Catholicism in the American Colonies

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. 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. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers, to listen too. In 1802, then President Thomas Jefferson, wrote to the Danbury Connecticut Baptist Association, "Believing with you, that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only and not opinions, 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." Of course, that wall has been sometimes porous in American history, but Jefferson was old enough to remember a time before the wall existed at all. When the American colonies were under English control, English religious laws extended across the ocean. By the time the first permanent English colony in the Americas was established in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, the Church of England was the established church, with the British monarch as its head. King Henry VIII had famously split with the Catholic Church when Pope Clement VII refused to grant him a divorce. After Henry's daughter Mary attempted to reverse his actions, his other daughter, Elizabeth, took the throne in 1558, and a series of laws, including the 1559 Act of Uniformity, quickly re-established the Church of England. Regardless of the law, though, Catholics continued to exist, both in England and in the English colonies. Most notably, Maryland colony was established in the 1630s by a Catholic, Cecilius Calvert, Second Baron Baltimore. 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, and it became a haven for English Catholic colonists. In 1649, the Maryland legislature passed the Maryland Toleration Act, the first religious tolerance act in the English colonies, although it offered tolerance only for Christians. Anyone denying the divinity of Jesus could be sentenced to death. Not everyone in Maryland wanted to be  tolerant of Catholics. A band of Puritans who had recently arrived in Maryland from Virginia, revolted in 1650, setting up a new government that prohibited Catholicism and Anglicanism, which led to persecution of Catholics and the burning of Catholic churches. When the Calvert family finally regained control in 1658, they re-enacted the Toleration Act. In 1685, Charles and Henrietta Maria's second surviving son, the Catholic, James II, became king of England and Ireland, and Scotland, where he was known as James VII; 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. Across the Atlantic, Protestants in Maryland, by now, a majority of the population, staged their own revolution, forming a 700 man strong army led by Colonel John Coode. Coode's new government outlawed Catholicism in the colony, and Catholics in Maryland were forced to celebrate Mass secretly. After 1704, Catholics could no longer hold political office in Maryland, either. Maryland may have been the most obvious and overt home of English Catholics in the English colonies, but Catholics could be found throughout the colonies. Most prominently, Catholic Thomas Dongan 2nd Earl of Limerick, was Governor of New york colony from 1682 to 1688 under Charles II and James II. Estimating the total number of Catholics is difficult because Catholics 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. Some Catholic colonists could easily pass as Protestants by attending their local parish church. The derogatory term, church Papist, was used to describe Catholics who conformed to the Church of England. In many cases, people's views of their own religious beliefs and practices may have been much more complicated than the term implies. Two of the largest groups of Catholics in the English colonies were often overlooked altogether, Irish servants and enslaved Africans. It's estimated that some 30 to 50,000 Irish servants were transported to North America and the Caribbean in the 17th century, and most of them were Catholic. In the Caribbean, the population of Irish Catholics was so large that the Catholic Church sent priests to minister to them. There were fewer Irish servants on the mainland, but they were there, in Virginia and Maryland and South Carolina and New York and Massachusetts. Large numbers of Irish workers came to the Newfoundland fisheries, and then headed south into New England. Perhaps the most unexpected Catholic population to a modern listener is that of enslaved Catholics. Some of them came to the Americas from the Congo, which was a Catholic kingdom. Others had been forcefully transported via Spanish and French territories, where they were baptized as a matter of course. We don't know how many enslaved Catholics lived in the English colonies in the 17th and early 18th centuries, or what they felt about their forced baptisms. By the end of the 18th century, though, a fifth of Maryland's Catholic community was enslaved. The Jesuits themselves were enslavers, and while those enslaved on Jesuit plantations were able to access Catholic sacraments, including marriage, they did not have their freedom, and the Jesuits sometimes sold them without respect to those sacramental ties. At the time that the United States Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, with the First Amendment that guaranteed that there would be no state church and no prohibition against the free exercise of religion, an estimated 1% of the US population was Catholic. Pew Research Center says that as of March, 2025, a full 20% of US adults now describe themselves as Catholic. Joining me now to help us learn more about Catholics and Catholicism in the English colonies, is Dr. Susan Juster, WM Keck Foundation Director of Research at the Huntington Library, and author of, "A Common Grave: Being Catholic in English America."

