seven-hundred-man strong army led by Colonel John Cude.

05:16.812 --> 05:25.817
[SPEAKER_02]: Cudes' new government outlawed Catholicism in the colony, and Catholics in Maryland were forced to celebrate mass secretly.

05:27.538 --> 05:32.840
[SPEAKER_02]: After seventeino four, Catholics could no longer hold political office in Maryland either.

05:34.341 --> 05:41.445
[SPEAKER_02]: Maryland may have been the most obvious and overt home of English Catholics in the English colonies.

05:41.465 --> 05:45.227
[SPEAKER_02]: The Catholics could be found throughout the colonies.

05:46.818 --> 06:01.568
[SPEAKER_02]: Most prominently, Catholic, Thomas Donggun, second Earl of Limerick, was governor of New York colony from sixteen eighty-two to sixteen eighty-eight under Charles II and James II.

06:03.950 --> 06:09.114
[SPEAKER_02]: Estimating the total number of Catholics is difficult because Catholics

06:09.822 --> 06:18.528
[SPEAKER_02]: In a land where Catholic worship was forbidden, often didn't want to be found, or at least didn't want to be identified as Catholic.

06:20.469 --> 06:27.474
[SPEAKER_02]: Some Catholic colonists could easily pass as Protestants by attending their local parish church.

06:28.915 --> 06:36.240
[SPEAKER_02]: The derogatory term, Church Papest, was used to describe Catholics who conformed to the Church of England.

06:38.057 --> 06:47.021
[SPEAKER_02]: In many cases, people's views of their own religious beliefs and practices may have been much more complicated than the term implies.

06:48.922 --> 06:55.225
[SPEAKER_02]: Two of the largest groups of Catholics in the English colonies were often overlooked altogether.

06:56.346 --> 06:59.027
[SPEAKER_02]: Irish servants and enslaved Africans.

07:01.139 --> 07:14.187
[SPEAKER_02]: It's estimated that some thirty to fifty thousand Irish servants were transported to North America and the Caribbean in the seventeenth century, and most of them were Catholic.

07:16.008 --> 07:23.853
[SPEAKER_02]: In the Caribbean, the population of Irish Catholics was so large that the Catholic Church sent priests to minister to them.

07:26.611 --> 07:35.916
[SPEAKER_02]: There were fewer Irish servants on the mainland, but they were there in Virginia and Maryland and South Carolina and New York and Massachusetts.

07:37.376 --> 07:44.240
[SPEAKER_02]: Large numbers of Irish workers came to the Newfoundland fisheries and then headed south into New England.

07:46.601 --> 07:53.885
[SPEAKER_02]: Perhaps the most unexpected Catholic population to a modern listener is that of enslaved Catholics.

07:55.280 --> 08:00.564
[SPEAKER_02]: Some of them came to the Americas from the Congo, which was a Catholic kingdom.

08:01.805 --> 08:10.051
[SPEAKER_02]: Others had been forcefully transported via Spanish and French territories, where they were baptized as a matter of course.

08:12.553 --> 08:23.942
[SPEAKER_02]: We don't know how many enslaved Catholics lived in the English colonies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, or what they felt about their forced baptisms.

08:25.508 --> 08:32.512
[SPEAKER_02]: By the end of the eighteenth century, though, a fifth of Maryland's Catholic community was enslaved.

08:34.393 --> 08:37.034
[SPEAKER_02]: The Jesuits themselves were enslaveders.

08:38.415 --> 08:45.898
[SPEAKER_02]: And while those enslaved, on Jesuit plantations, were able to access Catholic sacraments, including marriage.

08:46.979 --> 08:54.483
[SPEAKER_02]: They did not have their freedom, and the Jesuits sometimes sold them without respect to those sacramental ties.

08:57.009 --> 09:15.217
[SPEAKER_02]: At the time that the United States Bill of Rights was ratified in seventeen ninety-one, with the first amendment that guaranteed that there would be no state church and no prohibition against the free exercise of religion, and estimated one percent of the U.S.

09:15.257 --> 09:17.057
[SPEAKER_02]: population was Catholic.

09:18.898 --> 09:23.100
[SPEAKER_02]: Pew Research Center says that as of March, twenty-twenty-five,

09:24.053 --> 09:26.175
[SPEAKER_02]: a full twenty percent of U.S.

09:26.255 --> 09:29.337
[SPEAKER_02]: adults now describe themselves as Catholic.

09:30.818 --> 09:40.965
[SPEAKER_02]: Joining me now to help us learn more about Catholics and Catholicism in English colonies is Dr. Susan Juster, W.M.

09:41.065 --> 09:51.873
[SPEAKER_02]: Keck Foundation Director of Research at the Huntington Library and author of a Common Grave being Catholic in English America.

10:11.653 --> 10:19.118
[SPEAKER_02]: Hi Susan, thanks so much for joining me today.

10:19.738 --> 10:21.179
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for inviting me to my pleasure.

10:21.810 --> 10:25.573
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so I am super excited to get into this book with you.

10:25.593 --> 10:27.714
[SPEAKER_02]: I'd like to start by hearing a little bit.

10:27.734 --> 10:28.895
[SPEAKER_02]: This isn't your first book.

10:28.995 --> 10:34.299
[SPEAKER_02]: So how did you get into this topic, decide that this is what you want to spend a book working on?

10:34.980 --> 10:35.240
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.

10:35.800 --> 10:37.401
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it isn't my first book.

10:37.442 --> 10:44.367
[SPEAKER_01]: And I had just completed a quite arduous book that had taken a long time to write and taken a bit of an emotional toll.

10:44.427 --> 10:47.429
[SPEAKER_01]: It was on religious violence in the American colonies.

10:47.469 --> 10:48.910
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a difficult thing to write about.

10:49.050 --> 10:53.535
[SPEAKER_01]: It's been a lot of years reading about really atrocious things that people had done to one another.

10:54.456 --> 11:02.844
[SPEAKER_01]: But there was sort of lucky happenstance of having a few months unexpectedly, available to me while I was in residence as a fellow at the Huntington Library in California.

11:03.405 --> 11:07.589
[SPEAKER_01]: And I just finished the first draft of the Sacred Violence book, sent it off to the press.

