Michael Breidenbach’s Our Dear-Bought Liberty charts the transformation of Anglophone Catholics in America from English ‘Subjects’ to ‘Revolutionaries’, and finally into American ‘Citizens’. Central to this development was Catholics’ ability to distance themselves from papal pretensions to temporal authority. In so doing, Breidenbach argues that Catholics ‘offered a distinctive contribution’ (p. 1) to the emergence of religious toleration in Early America and its eventual enshrinement in the American political order.
Breidenbach correctly suggests that scholarship on early American religion as a whole, and the popular historical imagination, have tended to ignore Catholics’ and Catholicism’s role in these developments in favour of a focus on varieties of Reformed Protestantism. To rectify this, Breidenbach adopts a broad chronological scope, spanning from the 1620s to the early nineteenth century. It is an approach that offers considerable advantages, allowing the author to draw out parallels, under-appreciated contexts, and revealing discontinuities over the course of eight chapters, arranged into three sections. In section one, he outlines the antipapalist vision of the Calverts, the Lords Baltimore, who were the Catholic proprietors of the colonies of Avalon (in Newfoundland) and Maryland. This allows Breidenbach, in section two, to explore how the Carroll family, who migrated to Maryland from Ireland in the late-seventeenth century, adopted similarly antipapalist-inflected positions as a ‘deliberate continuation’ of the Calverts’ position and opened ‘an intellectual and political space in America for Catholics to support a juridical separation of church and state’ (p. 93). He highlights how John and Charles Carroll ‘of Carrollton’ (referred to as such, to distinguish him from his father and grandfather of the same name) familiarised themselves with Gallican and Jansenist ideas at the College of St. Omer in northern France in the eighteenth century. In sections two and three, Breidenbach charts how the Carrolls would go on to play significant roles in the American Revolution, the formulation of the United States Constitution, and the creation of a Catholic hierarchy in the new republic.
The benefits of stitching together these developments over the course of more than a century-and-a-half is chiefly evident in the latter portions of the book, when Breidenbach can refer back to matters discussed earlier. Consequently, the reader is left with a deepened appreciation for the significance of the rhetorical and ideological reversals that occurred regarding perceptions of Catholic loyalty during the late eighteenth century. By emphasising the significance of the Calverts’ role in Catholic attempts to secure liberty of conscience through revisions to the Oath of Allegiance in section one, in subsequent sections Breidenbach is able to highlight how early American Protestant insistence on loyalty to the king evaporated during the American Revolution and the consequences this had for Catholics. This shift opened up new opportunities for Catholics to demonstrate civil loyalty and inform policies, like the Constitution’s proscription of religious tests for officeholders. Breidenbach also adroitly situates the much-debated establishment clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution—prohibiting the establishment of a national church—in the context of the young Congress’s policy decisions regarding Catholics and Catholicism prior to the amendment’s ratification.
Breidenbach distinguishes his approach from other scholars of toleration in America by making medieval Catholic traditions of ‘conciliarism’ and ‘antipapalism’ central to his argument. He explains in an endnote that he is using these terms loosely as heuristic devices. While the significance of varieties of Catholic antipapalist thought comes through clearly, his use of ‘conciliarist’/‘conciliarism’ is a bit messier. Breidenbach has inherited some of this conceptual fuzziness from the voluminous literature on conciliarism itself, which, as Francis Oakley noted in 2003, has undergone its own crisis of definition over the course of the twentieth century.Footnote 1 When using the term precisely to refer to specifically conciliarist ideas that informed the American history of religious liberty, Breidenbach offers revealing analyses. This is especially true of his reconstruction of the influence decrees from the Council of Constance (1414–1418) had on John Skinner, an eighteenth-century Scottish, nonjuring Episcopalian bishop. Skinner, who called for a clear separation of the duties of spiritual and temporal authorities, explicitly related these conciliar principles to America when he helped to consecrate the first American Episcopal bishop, Samuel Seabury, in 1784.
Yet when Breidenbach uses ‘conciliarist’/‘conciliarism’ to stand in generally for ‘antipapalist’/‘antipapalism’, the result can be awkward. The two categories are not always easily interchangeable. His description of the Irish Franciscan, Peter Walsh, as straightforwardly ‘conciliarist’ (pp. 98, 161) illustrates the limits of the usefulness of this heuristic. Walsh certainly advocated an antipapalist ecclesiology, expressing an understanding of the spiritual authority of the universal church as residing in the congregatio fidelium. But he could also be quite sceptical about the role of ecumenical councils, insisting that they were only a reliable ‘rule of faith’ insofar as they proceeded upon Tradition and their decrees were received by the world’s particular churches.Footnote 2 Although Walsh clearly shared some common ground with conciliarist thinkers, it is not clear that ‘conciliarism’ is the best way to characterise his views.
This is one area where Breidenbach’s argument might have benefited from a greater engagement with scholarship on English Catholicism. An examination of Breidenbach’s endnotes does not reveal this work to be conversant with the most recent relevant scholarship in this field, for example, Helen Kilburn’s 2019 article in this journal about the mid-1640s trial of the English Jesuit missionary to Maryland, Thomas Copley. And while it might be unfair to expect the author to have read every unpublished thesis or dissertation relevant to English Catholic political thought and activism, the omission of any reference to Anthony Brown’s 2004 Cambridge thesis on ‘Anglo-Irish Gallicanism’ is unfortunate. It is cited (not always approvingly) in a number of works that Breidenbach references, and has also been readily available online for several years. It covers some important common ground with Breidenbach’s work (not least Peter Walsh’s ecclesiology). Moreover, its discussion of ‘Christian dualism’ might also have offered some alternative, and perhaps less problematic, heuristics for discussing the separation of temporal and spiritual authority that are not brought to the fore in Breidenbach’s work.
More generally, though, the historiographical landscape regarding this subject is more complex than it is represented in the main text of this volume, and some specialists might find elements of Breidenbach’s argument to be re-treading familiar ground, rather than forging new understandings. Specialists of early Maryland, for example, have long made versions of the argument Breidenbach makes here. There is also an apparent dissonance between Breidenbach’s claims of novelty in the main text of his book and the way he cites the works on English Catholicism that he does reference in his endnotes. For example, on multiple occasions in the main text, Breidenbach seems to represent himself as having ‘discovered archival documents’ about the Calverts’ attempts to revise the oath (pp. 9, 49–50, and 53–4, quotation at p. 9). On the face of it, such assertions ignore the fact that Michael Questier cited the source in question—a revised Latin version of the oath—in a 2005 publication.Footnote 3 Yet, in his endnotes, Breidenbach acknowledges Questier’s work and directly challenges his interpretation of the Latin oath (see for example, note 86 on p. 262). It is unclear in what way, then, Breidenbach considers himself to have ‘discovered’ this evidence.
While Breidenbach is primarily telling an American story, he also actively seeks to situate this narrative within an Atlantic context. Therefore, the manner in which he makes this argument in relation to English Catholic studies has merited some extended examination here. Nevertheless, it is not my intention in so doing to obscure the fact that this volume includes much of value. Breidenbach synthesizes a great deal of material. The scope of this ambitious work casts an important, if still underappreciated, argument about Catholic contributions to the history of liberty of conscience in an interesting new light.
