Mathew Carey and the Public Emergence of Catholicism in the Early Republic
- Format:
- Dissertation
- Year:
- 2006
- University:
- University of Southern California
- University URL:
- Thesis type:
- Doctoral Dissertation
- Place published:
- Los Angeles
- Language:
- Abstract:
This dissertation focuses on the emergence of a public Catholic culture in the first years of the early American republic and examines aspects of Catholic-Protestant relations during the last three decades of the eighteenth century. Revising existing interpretations, it argues that both clerical and lay Catholics, chief among them the printer Mathew Carey, carefully negotiated the first Catholic presence in the public sphere through the medium of print. This early Catholic culture appropriated "enlightened" rhetoric and modes of expression in order to critique the anti-Catholic legacy of the Colonial period that viewed Catholicism as a remnant of the "Dark Ages" and incompatible with republicanism. I argue that this pervasive historical view of Catholicism as anti-progressive is key to understanding the persistence of anti-Catholicism in the history-conscious early republic. Catholics of this era strove to define the public face of the Church in America as sympathetic to the dominant values of the founding generation, and to dispute Whig historical views of Catholicism's role in history, especially the history of England and then Britain. In this era, I argue, anti-Catholicism can be viewed as primarily ideological in nature.; Mathew Carey's brand of republican Catholicism brought from Ireland in the 1780s provided an existing model for this experiment, and like-minded American-born Catholics such as first bishop John Carroll also attempted to carefully control perceptions of the new church as "foreign." This was achieved through printed statements addressed to American Catholics, to President Washington, in responses to renegade or outspoken Catholic clergy, through Catholic devotional and instructional publications, the printing and marketing of the first Douai Bible in America, critiques of Whig history, and in Carey's participation in an extended newspaper controversy sparked by a derogatory reference to Catholic doctrine made by a politician.; By the time of Carey's death in 1839, this experiment in enlightened, republican Catholicism ended, as the Church, facing renewed anti-Catholicism that arose in reaction to massive ethnic Catholic immigration, ghettoized itself into an enclosed sub-culture increasingly viewed as dominated by "foreign" clerical leadership.
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