11:08.310 --> 11:10.491
[SPEAKER_01]: had a couple months while I was waiting, readers reports.

11:11.011 --> 11:20.314
[SPEAKER_01]: So I had time in my hands to explore in the archives, and I was very lucky to be in residence with a wonderful group of other early American and English historians of religion.

11:20.334 --> 11:23.394
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a very unusual sort of clustering, I think, at that time.

11:23.955 --> 11:34.718
[SPEAKER_01]: So I was in conversation with fellow fellows of Amlittle, David Hall, Matt Cadaine, and others about religious politics of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

11:35.438 --> 11:44.287
[SPEAKER_01]: And Anne had made this sort of comment that I talked about in the book, where she said, did you ever notice how many Jesuits there are running around colonial America?

11:44.367 --> 11:47.811
[SPEAKER_01]: And I thought Jesuits do not belong in the English colonies.

11:47.971 --> 11:49.572
[SPEAKER_01]: And by any sense of that, right?

11:49.693 --> 11:50.774
[SPEAKER_01]: And he stretched to the imagination.

11:50.794 --> 11:51.675
[SPEAKER_01]: They just don't belong.

11:52.255 --> 11:53.617
[SPEAKER_01]: And she said, they're even in New England.

11:54.197 --> 11:56.799
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was kind of one of those moments where you sort of are taken aback.

11:56.959 --> 11:58.020
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm a historian of religion.

11:58.040 --> 12:02.003
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been studying religion in colonial North America for thirty years.

12:02.043 --> 12:03.484
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd written three other books on it.

12:03.944 --> 12:09.529
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd never really occurred to me that Catholics were there other than as a kind of booking man, right?

12:09.589 --> 12:17.495
[SPEAKER_01]: Other than as a kind of a frightful other against which the English Protestants and colonial Americans had defined themselves.

12:17.975 --> 12:19.676
[SPEAKER_01]: So I decided I have some time.

12:19.736 --> 12:22.859
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll go dig into the archives with the Huntington has to offer

12:23.499 --> 12:42.814
[SPEAKER_01]: They have some pretty strong collections of the papers of English administrators from the Tudor Stewart era, Thomas Edderton in particular, who was Lord Chancellor under Elizabeth I. And part of his job was to seek out route out and prosecute English Catholics who had refused to conform to the new religious regime.

12:43.215 --> 12:47.238
[SPEAKER_01]: He was a former Catholic himself, so he had a lot of conflicted feelings about this.

12:47.558 --> 12:54.183
[SPEAKER_01]: So he had left a lot of paper trail about this search to identify what were called at the time requisence.

12:54.623 --> 12:55.504
[SPEAKER_01]: English requisence.

12:55.604 --> 13:06.032
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the term that was applied to people who had self-recused themselves from participating in the established church, the Church of England, and stubbornly held onto their old Catholic views.

13:06.692 --> 13:17.602
[SPEAKER_01]: So he was one of the right prosecutors of records and so I spent a lot of time learning about the life and dangers of English records in the sixteenth century or the seventeenth century.

13:17.983 --> 13:21.646
[SPEAKER_01]: So I left by the time I completed that fellowship year, I had a pretty good

13:22.567 --> 13:31.094
[SPEAKER_01]: sense of what the English background was, what did it mean to be a Catholic in an Protestant empire from the English perspective?

13:31.795 --> 13:39.822
[SPEAKER_01]: So that was sort of one route into this book, but the other route was the after-fact of the research I had just finished, Sacred Violence.

13:40.342 --> 13:45.285
[SPEAKER_01]: Because I had spent a lot of time reading about the rhetoric of anti-catholicism.

13:45.305 --> 13:49.867
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, Catholics were the great bugbearers of the seventeenth century and eighteenth century.

13:49.907 --> 13:52.949
[SPEAKER_01]: They embodied everything that English Protestants did.

13:53.029 --> 13:54.010
[SPEAKER_01]: They were disloyal.

13:54.710 --> 13:56.671
[SPEAKER_01]: They were overly emotional.

13:57.131 --> 14:03.175
[SPEAKER_01]: They were obsessed with ritual and materialism rather than with true doctrine and true theology.

14:03.655 --> 14:07.240
[SPEAKER_01]: They were feminized because they were so emotional and so sensual.

14:07.700 --> 14:10.844
[SPEAKER_01]: So they embodied everything that English Protestants despised.

14:11.345 --> 14:15.711
[SPEAKER_01]: And so Anticheth Catholic rhetoric is everywhere in colonial records.

14:15.971 --> 14:20.977
[SPEAKER_01]: But in fact, I had found very few examples of actual violence against Catholics.

14:21.518 --> 14:32.081
[SPEAKER_01]: So there was this sort of glaring gap between the rhetoric, which was so hateful, and so persecutory and the experience, which seemed to be one of the sort of benign neglect or indifference.

14:32.581 --> 14:37.243
[SPEAKER_01]: So I was very curious about that there's one episode in that sort of the exception to the rule.

14:37.283 --> 14:43.545
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a pitched battle between armed Protestants and armed Catholics in Maryland, in the sixteenth-fifty years.

14:44.105 --> 14:50.670
[SPEAKER_01]: where the Catholics were routed by the Protestants and the loss of some twenty twenty-two or so lives.

14:51.070 --> 14:52.951
[SPEAKER_01]: But that was the total exception to the rule.

14:53.532 --> 15:04.299
[SPEAKER_01]: So I was interested in how it was that colonial Catholics sort of occupied this space between heightened rhetoric and it kind of lived neglect.

15:04.740 --> 15:07.702
[SPEAKER_01]: So that was what sort of led me into this project.

15:08.854 --> 15:12.258
[SPEAKER_02]: How did you go about actually finding anything?

15:12.298 --> 15:16.003
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, these are people who, as you said, were flouting the law.

15:16.083 --> 15:18.806
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't leave a lot of trace in some cases.

15:18.886 --> 15:21.970
[SPEAKER_02]: You're talking about some that are servants or enslaved.

15:22.430 --> 15:26.595
[SPEAKER_02]: So what all did you have to look at to go about to put this story together?

15:27.298 --> 15:28.799
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that was the real challenge.

