Newman Studies Journal

Michael Breidenbach has gifted us with a synthesis of years of research into early modern Anglo-American Catholicism. The result, Our Dear Bought Liberty, is an ambitious and sweeping ecclesio-political tour: from the cells underneath Parliament in anti-Catholic England in 1605, to the triumphs and sins of creative, brilliant, and bigoted characters in seventeenth century colonial America, to the familiar crescendos of the achievements, promises, and contradictions of the early United States in the eighteenth century. Thematically, the monograph is tightly focused around several threads: 1) the manner in which Anglo-American Catholics, especially the Calvert and Carroll families, negotiated civil allegiance to a Protestant crown and country with spiritual fidelity to a church headed by the pope in Rome; 2) the ecclesio-political position of "anti-papalism," a tradition with deep roots in conciliarism, powerful backing from French Gallicanism, and a long apologetic and practical pedigree in Britain, Ireland, and then America; and finally, 3) the many distinctive contributions such Catholics made to toleration in the colonies and religious liberty in the young Republic—a legal, ecclesiastical, and jurisprudential story of oaths and laws, culminating in the First Amendment.

Probably the widest audience will be found for Breidenbach's detailed and sustained analysis of the First Amendment (the subject of an important recent volume he co-edited)¹ and its origins. He revises, definitively, the picture of Catholic involvement in the forging of religious liberty in America, from ideals to rhetoric to actual laws. If the Calvert family were the sires of patriotic "anti-papalist" American Catholicism in their Maryland colony, the Anglo-Irish Carrolls were the mediators between that tradition and the world of the Founders. Breidenbach's research on [End Page 90] these points culminates with the well-defended claim (183) that if James Madison was "the father of the US Constitution," he was flanked by a Catholic "godfather," Daniel Carroll (1730–1796).

The broad scope and context of Breidenbach's story—the British North Atlantic, roughly from 1600 to 1800—can help American readers and students of American politics and culture to better understand some of the most famous events and important ideas of that era. The continuity between the oath that King James I inflicted upon Catholics in the wake of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot and the wording of later colonial and American oaths and laws (and the prejudice, benignity, or fears revealed therein) is much stronger than probably all but specialist historians are aware. The US Oath of Allegiance, to this day, requires total renunciation of "allegiance and fidelity" to any "foreign prince [or] potentate." The term "prelate" was, mercifully for Catholics, excised. Such an oath bears witness to, among other things, the centuries-old struggle between sovereign states and the alleged imperio in imperium (state within a state) that papal authority creates. This problem of so-called dual allegiance, Breidenbach points out in several places, is not simply a historical one. US Muslims still face such suspicions. While Catholic controversies have certainly morphed and shifted from the days of Al Smith to John F. Kennedy to Joe Biden, the interplay between papal or episcopal authority—an authority that is moral and, if not political per se, certainly ecclesiastical—and fidelity to the US Constitution, the cultural zeitgeist, or voting constituents, always bubbles beneath the surface of ecclesial and political life. It sometimes explodes onto the surface of public life, as we see in recent examples, such as Trump's sparring with Pope Francis or certain American bishops' criticisms of Biden.

Another important contribution of Breidenbach's book is in its lucid explication of the most burning issues at stake when the First Amendment was codified in the late eighteenth-century. The constitutional ideal of religious liberty was indeed radical in its conception of the rights of individuals. In contrast to our current culture wars, adoption agencies and cake baking were not primary issues...