At Peace with All Their Neighbors
Warner, William W.
IN BRIEF At Peace with All Their Neighbors: Catholics and Catholicism in the National Capital 1787-1860, by William W. Warner, Georgetown University Press, $29.95, 320pp. According to the old...
...It is where they are baptized, first receive the sacraments, are married, and from which they are buried...
...They are not as apt to know, however, that that era of toleration passed quickly...
...Not only were the baptismal and marriage registers of Holy Trinity virtually complete from 1795 onwards but there were diaries, correspondence, the archives of the Maryland Jesuits, Georgetown University, and the Archdiocese of Baltimore...
...Coping with these circumstances, Warner says, developed the attributes cited above that had a lasting effect on the development of the church in America...
...and form their images of church authority from the succession of parish pastors...
...Their experience in Maryland had formed their traditions-these included the advocacy of the separation of church and state, a sense of civic duty, and a determination "to live at peace with all their neighbors," in the phrase of Marylander John Carroll, America's first Catholic bishop...
...Historically in cities in the United States the bond between people and parish has been so strong that Catholic families have drawn their identities from it: They are "from Blessed Sacrament," "from Saint Gabriel's," or "from Holy Redeemer...
...Most Americans think of Maryland as a Catholic colony established by Lord Baltimore where acts of religious liberty were passed in 1639 and 1649...
...For the most part the founders of Holy Trinity were Maryland Catholics-fifth-and sixth-generation Americans, affluent and well-established in their communities...
...Warner has given us not only a richly detailed history of a parish (accompanied incidentally by the history of Georgetown University to which Holy Trinity was so closely tied) but a historical tool essential to understanding the place and temper of American Catholics in the story of the universal church...
...acquire habits of prayer and piety there...
...By 1763 Maryland's Assembly passed an act introducing a seventy-two-year period of anti-Catholic penal laws that forbade Catholics communal worship, religious education, eligibility for public office, and other human rights...
...ABIGAIL MCCARTHYAIL MCCARTHY...
...The Balti-mores' proprietary rule was overthrown after England's "Glorious Revolution" in 1689...
...He found a parish whose people were not only important in founding the capital city of Washington but set the dominant tone for Catholic-Protestant relations and Catholic-state relations in the maturing American nation so late a collection of colonies...
...William Warner began his book as a simple parish history-that of Holy Trinity parish, the oldest in the District of Columbia...
...In the abundance of records he discovered a subsidiary theme-a theme that went far beyond that of a local parish history...
...As a result, as Warner concludes, the citizens of Washington withstood the tide of bigotry against the Catholic church that washed across the nation in the two decades before the Civil War...
...Their Catholicism is local...
...According to the old Catholic Dictionary edited by Donald Attwater, a parish is a defined territorial district with a church and congregation under the charge of a priest "who has the cure of souls therein...
...They are formed in doctrine and church lore there...
...The roots of the Maryland tradition were too deep and strong to tolerate a political movement that attempted to undermine the tradition's basic precepts...
...For most American Catholics, the parish is church...
...As he began his research he discovered a wealth of records...
Vol. 122 • May 1995 • No. 10