15:28.839 --> 15:32.181
[SPEAKER_01]: How do you find people who don't want to be found in the archives?

15:32.401 --> 15:46.590
[SPEAKER_01]: Archives that are created by colonial administrators who are had one set of objectives and one set of motives and aren't particularly good at detailing and narrating the lives of ordinary people who don't otherwise come to their attention.

15:47.183 --> 15:58.269
[SPEAKER_01]: So it was a scattershot approach required me to be a lot more creative than I think I'd been in other books to look beyond the documentary record for one thing, to look at the material record.

15:58.329 --> 16:03.592
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm certainly not an archaeologist, but I ended up reading a lot of archaeology over the course of this book.

16:04.352 --> 16:12.116
[SPEAKER_01]: to sort of discover and find what are the material remains that have been left by individual Catholics or individuals or Catholic communities.

16:12.776 --> 16:15.798
[SPEAKER_01]: So that revealed one set of sources.

16:15.878 --> 16:21.820
[SPEAKER_01]: There were scattered examples of rosary beats discovered in archaeological pits.

16:22.101 --> 16:31.085
[SPEAKER_01]: There were stray references to crucifix here and there found in probate records or in inventories of people's households.

16:31.605 --> 16:34.608
[SPEAKER_01]: So the material record gave me some clues.

16:35.068 --> 16:37.531
[SPEAKER_01]: The material record is always ambiguous.

16:37.571 --> 16:42.035
[SPEAKER_01]: You can, I can know that a crucifix was owned by a particular person.

16:42.155 --> 16:44.097
[SPEAKER_01]: I have no idea what that meant to them.

16:44.337 --> 16:49.001
[SPEAKER_01]: Was this a relic of a, of a, of a grandmother, perhaps as someone who,

16:49.742 --> 16:58.075
[SPEAKER_01]: holds on very dearly to the rosary that my mother left behind, but does not consider myself in any way a member of that community, that rosary I own it.

16:58.175 --> 17:03.203
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you were to look at my probate interest, or you would see it, but it couldn't tell you much about my own personal beliefs.

17:04.177 --> 17:11.463
[SPEAKER_01]: So objects are very difficult to decode and to the meaning of them, but the nonetheless they do offer us one clue.

17:12.244 --> 17:23.473
[SPEAKER_01]: The other way to find Catholics in addition to what they've left behind in their material possessions is to read about the accounts of encounters with them from the people who were opposed to them.

17:23.613 --> 17:27.656
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is often true of minority groups, who are persecuted, what we know of them

17:28.497 --> 17:33.500
[SPEAKER_01]: is left to us by their prosecutors, by the law, by the colonial authorities.

17:33.540 --> 17:45.308
[SPEAKER_01]: In the many cases, Minister of Protestant Ministers who took it upon themselves to try to identify and convert, or at least oppose the Catholic settlers that they found in the midst of their congregations.

17:45.908 --> 17:54.054
[SPEAKER_01]: So reports by colonial Anglican Ministers were a great source, always keeping in mind that they are writing from a very

17:54.694 --> 17:59.869
[SPEAKER_01]: particular viewpoint that they are trying to find these people in order to expose them.

18:00.870 --> 18:11.354
[SPEAKER_01]: either if they're more generously minded to convert them or somehow incorporate them, if they're less generously minded to prosecute them, wills were another great resource.

18:12.074 --> 18:26.619
[SPEAKER_01]: Colonial wills like many wills in the early modern period often began with a preamble that sort of lays out a statement of belief, much different than wills, not, oh, I'm not sure they're that different than wills today, but nonetheless, their preamble tend to be quite theological.

18:27.579 --> 18:48.697
[SPEAKER_01]: And so even someone who might have passed their whole life as a secret Catholic who wouldn't have been known to be Catholic from their neighbors or to their larger community might in their last will and testament the last time someone has to sort of make a statement about their lives and their beliefs might lay out a kind of theology of what it meant to be a Catholic.

18:49.237 --> 18:53.242
[SPEAKER_01]: So I read a lot of wills and looking for those theological cues in the preambles.

18:53.942 --> 19:04.154
[SPEAKER_01]: Read a lot of, in my, the point when newspapers become available, which is not until the eighteenth century, really, seventeen-thirds on looking for any stray references, thick afflix.

19:05.015 --> 19:10.060
[SPEAKER_01]: I did have to learn to, when I was using more digital databases to use the term papest and not Catholic.

19:10.580 --> 19:17.487
[SPEAKER_01]: Papest was far more effective and it was the term that was most commonly used in this period of time to describe Catholics.

19:17.587 --> 19:19.409
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a term of insult.

19:19.729 --> 19:23.893
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a term that suggests that these are people who still owe their political loyalty to the Pope.

19:24.654 --> 19:25.574
[SPEAKER_01]: So therefore, our papest.

19:26.407 --> 19:41.883
[SPEAKER_01]: So it was really a scattershot approach to looking for evidence wherever I could find it, often being very mindful of fact that most of this was coming from people institutions, organizations that were hostile to the people I was trying to understand.

19:43.420 --> 19:54.190
[SPEAKER_02]: I was raised Catholic and a lot of what it meant to be a Catholic as I was growing up was going to church every week and being baptized and being confirmed and all of that.

19:54.731 --> 20:03.099
[SPEAKER_02]: What does it mean in this colonial period when there are by and large, not Catholic churches when there may be not a whole lot of priests around?

20:03.940 --> 20:06.943
[SPEAKER_02]: What does it mean to be a Catholic for these colonists?

20:07.844 --> 20:09.645
[SPEAKER_01]: That is the most important question.

20:09.765 --> 20:11.246
[SPEAKER_01]: That is the essential question.

20:11.766 --> 20:27.653
[SPEAKER_01]: What does it mean to be a Catholic when you don't have access to the sacraments, which are the building blocks of a Catholic identity in a Catholic life when you don't have access to priests who are the only people authorized to perform those sacraments to perform most importantly the miracle of the mass.

20:30.314 --> 20:37.706
[SPEAKER_01]: the fundamental central ritual of Catholicism, which is the turning of bread and wine into body and blood.

20:38.567 --> 20:45.097
[SPEAKER_01]: So in churches, there are no churches in which together and celebrate these sacraments, these moments of transformation to transcendence.