Kelly Therese Pollock  10:16  
Hi, Susan, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Susan Juster  10:19  
Thank you for inviting me. It's my pleasure.

Kelly Therese Pollock  10:21  
 Yeah, so I am super excited to get into this book with you. I'd like to start by hearing a little bit, this isn't your first book. So how did you get into this topic, decide that this is what you wanted to spend a book working on?

Dr. Susan Juster  10:34  
Right. Well, it isn't my first book, 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. It was on religious violence in the American colonies, and it's a difficult thing to write about. I'd spent a lot of years reading about really atrocious things that people had done to one another. But there was a 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, and I had just finished the first draft of the sacred violence book, sent it off to the press, had a couple months while I was waiting readers' reports. So I had time on 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. It's a very unusual sort of clustering, I think, at that time. So I was in conversation with fellow fellows of Ann Little, David Hall, Matt Kadane, and others, about religious politics of England in the 16th and 17th and 18th centuries. And Ann had made this sort of comment that I talk about in the book, where she said, "Did you ever notice how many Jesuits there are running around colonial America?" And I thought Jesuits do not belong in the English colonies, and by any sense of that, right, any stretch of the imagination, they just don't belong. And she said, "They're even in New England." And it was kind of one of those moments where you sort of are taken aback. I'm a historian of religion. I've been studying religion in colonial North America for 30 years. I'd written three other books on it and it never really occurred to me that Catholics were there, other than as a kind of boogeyman, right, other than as a kind of frightful other against which the English Protestants and colonial Americans had defined themselves. So I decided I have some time. I'll go dig into the archives of what the Huntington has to offer. They have some pretty strong collections of the papers of English administrators from the Tudor-Stuart Era, Thomas Edgerton in particular, who was Lord Chancellor under Elizabeth I, and part of his job was to seek out, root out and prosecute English Catholics who had refused to conform to the new religious regime. He was a former Catholic himself, so he had a lot of conflicted feelings about this. So he had left a lot of paper trail about this search to identify what were called at the time, recusants. English recusants. 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. So he was one of the right prosecutors of recusants. And so I spent a lot of time learning about the life and dangers of English recusants In the 16th century and early 17th century. So I left. By the time I completed that fellowship year, I had a pretty good sense of what the English background was. What was it? What did it mean to be a Catholic in a Protestant empire from the English perspective? So that was sort of one route into this book, but the other route was the after effect of the research I had just finished, sacred violence, because I had spent a lot of time reading about the rhetoric of anti Catholicism. You know, Catholics were the great bugbears of the of the 17th Century and 18th century. They embodied everything that English Protestants detested. They were disloyal, they were overly emotional. They were obsessed with ritual and materialism rather than with true doctrine and true ideology. They were feminized because they were so emotional and so sensual. So they embodied everything that English Protestants despised. And so anti Catholic rhetoric is everywhere in colonial records. But in fact, I had found very few examples of actual violence against Catholics. 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 sort of benign neglect or indifference. So I was very curious about that. There's one episode in that's sort of the exception to the rule. There was a pitched battle between armed Protestants and armed Catholics in Maryland in the 1650s, where the Catholics were routed by the Protestants, and the loss of some 20, 20, 22 or so lives. But that was the total exception to the rule. So I was interested in how it was that colonial Catholics sort of occupied this space between heightened rhetoric and a kind of lived neglect. So that was what sort of led me into this project.

Kelly Therese Pollock  15:08  
How did you go about actually finding anything? You know, these are people who, as you said, were flouting the law. They don't leave a lot of trace. In some cases, you're talking about some that are servants or enslaved. So what all did you have to look at to go about to put this story together? 

