page_title: Anti-Catholicism
section_title: Colonial era
hierarchical_section_title: Anti-Catholicism / In primarily Protestant countries / United States / Colonial era
caption_attribution_description: English: HANDS OFF, Rev. Branford Clarke illustration in Heroes of the Fiery Cross
context_page_description: Anti-Catholicism is hostility towards Catholics or opposition to the Catholic Church, its clergy, or its adherents. At various points after the Reformation, some majority Protestant states, including England, Prussia, and Scotland made anti-Catholicism and opposition to the Pope and Catholic rituals major political themes, and the anti-Catholic sentiment which resulted from it frequently lead to religious discrimination against Catholic individuals. Historian John Wolffe identifies four types of anti-Catholicism: constitutional-national, theological, popular and socio-cultural.
  Historically, Catholics who lived in Protestant countries were frequently suspected of conspiring against the state in furtherance of papal interests. Support for the alien pope led to allegations that they lacked loyalty to the state. In majority Protestant countries with large scale immigration, such as the United States and Australia, suspicion of Catholic immigrants or discrimination against them often overlapped or was conflated with nativism, xenophobia, and ethnocentric or racist sentiments.
context_section_description: American anti-Catholicism has its origins in the Protestant Reformation which generated anti-Catholic propaganda for various political and dynastic reasons. Because the Protestant Reformation justified itself as an effort to correct what it perceived were the errors and the excesses of the Catholic Church, it formed strong positions against the Catholic bishops and the Papacy in particular. These positions were brought to New England by English colonists who were predominantly Puritans. They opposed not only the Catholic Church but also the Church of England which, due to its perpetuation of some Catholic doctrines and practices, was deemed insufficiently "reformed". Furthermore, English and Scottish identity to a large extent was based on opposition to Catholicism. "To be English was to be anti-Catholic," writes Robert Curran.
  Because many of the British colonists, such as the Puritans and Congregationalists, were fleeing religious persecution by the Church of England, much of early American religious culture exhibited the more extreme anti-Catholic bias of these Protestant denominations. Monsignor John Tracy Ellis wrote that a "universal anti-Catholic bias was brought to Jamestown in 1607 and vigorously cultivated in all the thirteen colonies from Massachusetts to Georgia". Colonial charters and laws often contained specific proscriptions against Catholics. For example, the second Massachusetts charter of October 7, 1691, decreed "that forever hereafter there shall be liberty of conscience allowed in the worship of God to all Christians, except Papists, inhabiting, or which shall inhabit or be resident within, such Province or Territory". Historians have identified only one Catholic living in colonial Boston--Ann Glover. She was hanged as a witch in 1688, shortly before the much more famous witchcraft trials in nearby Salem.
  Monsignor Ellis noted that a common hatred of the Catholic Church could unite Anglican clerics and Puritan ministers despite their differences and conflicts. One of the Intolerable Acts passed by the British Parliament that helped fuel the American Revolution was the Quebec Act of 1774, which granted freedom of worship to Roman Catholics in Canada.
caption: Rev. Branford Clarke illustration in the Ku Klux Klan, Heroes of the Fiery Cross 1928 by Bishop Alma White Published by the Pillar of Fire Church in Zarephath, NJ
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