20:45.577 --> 20:46.238
[SPEAKER_01]: as a community.

20:47.058 --> 20:49.519
[SPEAKER_01]: That is the most essential question.

20:50.300 --> 21:03.867
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm very fortunate to be guided here by generations, really, of wonderful historians who have especially historians of English Catholics who really devoted a lot of time to understanding what does that mean to be a Catholic and a Protestant country.

21:05.007 --> 21:09.470
[SPEAKER_01]: And what we learned, those historians have learned what I learned from this project, is that

21:10.677 --> 21:21.666
[SPEAKER_01]: To be a Catholic under those conditions means that you have to find a way to translate and transfer some of those essential processes encounters into a domestic context.

21:22.287 --> 21:34.216
[SPEAKER_01]: You cannot celebrate the mass in a church with the priest, but you can try to find a way in your own home by either dedicating a room in that house to be the place where you and your family gather on a Sunday.

21:36.041 --> 21:45.407
[SPEAKER_01]: to you cannot receive communion at the hands of a priest in that room in your home on a Sunday, but you can read together the Catholic missile or on prayer book.

21:46.187 --> 21:49.930
[SPEAKER_01]: And you can imagine receiving communion.

21:50.010 --> 21:53.792
[SPEAKER_01]: It's sort of an act of imaginative reception.

21:56.053 --> 22:04.776
[SPEAKER_01]: And you can try to think about that there are other people doing this at the same time in their homes that you don't necessarily know personally, but you have a sense that there is a community out there.

22:06.016 --> 22:11.518
[SPEAKER_01]: So this domestication of ritual, the domestication of the experience of the mass,

22:12.498 --> 22:18.283
[SPEAKER_01]: was the biggest innovation that colonial Catholics and English Catholics made in this time.

22:18.663 --> 22:21.305
[SPEAKER_01]: And it had really far reaching consequences.

22:21.365 --> 22:25.588
[SPEAKER_01]: For one thing, it meant that women assumed a really central role.

22:25.648 --> 22:32.213
[SPEAKER_01]: Women were in a sense, the priests of the Catholic community, and that they were the ones who gathered the family together.

22:32.233 --> 22:34.135
[SPEAKER_01]: They were the ones who kept

22:35.156 --> 22:45.492
[SPEAKER_01]: The essential, the missiles and the bread that you might try to pretend is a wafer and organize these events and presided over these events.

22:45.572 --> 22:49.698
[SPEAKER_01]: And they were the ones who kept the feasting and fasting schedules of the church.

22:50.559 --> 22:52.400
[SPEAKER_01]: So two things are happening.

22:52.560 --> 23:06.987
[SPEAKER_01]: One is that the kind of experiences that would take place in a church are taking place now in a home and a much attenuated, much modified form, but also other rituals that were not centered on the church become more important.

23:07.447 --> 23:12.470
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is where, for instance, the calendar of feasting and fasting becomes absolutely central.

23:12.910 --> 23:26.517
[SPEAKER_01]: to preserving a Catholic identity, the Catholic calendar, liturgical calendars full, something like two-thirds of all days, maybe exaggerating, two-thirds of all days on the Catholic liturgical calendar that someone is, you were supposed to either face fast or feast.

23:27.557 --> 23:29.658
[SPEAKER_01]: And by feasting, they really mean receding communion.

23:29.698 --> 23:30.939
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what they mean by feasting.

23:30.979 --> 23:33.120
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't mean eating a sumptuous meal.

23:33.560 --> 23:35.041
[SPEAKER_01]: And there are many rules about fasting.

23:35.701 --> 23:40.205
[SPEAKER_01]: But that's the kind of thing that a Catholic household could maintain without fear of exposure.

23:41.966 --> 23:46.469
[SPEAKER_01]: No one's peering in at dinner time to see whether you're eating meat on a Friday or not.

23:47.070 --> 23:58.679
[SPEAKER_01]: No one's peering in unless you invite neighbors to join you for dinner to see whether on a day of obligation, holy day of obligation, you are issuing all meals except for one meal on in the middle of the day.

23:59.079 --> 24:01.862
[SPEAKER_01]: So those are the kinds of rituals that families could

24:02.482 --> 24:08.005
[SPEAKER_01]: continue and preserve and be relatively safe from exposure.

24:08.025 --> 24:19.853
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, it meant that other that women in particular are stepping up to be the guardians of this faith in ways that we're not as true in other communities in other households.

24:21.362 --> 24:25.183
[SPEAKER_02]: religious identity, of course, is not the only identity that people have.

24:25.283 --> 24:39.187
[SPEAKER_02]: And so you talk about interesting situations where an enslaver is Catholic, maybe is okay with their enslaved workers being baptized, maybe marrying, you know, but it gets complicated, right?

24:39.227 --> 24:41.508
[SPEAKER_02]: Because they're also part of other communities.

24:41.588 --> 24:44.589
[SPEAKER_02]: Could you talk some about that interplay and how complicated it is?

24:45.269 --> 24:50.533
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that was something I really spent a lot of time on trying to figure out.

24:50.613 --> 24:52.835
[SPEAKER_01]: It was one of the biggest challenges at this project.

24:53.535 --> 24:58.399
[SPEAKER_01]: I was very important to me to incorporate people who might be considered Catholic.

24:59.119 --> 25:02.582
[SPEAKER_01]: By one measure or one metric into a story that had largely been told.

25:03.342 --> 25:05.843
[SPEAKER_01]: about a community that was only English and white.

25:06.423 --> 25:12.165
[SPEAKER_01]: So the usual story of colonial Catholicism is that outside of Maryland, one Catholicism is not.

25:12.185 --> 25:17.347
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm to be found, and two that those Catholics that are there are very specific community.

25:17.387 --> 25:30.311
[SPEAKER_01]: They are wealthy white, requisites, Englishmen and women, planners who came and settled in Maryland, the one colony founded by a Catholic proprietor, where they could live their lives relatively untouched and troubled.

25:30.991 --> 25:35.454
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's so important to me to understand that that was not the sum total of the Catholic community.

25:35.474 --> 25:38.797
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is a bit of a surprise finding for me.

