By IHE Graduate Scholar Michael Bors
“When an adventurer carries his gods with him into a remote and savage country, the colony he founds will, from the beginning, have graces, traditions, riches of the mind and spirit.” So wrote Willa Cather in Shadows on the Rock, her tale of early French-Catholic settlers in Québec. Though we Americans often consider the Protestant influence on our country’s founding, there was also a small but vital settlement by English-speaking Catholics in the new world.
In summer 2024, I had the privilege of attending the IHE England Pilgrimage. During the pilgrimage, I was struck by the many connections between the English Catholics and the Catholic settlers in North America who suffered greatly to pass on the faith.
It was George Calvert, First Baron Baltimore, who sought to establish a colony where Catholics and all Christians could freely practice their faith. His proprietary colony, Terra Mariae — “Mary’s Land” — was directly named for Queen Henrietta Maria (the French Catholic wife of King Charles I), but it also carried an obvious spiritual reference to the Blessed Mother. This experiment in religious tolerance, however, was soon afflicted by the violence of the English Civil War. Cromwell’s commissioner to Maryland opposed Calvert’s government, including at the Battle of the Severn in 1655. Restrictions on Catholic civil rights in Maryland mirrored Parliament’s restrictions on British Catholics and were only repealed after American Independence. When Elizabethan penal laws outlawed priests in England, Humphry Parkington equipped his home, Harvington Hall, with several “priest hides,” probably built by the Jesuit lay brother and woodworker, Saint Nicholas Owen. Across the sea, the public celebration of the Mass was prohibited in Maryland for much of the 18th century, though its celebration was permitted in private.
Catholic schooling was also outlawed in both lands. In Maryland, the Jesuit grade school probably attended by John Carroll (future first Bishop of Baltimore) and Charles Carroll (the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence) had to close its doors several times as the colonial political climate grew hostile. Later these cousins were sent to the Jesuit College of St. Omer’s in Northern France, where they studied with the sons of English recusant families similarly forced to seek a Catholic education abroad.
One finds not only the same patterns in England and Maryland, but sometimes even the same families. Etched into one of the Tower of London’s prison walls are Latin words meaning, “The more affliction for Christ in this world, the more glory with Christ in the future one.” Saint Philip Howard, Thirteenth Earl of Arundel, spent ten years imprisoned, ultimately dying there. When Queen Elizabeth offered him freedom in exchange for attending a Protestant service, he replied, “Tell Her Majesty if my religion be the cause for which I suffer, sorry I am that I have but one life to lose.” The name “Arundell,” carved beneath the text, links Philip with his distant cousin, Lady Anne Arundel. Anne married Cecil Calvert, Second Baron Baltimore, who sent the first settlers to Maryland in 1634. She carried a different kind of cross, bearing nine children, of whom only five lived to adulthood. She is commemorated in the name of Anne Arundel County, Maryland.
One of the goals of a pilgrimage is to leave the pilgrim with a sense of the sacred to bring back home. I am deeply thankful that the IHE England Pilgrimage did that for me. As we remember the suffering of the English Martyrs and the early Catholic settlers of the United States, may we imitate their courage and their faith, so that we too may bestow “graces, traditions, riches of the mind and spirit” on our land.