Dr. Susan Juster  15:27  
Yeah, that was the real challenge. How do you find people who don't want to be found in the archives? Archives that are created by colonial administrators, who are have 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. So it was a, it was a scatter shot approach. It 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. I'm certainly not an archeologist, but I ended up reading a lot of archeology over the course of this book to sort of discover and find what are the material remains that had been left by individual Catholics or individual or Catholic communities. So and that revealed one set of sources. There were scattered examples of rosary beads discovered in archeological pits. There were stray references to a crucifix here and there found in probate records or in inventories of people's households. So the material record gave me some clues. The material record is always ambiguous. You can I can know that a crucifix was owned by a particular person. I have no idea what that meant to them. Was this a relic of a of a grandmother? Right? Perhaps, as someone who 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, and if you were to look at my probate into a story, you would see it, but it couldn't tell you much about my own personal beliefs. So So objects are very difficult to decode and to the meaning of them, but then nonetheless, they do offer us one clue. 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, and that is often true of minority groups, right who are persecuted. What we know of them is left to us by their persecutors, by the law, by the colonial authorities, in many cases, ministers,  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. So reports by colonial Anglican ministers were a great source, always with, always keeping in mind that they are writing from a very particular viewpoint, that they they are trying to find these people in order to expose them, 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. 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 well, I'm not sure that they're that different than wills today, but nonetheless, their their preambles tend to be quite theological. And so even someone who might have passed their whole life as a as a secret Catholic, who wouldn't have been known to be Catholic from their to their neighbors or to the 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. So I read a lot of wills and looking for those theological cues in the preambles. Read a lot of the point when newspapers become available, which is not until the 18th century, really, 1730s on looking for any stray references to Catholics. I did have to learn to when I was using more digital databases to use the term Papist and not Catholic. Papist was far more effective. It was the term that was most commonly used in this period of time to describe Catholics. It is a term of insult. It is a term that suggests that these are people who still owe their political loyalty to the pope, so therefore are Papists. So it was really a scattershot approach to looking for evidence wherever I could find it, often being very mindful the fact that most of this was coming from people, institutions, organizations that were hostile to the people I was trying to understand.

Kelly Therese Pollock  19:43  
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. What does it mean in this colonial period when there are, by and large not Catholic churches, when there maybe not a whole lot of priests around? What does it mean to be a Catholic for these colonists?

Dr. Susan Juster  20:06  
That is the most important question. That is the essential question. 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 and 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, the fundamental central ritual of Catholicism, which is the turning of bread and wine into Body and Blood, so and churches? And there are no churches in which to gather and celebrate these sacraments, these moments of transformation and transcendence as a community. That is the most essential question. And I was very fortunate to be guided here by one, 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 in a Protestant country? And what we learned, what those historians have learned, what I learned from this project, is that 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. 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. 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 missal or prayer book, and you can imagine it's receiving Communion. It's sort of a it's an act of imaginative reception. 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. So this domestication of ritual, the domestication of the experience of the Mass, was the biggest innovation that colonial Catholics and English Catholics made in this time, and it had really far reaching consequences. For one thing, it meant that women assumed a really central role. Women were, in a sense, the priests of the of the Catholic community, in that they were the ones who gathered the family together. They were the ones who kept 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, and they were the ones who kept the feasting and fasting schedules of the church. So two things are happening. One is that the kind of experiences that would take place in a church are taking place now in a home in a much attenuated, much modified form, but also other rituals that were not centered on the church become more important. And this is where, for instance, the calendar of feasting and fasting becomes absolutely central to preserving a Catholic identity. The Catholic calendar, liturgical calendar, is full. Something like two thirds of all days, I may be exaggerating. Two thirds of all day is on the Catholic liturgical calendar. Someone is you're supposed to either fast, fast or feast. And by feasting, they really mean receiving Communion. That's what they mean by feasting. They don't mean eating a sumptuous meal, and there are many rules about fasting. But that's the kind of thing that a Catholic household could maintain without fear of exposure, right? No one's peering in at dinner time to see whether you're eating meat on a Friday or not. 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 eschewing all meals except for one meal in the middle of the day. So those are the kinds of rituals that families could continue and preserve and be relatively safe from exposure. And again, it meant that that other that women in particular, are stepping up to be the guardians of this faith in ways that were not as true in other communities and other households.