25:38.857 --> 25:52.207
[SPEAKER_01]: I should have known as a colonial historian who've been studying this field for thirty years that there were many many Irish Catholics in the colonies that there were many enslaved African Catholics and many indigenous converts in these communities.

25:52.688 --> 25:55.490
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I knew it at some level, but had never really focused on it.

25:55.730 --> 26:01.176
[SPEAKER_01]: So in understanding what it meant to be an enslaved Catholic was something that I really struggled with.

26:01.657 --> 26:03.559
[SPEAKER_01]: At a certain level, we will never know, right?

26:03.579 --> 26:15.532
[SPEAKER_01]: We will never know what did it, what did baptism at the hands of one's insolvers, often under forced conditions mean to an African man or woman laboring in the household of an English planter.

26:15.952 --> 26:20.656
[SPEAKER_01]: Those are questions we will never really understand and the answers to.

26:21.257 --> 26:38.212
[SPEAKER_01]: But what this research reminded me was that many of the enslaved Africans who were brought as captives to the English colonies were in fact came from areas of Africa that were in fact Catholic that had been the Kingdom of Congo had been a Catholic country since the fourteen nineties.

26:38.632 --> 26:42.015
[SPEAKER_01]: And Gola was a Catholic country at this time, nation at this time.

26:42.756 --> 26:55.474
[SPEAKER_01]: So there was a whole stream of migration for migration from Africa into these households that consisted of people who in their own mind and their own lives would have considered themselves Christians, specifically Catholics.

26:55.975 --> 26:57.977
[SPEAKER_01]: But there was also another steady stream of

26:58.678 --> 27:14.344
[SPEAKER_01]: of captives into English households from various Spanish French Portuguese islands in the Caribbean where Africans, from wherever they had part of Africa, had come from, had been forcibly baptized upon their arrival in these colonies.

27:14.444 --> 27:23.488
[SPEAKER_01]: And then sold into English households, captured by English predators, and then taken into English households, a variety of methods that brought them into English households.

27:24.442 --> 27:35.530
[SPEAKER_01]: So really a challenge for me was to think about, do we, one, should we even consider someone who has been forcibly baptized against their will under terrible conditions, right, of, of Dores as Catholics?

27:36.524 --> 27:39.747
[SPEAKER_01]: And I tried to keep an open mind without prejudging the issue.

27:40.267 --> 27:46.872
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it is fair to say that most Africans who had been forcefully baptized did not consider themselves Catholics.

27:46.952 --> 27:58.402
[SPEAKER_01]: It was that their baptism was a marker of their enslavement and it was something that was imposed upon them and it was something that defined them in ways they would never have defined themselves.

27:59.002 --> 28:00.682
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's absolutely fair to say.

28:00.842 --> 28:08.964
[SPEAKER_01]: But I was really intrigued by the very clear evidence that for at least some of these captives, Catholicism was something that they had embraced at some level.

28:09.324 --> 28:27.568
[SPEAKER_01]: We have evidence of African fleeing, South Carolina fleeing the North American South into Florida, which was at Spanish colony and seeking out a Catholic community to rejoin, seeking out Catholic marriages for themselves and their spouses.

28:28.188 --> 28:31.390
[SPEAKER_01]: seeking out baptism, seeking out the other sacraments of the faith.

28:31.430 --> 28:41.458
[SPEAKER_01]: So we do know that at least for some Africans, that there was a sense in which Catholicism was an identity that they took on for themselves.

28:41.718 --> 28:44.720
[SPEAKER_01]: Regardless of the circumstances in which they were first introduced to that faith.

28:45.080 --> 28:53.608
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, I was really intrigued by what it meant to be an enslaved Catholic living in the household of an enslaved her.

28:54.169 --> 29:00.454
[SPEAKER_01]: And the English manners and plantations in Maryland were the best places to explore that dynamic.

29:01.175 --> 29:11.019
[SPEAKER_01]: The Jesuits, which was the religious society that served the English colonies, the only priests who were allowed really to operate at all were themselves slaveholders.

29:11.539 --> 29:17.121
[SPEAKER_01]: So the English, the Jesuit community in Maryland owned hundreds of slaves themselves.

29:17.641 --> 29:26.785
[SPEAKER_01]: And they became, they were a tutor, they're English followers, white Catholic followers, and how to be a Catholic household with enslaved peoples living in it.

29:27.645 --> 29:30.326
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was a source of tremendous contradiction, right?

29:30.366 --> 29:34.188
[SPEAKER_01]: The record of Catholics like holding is as brutal as you would expect it to be.

29:34.288 --> 29:44.252
[SPEAKER_01]: There was no attempt to protect families, marital husbands and wives when it came to selling their property, as they would have put it.

29:44.892 --> 29:52.177
[SPEAKER_01]: But there was an effort to incorporate enslaved peoples into the sacraments of the household, that found that very intriguing.

29:52.197 --> 30:00.563
[SPEAKER_01]: So baptism and marriage interestingly enough was in fact a sacrament that enslaved Africans and indigenous people had some access to.

30:01.104 --> 30:03.726
[SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, the bonds of marriage were not respected.

30:04.426 --> 30:15.631
[SPEAKER_01]: when financial trouble came and English households decided that for whatever reason they needed to sell their property, they didn't hesitate to separate husbands and wives.

30:15.891 --> 30:25.255
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's a very mixed record and trying to parse out how to make sense of that record was a challenge for me.

30:25.295 --> 30:25.735
[SPEAKER_01]: Should I be

30:26.595 --> 30:45.801
[SPEAKER_01]: more impressed by or more drawn to the evidence that suggested a kind of sacramental fellowship between black and white Christians within these households, or should I be more impressed by how fragile, whatever the evidence of that spiritual fellowship was when one life hit.

30:46.741 --> 30:49.463
[SPEAKER_01]: And to this day, I remain sort of conflicted by this.

30:49.703 --> 30:52.545
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that someone that readers will have to make their own choices about.

30:52.605 --> 31:01.910
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd like to present the evidence on both sides, the evidence both for fellowship and the evidence for Christian hypocrisy and Christian exploitation.

31:02.651 --> 31:05.653
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's going to come down to how you read that evidence.

31:07.274 --> 31:09.295
[SPEAKER_02]: I've mentioned Jesuits a few times.

