The American Catholic Church

Assessing The Past, Discerning The Future

by Anthony T. Padovano, CORPUS Ambassador

Delivered at 2003 Call To Action Conference in Milwaukee, WI

In 1775, there were armed clashes between American and English forces in Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. The next year, 1776, as Americans know well, the insurrection became a rebellion and a revolution. One of the great documents of human history, the Declaration of Independence, called for a new nation. The Declaration was a revolution in its own right. It affirmed God but not the Churches, stressed the Enlightenment but not Tradition, and it underscored inclusivity as the operating principle of the new nation ("all are created equal"). Never before or since was a nation formed with so much boldness and imagination.

In that fateful year, 1776, the Continental Congress sent a small delegation to Canada to elicit Canada's support in the revolution. For a number of days, Benjamin Franklin and two prominent Catholics traveled north together.  One of these Catholics was a layman, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the richest person in the new nation. He had signed the Declaration of Independence, willing to face execution for treason if the revolution failed. He had also put his vast fortune at the service of the new nation. He had nothing to gain from this revolution. He supported it as an act of conscience. The founders of the new nation were impressed mightily by this Catholic commitment to what was then a very risky enterprise.  A second Catholic in the coach with Franklin was Charles Carrollton's cousin, John Carroll, a priest, forty one years of age. He was destined, as we shall see, to bring the principles of the American Revolution into the structures of the American Catholic Church.  Benjamin Franklin, a believer in God but not in denominationalism, a humanist who distrusted organized religion, a very shrewd judge of human character, grew to respect John Carroll in their time together.  We should focus on this journey north, inclusive, tolerant, brave. Catholics were not deemed dangerous by the founders of the nation. They were sent on this congressional mission of the highest urgency in the hope that Franklin' s diplomatic skills and the Catholic sensitivities of the Carrolls might bring strongly Catholic Canada in on the American side.

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