Kelly Therese Pollock  24:21  
Religious identity, of course, is not the only identity that people have, 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? Because they're also part of other communities. Could you talk some about that interplay and how complicated it is?

Dr. Susan Juster  24:45  
Yeah, that was something I really spent a lot of time on trying to figure out. It was one of the biggest challenges of this project. It was very important to me to incorporate people who might be considered Catholic by one measure or one metric into a story that had largely been told about a community that was only English and white. So the usual story of colonial Catholicism is that outside of Maryland, one, Catholics aren't to be found, and two, that those Catholics that are there are very specific community. They are wealthy white recusants, English men and women, planters who came and settled in Maryland, the one colony founded by a Catholic proprietor, where they could live their lives relatively untouched, untroubled. But it's so important to me to understand that that was not the sum total of the Catholic community. And this is a bit of a surprise finding for me. I should have known as a colonial historian who'd been studying this field for 30 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. I think I knew it at some level, but had never really focused on it. So in understanding what it meant to be an enslaved Catholic was something that I really struggled with. At a certain level we will never know, right? We will never know, what did it what did baptism at the hands of one's enslavers, often under forced conditions, mean to an African man or woman laboring in the household of an English planter? Those are, those are questions we will never really understand and the answers too, 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, kingdom of Congo had been a Catholic country since the 1490s. Angola was a Catholic country at this time, nation at this time. So there was a whole string of migration, forced 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. But there was also another steady stream of captives into English households from various Spanish, French, Portuguese islands in the Caribbean, where Africans with from wherever they part of Africa they had come from, had been forcibly baptized upon their arrival in these colonies, and then sold, either sold into English households, captured by English privateers, and then taken into English households, a variety of methods that brought them into English households. So really a challenge for me is to think about, do we one, should we even consider someone who has been forcibly baptized against their will, under terrible conditions, right of duress, as Catholics? And I tried to keep an open mind without prejudging the issue. I think it is fair to say that most Africans who had been forcibly baptized did not consider themselves Catholics. 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. I think that's absolutely fair to say. 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. We have evidence of Africans fleeing South Carolina, fleeing the North American south into Florida, which was a Spanish colony, and seeking out a Catholic community to rejoin, seeking out Catholic marriages for themselves and their and their spouses, seeking out baptism, seeking out the other sacraments of the faith. 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, under whatever regardless of the circumstances in which they were first introduced to that faith. And of course, I was really intrigued by what it meant to be an enslaved Catholic living in the household of an enslaver. And the English manors and plantations in Maryland were the best place to sort of explore that dynamic. 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 slave holders. So the English, the Jesuit community in Maryland owned hundreds of slaves themselves, and they became they were, they tutored their English followers, English white Catholic followers, and how to be a Catholic household with enslaved peoples living in it. And it was a source of tremendous contradiction. Right, the record of Catholic slave holding is as brutal as you would expect it to be, that there was no attempt to protect families, marital husbands and wives, when it when it came to selling their property, as they would have put it.  But there was an effort to incorporate enslaved peoples into this, into the sacraments of the household. I found that very intriguing. So baptism and marriage, interestingly enough, was in fact, a sacrament that enslaved Africans and indigenous people had some access to. On the other hand, the bonds of marriage were not respected. 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. So it's a very mixed record, and trying to parse out, you know how to how to make sense of that record was a challenge for me. Should I be 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 when life hit. And to this day, I remain sort of conflicted by this, and I think it's one that readers will have to make their own choices about. I tried to present the evidence on both sides, the evidence both for fellowship and the evidence for Christian hypocrisy and Christian exploitation. And I think it's going to come down to how you read that evidence.

Kelly Therese Pollock  31:07  
You've mentioned Jesuits a few times. So what are the Jesuits doing in the English colonies?