31:09.375 --> 31:12.657
[SPEAKER_02]: So what are the Jesuits doing in the English colonies?

31:13.827 --> 31:15.168
[SPEAKER_01]: That's an interesting question.

31:15.229 --> 31:20.994
[SPEAKER_01]: They are the really the sort of the the true boogey men of the prize at Reformation.

31:21.034 --> 31:29.103
[SPEAKER_01]: Jesuits among all Catholics were known to be particularly devious, particularly cunning, particularly seductive.

31:29.523 --> 31:46.314
[SPEAKER_01]: They were the foot soldiers of the Catholic Reformation, the sort of response to the Protestant Reformation, which was a organized movement on the part of the Catholic Church to recapture what they had lost in the Reformation, to retrieve and reclaim people who had fallen away from the true faith.

31:46.714 --> 31:48.895
[SPEAKER_01]: So they were aggressive.

31:48.975 --> 31:53.278
[SPEAKER_01]: They were omissionizing, you know, with a mission from the beginning.

31:53.638 --> 32:04.363
[SPEAKER_01]: And they are the ones who sort of spread out across the globe to try to take this evangelizing, aggressive counter-reformation to all people's.

32:04.663 --> 32:09.505
[SPEAKER_01]: So they truly are the ones who figure the largest in the rhetoric of anti-Catholicism.

32:10.105 --> 32:19.494
[SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, one of the things that made them good missionaries was that they were, in fact, willing to adapt themselves to local circumstances.

32:20.095 --> 32:24.059
[SPEAKER_01]: They were very interested in learning indigenous languages, for instance.

32:24.219 --> 32:31.806
[SPEAKER_01]: One reason why Jesuits did make inroads into indigenous communities in North America was that they were one of the few missionaries willing to learn indigenous languages.

32:32.326 --> 32:34.368
[SPEAKER_01]: They were willing to adapt

32:35.009 --> 32:44.037
[SPEAKER_01]: the sort of Sacramento and devotional model of their program to native conditions and native understandings of ritual.

32:44.457 --> 33:00.251
[SPEAKER_01]: So they were able, they were willing to adapt to some degree, some native customs and traditions, and that ability to adapt, that not this ability but willingness to adapt meant that they were able to survive in circumstances in which you would not expect them to survive.

33:00.871 --> 33:02.653
[SPEAKER_01]: They also had the cache of learning.

33:03.053 --> 33:19.746
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I think one thing that really, it sort of struck me when I was reading these accounts of Puritan ministers and Puritan governors in places like Boston and places like Connecticut, which were known as the hyper Puritan colonies, which were the most rigorous indoctrinated Protestants of all.

33:20.407 --> 33:27.413
[SPEAKER_01]: They were really, they really appreciated the fact that they could talk to a Jesuit as a fellow-learned gentleman.

33:28.073 --> 33:35.395
[SPEAKER_01]: So they were struck by an awe, I think, in some ways, of Jesuits' linguistic prowess and their general level of education.

33:35.875 --> 33:46.579
[SPEAKER_01]: And as long as they were the isolated person passing through a colony, not the spearhead of the larger movement of people, they could be accommodated.

33:47.059 --> 33:50.040
[SPEAKER_01]: So they are accommodated more than I would have thought they were.

33:50.400 --> 33:54.561
[SPEAKER_01]: And they also were very adept, even in places where they were not accommodated.

33:54.861 --> 33:56.882
[SPEAKER_01]: They were very adept at disguising themselves.

33:57.422 --> 34:07.987
[SPEAKER_01]: So there is a whole section of the book on the kinds of disguises that Catholics in general had to adapt in order to survive underground, or at least below the radar public attention.

34:08.588 --> 34:23.055
[SPEAKER_01]: But also that Jesuits in particular, as part of their sort of instructions from their home society, was to disguise themselves as farmers, as doctors, as lawyers, as any sort of gentlemanly occupation.

34:23.515 --> 34:30.177
[SPEAKER_01]: that might give them cover for their education, for their level of linguistic and facility.

34:30.837 --> 34:49.801
[SPEAKER_01]: So, so Jesuits do move through these territories in disguise largely undetected at times, but it still still surprises me to hear of Governor Bradford in plenty of colony sitting down and dining with his Jesuit visitors and a seating to their request to have fish on Friday.

34:49.861 --> 34:51.362
[SPEAKER_01]: That to me is just stunning.

34:51.842 --> 34:53.382
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a historian of Protestantism.

34:54.262 --> 35:02.985
[SPEAKER_02]: We're speaking largely, of course, about times when Catholicism was outlawed in England and thus the English territories.

35:03.605 --> 35:14.408
[SPEAKER_02]: But there is this curious moment as different monarchs, die new people get in charge, some people like Catholics, some people don't, it's going back and forth.

35:14.808 --> 35:21.290
[SPEAKER_02]: That's confusing enough for people in England to learn about this maybe right away as it's happening, but to have to wait

35:21.950 --> 35:24.371
[SPEAKER_02]: weeks or months or whatever to hear what's happening.

35:24.812 --> 35:27.793
[SPEAKER_02]: You have this part in the conclusion where you're talking about that.

35:27.813 --> 35:30.235
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm like, what is this going to mean for us?

35:30.295 --> 35:30.835
[SPEAKER_02]: We don't know.

35:30.915 --> 35:32.276
[SPEAKER_02]: Can we come out from underground?

35:32.696 --> 35:35.297
[SPEAKER_02]: Could you talk some about that interplay?

35:35.377 --> 35:38.099
[SPEAKER_02]: What that means during this time period in the colonies?

35:38.959 --> 35:39.239
[SPEAKER_01]: Right?

35:40.000 --> 35:44.684
[SPEAKER_01]: The politics are so confusing and so influx in this period of time.

35:44.744 --> 36:04.620
[SPEAKER_01]: And we tend to have an impression that once the Protestant movement became established in England, which is largely at that seesaw tumultuous time in which England itself is going through four different regimes and four different religious regimes in a period of twenty years.

36:04.700 --> 36:05.861
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really remarkable.

36:06.642 --> 36:13.763
[SPEAKER_01]: But by the time Elizabeth comes to reign and the active uniformity is passed in fifteen-fifty nine.

