Catholicism in America

The first Christian worship in what is now the United States was Catholic. Spanish priests said Mass at St. Augustine in 1565, and Franciscan missions stretched across the Southwest and California for two centuries. In the English colonies Catholics were a small and distrusted minority. Maryland was founded by the Catholic Calvert family in 1634 as a refuge, but Protestants soon took control there too, and by the Revolution Catholics made up perhaps one percent of the population.

The Revolution brought them in from the cold. Catholic France was an ally, Charles Carroll of Maryland signed the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution barred religious tests for office. In 1789 John Carroll became the first American bishop, at Baltimore. Then came the great migrations. Irish fleeing the famine and Germans fleeing hard times and revolution arrived by the millions, and by 1850 Catholics formed the largest single denomination in the country.

Their arrival set off a Protestant backlash. A mob burned an Ursuline convent outside Boston in 1834, riots over which Bible would be read in public schools left Philadelphia churches in ruins in 1844, and the Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s rode anti-Catholic fear to power in several states. Catholics responded by building a parallel world of parishes, hospitals, colleges, charities, and the largest private school system in the country, mandated by the bishops in 1884.

Suspicion lingered into the twentieth century. Al Smith's Catholicism hurt him badly in 1928, and John F. Kennedy had to assure Protestant ministers in Houston in 1960 that he would not take orders from Rome. His election marked the end of the old barrier. Catholics now make up about a fifth of Americans, a growing share of them Hispanic. Since 2002 the church has been shaken by revelations that bishops concealed sexual abuse by priests, and its members are divided politically much as the country is.