Dr. Susan Juster  31:13  
Such an interesting question. They are the, really, the sort of the true boogeymen of the Protestant Reformation. Jesuits, among all Catholics, were known to be particularly devious, particularly cunning, particularly seductive. 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. So they were aggressive. They were missionizing with a mission from the beginning, and they are the ones who sort of spread out across the globe to try to take this evangelizing, aggressive counter Reformation to all all peoples. So they truly are the ones who figure the largest in the rhetoric of anti Catholicism. 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. They were very interested in learning indigenous languages, for instance. 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. They were willing to adapt the sort of sacramental and devotional model of their program to native conditions and native understandings of ritual. So they were able, they were willing to adapt, to some degree, some native customs and traditions. And that ability to adapt, that not just ability, but willingness to adapt, meant that they were able to survive in circumstances in which you would not expect them to survive. They also had the cache of learning. 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, right, the most rigorous indoctrinaire Protestants of all. They were really, they really appreciated the fact that they could talk to a Jesuit as a fellow, learned gentleman. So they were struck by and in awe, I think, in some ways, of Jesuits' linguistic prowess and their general level of education, and as long as they were the isolated person passing through a colony, not the spearhead of right of the larger movement of people, they could be accommodated. So they're there. They are accommodated more than I would have thought they were. And they also were very adept, even in places where they were not accommodated, they were very adept at disguising themselves. 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 of public attention, but also that Jesuits in particular, as part of their their sort of instructions from their home society was to disguise themselves as farmers, as doctors, as lawyers, as any sort of gentlemanly occupation that might give them cover for their education, for their level of linguistic facility. 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 Plymouth Colony, sitting down and dining with his Jesuit visitors and acceding to their request to have fish on Friday. That, to me, is just stunning, as a historian of Protestantism.

Kelly Therese Pollock  34:54  
We're speaking largely, of course, about times when Catholicism was outlawed  in England, and thus the English territories. But there is this curious moment as different different monarchs die, new people get in charge, some people like Catholics, some people don't, and it's going back and forth. That's confusing enough for people in England to learn about this, maybe right away, as it's happening, but to have to wait, you know, weeks or months, or whatever, to hear what's happening, you have this part in the conclusion where you're talking about that, of like, what is this gonna mean for us? We don't know. Can we come out from underground? Could you talk some about that interplay, what that means during this time period in the colonies?