36:13.803 --> 36:15.444
[SPEAKER_01]: We have a sense that things are kind of settled.

36:15.644 --> 36:17.604
[SPEAKER_01]: But England will be a Protestant nation.

36:18.304 --> 36:20.624
[SPEAKER_01]: They can argue about who counts as a Protestant.

36:20.664 --> 36:27.826
[SPEAKER_01]: They can argue about whether it's okay for different varieties of Protestant to be allowed to worship.

36:28.186 --> 36:30.566
[SPEAKER_01]: But Capits by all means are to be excluded from that.

36:30.626 --> 36:35.187
[SPEAKER_01]: So that is our sort of general perception of the religious politics of England.

36:35.707 --> 36:57.618
[SPEAKER_01]: But in fact, in the continues to have these regime changes, there continues to be a lot of ambiguity, a lot of ambivalence about what exactly it means to be a Protestant and to what degree the edges of that Protestant Catholic interface will be tolerated throughout the seventeenth century.

36:58.670 --> 37:05.055
[SPEAKER_01]: So after Elizabeth dies in six, no three, and the Stuart kings come into power.

37:05.315 --> 37:14.662
[SPEAKER_01]: The first being James I, she's James I, but he's James I in England, and the stewards have a much stronger connection to Catholicism.

37:15.222 --> 37:24.689
[SPEAKER_01]: Every Stuart a monarch from James I through Charles I and Charles II reigns as a Protestant monarch, but all of them have Catholic wives, for instance.

37:25.129 --> 37:28.911
[SPEAKER_01]: all of them have Catholic upbrings in their background.

37:29.491 --> 37:35.595
[SPEAKER_01]: And then by the time James the second comes to the throne in six and eighty five he is the first openly Catholic monarch.

37:36.055 --> 37:45.140
[SPEAKER_01]: But he is really the culmination of what has been a gradual opening up of that of the society and politics to Catholic presence.

37:45.960 --> 37:55.968
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the seventeenth century sees this, it's a very unsettled time in England in which Protestants are nominally still in control.

37:56.128 --> 37:59.371
[SPEAKER_01]: They're still up every monarch as I say until James is Protestant.

37:59.831 --> 38:04.555
[SPEAKER_01]: Those are suspicions about whether Charles II had but secretly converted to Catholicism.

38:05.155 --> 38:10.979
[SPEAKER_01]: but they all have strong Catholic presences in their courts and they as certain degree of tolerance for Catholic practice.

38:11.480 --> 38:22.407
[SPEAKER_01]: So as each monarch comes to the throne, there is this moment of hope and expectation within the Catholic community that they will finally be able to come out from the come in from the cold, come out into the open.

38:22.828 --> 38:25.510
[SPEAKER_01]: And to some degree, those aspirations are realized.

38:25.550 --> 38:28.552
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a flourishing of Catholic sacramental practice.

38:28.932 --> 38:39.235
[SPEAKER_01]: There is an allowance for the public for the first time, and a long time, the public celebration of the mass in London during under Charles I and Charles II.

38:39.595 --> 38:44.276
[SPEAKER_01]: These are in the homes of French and Spanish ambassadors, so that's the way they justify it.

38:44.316 --> 38:54.198
[SPEAKER_01]: We're not allowing English Catholics to celebrate the mass, but if English Catholics want to go to the chapel of the French ambassador and celebrate mass openly there, we're not going to intervene.

38:54.519 --> 38:56.179
[SPEAKER_01]: So there is this more opening up.

38:56.839 --> 38:59.141
[SPEAKER_01]: both ritual life and material life.

38:59.181 --> 39:07.028
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a flourishing of Catholic material culture in the seventeenth century that accompanies the ascension of each of these monarchs.

39:07.668 --> 39:09.250
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's what's happening in England.

39:09.450 --> 39:14.354
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, as you said, that the news of all of that takes a very long time to hit the colonies.

39:14.774 --> 39:19.258
[SPEAKER_01]: So that leaves colonial Catholics in much more in a state of limbo, frankly.

39:19.338 --> 39:21.040
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't really know what's going on.

39:21.060 --> 39:24.122
[SPEAKER_01]: They're hearing rumors that they may be having letters from home saying,

39:25.142 --> 39:28.143
[SPEAKER_01]: Under this new monarch, Charles I's take is come to the crown.

39:28.323 --> 39:33.204
[SPEAKER_01]: We have hopes that English Catholics will be able to practice and worship freely again.

39:33.224 --> 39:34.644
[SPEAKER_01]: They can't count on that.

39:35.244 --> 39:41.806
[SPEAKER_01]: So colonial Catholics are in a state of uncertainty, but also colonial authorities are in a state of uncertainty.

39:41.866 --> 39:49.508
[SPEAKER_01]: They are waiting for the official word from their imperial masters about whether they should incorporate some of these new changes or not.

39:50.088 --> 39:52.708
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's a great deal of uncertainty.

39:53.289 --> 39:54.569
[SPEAKER_01]: And that allows for both

39:55.309 --> 40:03.911
[SPEAKER_01]: Catholic practice to flourish on the margins once again, but it also gives their opponents ammunition to crack down on them.

40:04.511 --> 40:09.392
[SPEAKER_01]: So that was particularly true in this period of sixteen eighty-five to sixteen eighty-eight.

40:09.432 --> 40:20.433
[SPEAKER_01]: Those are the three years in which James II rules is on the throne, before he's ousted in a mostly bloodless coup that establishes once and for all that there will be a Protestant monarch.

40:20.473 --> 40:22.914
[SPEAKER_01]: And Catholic Catholics will not be allowed to hold the throne.

40:23.614 --> 40:27.435
[SPEAKER_01]: But during those three years, the colonies aren't a state of utter suspension.

40:27.515 --> 40:28.655
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't know what's happening.

40:28.675 --> 40:29.676
[SPEAKER_01]: They're hearing rumors.

40:30.156 --> 40:34.577
[SPEAKER_01]: Catholics have come out into the open during those three years of James's rule.

40:34.617 --> 40:42.019
[SPEAKER_01]: There are open masses being held on the island of Barbados, for instance, with wealthy Catholic clanters hosting these masses.

40:42.099 --> 40:47.301
[SPEAKER_01]: They invite a priest to come over from Martinique, a French priest to celebrate the mass in these homes.

40:47.781 --> 40:50.222
[SPEAKER_01]: And then once the first word comes down,

40:51.302 --> 40:54.243
[SPEAKER_01]: definitive word comes down that James has been outstead.

40:54.263 --> 40:58.944
[SPEAKER_01]: There is this scramble to shut down what has just been opened up again.

40:59.704 --> 41:20.928
[SPEAKER_01]: And for the historian, what that does is produce a wonderful cache of documents, where we can actually then, we have these wonderful cache of documents that tell us who has been attending these masses, what's happening in these masses, the best glimpse I found in through the project of what a mass and a colonial household might have looked like.

41:21.629 --> 41:40.128
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's all because of the political turmoil of this year's and the way in which the delay in news coming in and the doubts about how reliable this news is has created chaos on the ground and out of chaos has come an opportunity for Catholics to emerge again.

41:40.969 --> 41:46.590
[SPEAKER_01]: but it's also created the conditions under which that emergence is going to be stamped out pretty ruthlessly.

41:46.810 --> 41:53.352
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's just a wonderful historical moment and generated great documents for the historian to read.

41:54.372 --> 42:04.475
[SPEAKER_02]: This book is it's just fascinating book at this part of the colonial experience that I had never really given a lot of thought to can you tell listeners how they can read the book?

42:06.248 --> 42:20.327
[SPEAKER_01]: I think they should read it with an open mind and read it as the effort by one historian to make sense of a lot of contradictory and scattered information that doesn't lend itself to a neat narrative.

42:20.387 --> 42:23.471
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not a story of how colonial Catholics

42:24.412 --> 42:32.400
[SPEAKER_01]: persevered in the face of great obstacles to preserve a community that has become a very important community in the United States.

42:33.141 --> 42:35.763
[SPEAKER_01]: That is part of the story, but it's not the whole story.

42:36.344 --> 42:46.654
[SPEAKER_01]: So rather than reading it for sort of definitive lessons for us today or for understanding how the current Catholic community in the United States is functioning

42:47.395 --> 42:54.497
[SPEAKER_01]: I would like readers to come to it with a sense of, this is a very chaotic time where a lot is unknown.

42:54.637 --> 42:57.558
[SPEAKER_01]: Institutions are still forming.

42:57.878 --> 42:59.518
[SPEAKER_01]: Identity is still forming.

43:00.058 --> 43:05.140
[SPEAKER_01]: All of the uncertainties of a colonial environment, a frontier environment in many ways are there.

43:07.240 --> 43:10.543
[SPEAKER_01]: People's identities are in flux, and they are multiple.

43:11.003 --> 43:20.692
[SPEAKER_01]: As you had mentioned earlier, there are racial identities, there are religious identities, political identities, gender identities, all of these identities are in a state of considerable flux at this time.

43:21.193 --> 43:30.941
[SPEAKER_01]: To read this as a story of how community is formed and survives under these conditions, a precarity of uncertainty of risk.

43:32.763 --> 43:36.327
[SPEAKER_01]: There are heroic lessons to take from that, but that's not the end of the day.

43:36.368 --> 43:40.032
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the story that I want people to come away with.

43:40.993 --> 43:42.395
[SPEAKER_01]: And how can they get a copy of the book?

43:43.653 --> 43:46.034
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's the more practical question.

43:46.334 --> 43:48.014
[SPEAKER_01]: You can get it on Amazon, as far as I know.

43:48.314 --> 43:50.175
[SPEAKER_01]: So it was published a spring.

43:50.215 --> 43:54.296
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's had a major June release date from the University of North Carolina Press.

43:54.756 --> 44:07.078
[SPEAKER_01]: There's an imprint of the UNC press that is books that are edited and promoted by the Omaha and Institute of Early American History and Culture, which is one of the premier institutes supporting research and colonial America.

44:07.619 --> 44:13.320
[SPEAKER_01]: So it is a book that comes out under the OI, Omaha and Institute imprint as part of the University of North Carolina Press.

44:14.822 --> 44:17.505
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there anything else that you want to make sure we talk about?

44:18.386 --> 44:26.936
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it is that one thing I would say, which is to always read and historians will notice, but to always read documents with a certain amount of suspicion.

44:27.557 --> 44:33.183
[SPEAKER_01]: That is especially when we're trying to understand the lives of people who are constitute a minority in some sense.

44:34.284 --> 44:42.647
[SPEAKER_01]: are living lives larger than the margins who experience a degree of persecution and prosecution in both senses in their lives and harassment.

44:43.007 --> 44:52.451
[SPEAKER_01]: That most of what we will ever be able to know about those communities usually comes from the documents generated by those who are in power and are suppressing them.

44:53.131 --> 45:02.857
[SPEAKER_01]: So we can learn a tremendous amount from these individuals, about these individuals and these communities, from those kind of documents, but they have to be read with a great deal of suspicion and caution.

45:03.277 --> 45:14.444
[SPEAKER_01]: But there's still a worthwhile enterprise to try to understand the lives of fugitive people because there have been many fugitive communities in this country's history that those lives need to be told.

45:15.344 --> 45:17.886
[SPEAKER_01]: Susan, thank you so much for speaking with me today.

45:18.846 --> 45:19.847
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for having me.

45:43.379 --> 45:45.240
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening to Unsung History.

45:46.020 --> 45:49.541
[SPEAKER_00]: Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app.

45:50.021 --> 45:53.222
[SPEAKER_00]: You can find the sources used for this episode in a full episode transcript.

45:53.605 --> 45:55.487
[SPEAKER_00]: at unsunghistorypodcast.com.

45:56.128 --> 46:02.195
[SPEAKER_00]: To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by unsung history are in the public domain, or are used with permission.

46:03.035 --> 46:09.963
[SPEAKER_00]: You can sign us on Twitter or Instagram at unsung underscore underscore history, or on Facebook at unsung history podcast.

46:10.544 --> 46:17.191
[SPEAKER_00]: To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelley at unsunghistorypodcast.com.

46:17.932 --> 46:21.896
[SPEAKER_00]: If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know.

46:22.257 --> 46:22.457
[SPEAKER_00]: Bye.