Dr. Susan Juster  35:38  
Right? The politics are so confusing and so in flux in this period of time. 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, you know, 20 years. It's really remarkable. But by the time Elizabeth comes to, comes to reign, and the Act of Uniformity is passed in 1559, we have a sense that things are kind of settled, that England will be a Protestant nation. They can argue about who counts as a Protestant. They can argue about whether it's okay for different varieties of Protestant to be allowed to worship, but but Catholics, by all means, are to be excluded from that. So that is our sort of general perception of the religious politics of England. But in fact, England 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 the edges of that Protestant Catholic interface will be tolerated throughout the 17th century. So after Elizabeth dies in 1603 and the Stuart kings come into power, the first being James I, he's James VI in Scotland, but he's James I in England, and the Stuarts have a much stronger connection to Catholicism. Every Stuart monarch from James I through Charles I and Charles II, reigns as a Protestant monarch, but all of them have Catholic wives, for instance. All of them have Catholic upbringings in their background. And then by the time James II comes to the throne in 1685, he is the first openly Catholic monarch. But he is really the culmination of what has been a gradual opening up of that of the society and politics to Catholic presence. And so this so that the 17th century sees this. It's a very unsettled time in England in which Protestants are nominally still in control. There are still every monarch, as they say, until James is Protestant, though there are suspicions about whether Charles II had had secretly converted to Catholicism, but they all have strong Catholic presences in their courts, and they a certain degree of tolerance for Catholic practice. 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, and to some degree, those aspirations are realized. There is a flourishing of Catholic sacramental practice. There is an allowance for the public, for the first time in a long time, the public celebration of the Mass in London during under Charles I and Charles II. These are in the homes of French and Spanish ambassadors. So that's the way they justify it like 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. So there is this more opening up both ritual life and material life. There's a flourishing of Catholic material culture in the 17th century that accompanies the ascension of each of these monarchs. So that's what's happening in England. And of course, as you said, that the news of all of that takes a very long time to hit the colonies. So that leaves colonial Catholics in much more in a state of limbo, frankly. They don't really know what's going on. They're hearing rumors that they may be having letters from home saying, under this new monarch, Charles I, is, take is come to the crown, we have hopes that English Catholics will be able to practice and worship freely again. They can't count on that. So colonial Catholics are in a state of uncertainty. But also colonial authorities are in a state of uncertainty. They are waiting for the official word from their imperial masters about whether they should incorporate some of these new changes or not. And so it's there is a great deal of uncertainty, and that allows for both Catholic practice to flourish on the margins once again, but it also gives their opponents ammunition to crack down on them. So that is particularly true in this period of 1685 to 1688. Those are the three years in which James II rules is on the throne before he is ousted in a mostly bloodless coup that establishes, once and for all, that there will be a Protestant monarch and the Catholics will not be allowed to hold the throne. But during those three years, the colonies are in a state of utter suspension. They don't know what's happening. They're hearing rumors. Catholics have come out into the open during those three years of James's rule. There are, there are open Masses being held on the island of Barbados, for instance, with wealthy Catholic planters hosting these Masses. They invite a priest to come over from Martinique, a French priest to celebrate the Mass in these homes. And then once the first word comes down, the definitive word comes down that James has been ousted, there is a scramble to shut down what has just been opened up again. 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 throughout the project of what a Mass in a colonial household might have looked like, and it's all because of the political turmoil of this day, of these years, 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, but it's also created the conditions under which that emergence is going to be stamped out pretty ruthlessly. So it was just a wonderful historical moment and generated great documents for the historian to read.

Kelly Therese Pollock  41:54  
This book is it's just a fascinating look 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?

Dr. Susan Juster  42:06  
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. This is not a story of how colonial Catholics persevered in the face of great obstacles to preserve a community that has become a very important community in the United States. That is part of the story, but it's not the whole story. 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, I would like readers to come to it with a sense of this is a very chaotic time where a lot is unknown. Institutions are still forming, identity is still forming, all of the uncertainties of a colonial environment, a frontier environment, in many ways, are there, and people's identities are in flux, and they are multiple. 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. To read this as a story of how community is formed and survives under these conditions of precarity, of uncertainty, of risk. And there are, there are heroic lessons to take from that. But that's not at the end of the day, I think the story that I want people to come away with.

Kelly Therese Pollock  43:40  
And how can they get a copy of the book?

Dr. Susan Juster  43:43  
So that's the more practical question. Like you can get it on Amazon, as far as I know. So it was published this spring. I think it had a May or June release date from the University of North Carolina Press. There's an imprint of the UNC press that is books that are edited and promoted by the Omohundro Institute of early American history and culture, which is one of the premier institutes supporting research in colonial America. So it is a book that comes out under the OI Omohundro Institute imprint as part of the University of North Carolina Press.

Kelly Therese Pollock  44:14  
Is there anything else that you want to make sure we talk about? 

Dr. Susan Juster  44:18  
I think it is that one thing I would say, which is to always read, and historians will know this, but to always read documents with a certain amount of suspicion, that especially when we're trying to understand the lives of people who are constitute a minority, in some sense, are living lives largely on the margins, who experience a degree of persecution and prosecution in both senses, in their lives and harassment, 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. So we can learn a tremendous amount from these individuals, about these individuals and these communities from those kinds of documents, but they have to be read with a great deal of suspicion and caution, but there's still, it'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 whose lives need to be told.

Kelly Therese Pollock  45:15  
Susan, thank you so much for speaking with me today. 

Dr. Susan Juster  45:18  
Thank you so much for having me.

Teddy  45:43  
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