Despite recent claims by GB News correspondent Dougie Beattie, Catholics have had an established place in the United States since long before the turn of the 19th century.
Speaking on GB News, Beattie claimed that the Irishmen present in the United States in the 1700s were from Ulster, and that President Donald Trump “doesn’t know his history”.
There were “never Catholics in America until 1801”, Beattie stated, and suggested that President Trump’s statement in support of a united Ireland was an attempt to court the Irish-American vote.
While Catholics were certainly a minority group in the United States prior to the mid-19th century, Beattie’s claim that there were “never Catholics” is inaccurate. Catholics numbered about 25,000 in 1776, roughly one per cent of the American population.
The first Catholics to reach what is now the USA arrived in what is now the state of Florida in the 16th century, while Catholic missionaries subsequently established missions further north. In 1570, eight Spanish Jesuits arrived in the area of present-day Williamsburg, Virginia, establishing the Ajacán Mission. The missionaries were killed the following year, with one member of the group surviving.
The 1600s were a tad kinder to the nascent Catholic population in the United States, but Catholics were still hindered by anti-Catholic laws and other discrimination. Maryland was founded in 1634, and it was initially intended to be a Catholic colony.
In 1604, in what is now Maine, Pierre du Guast, Sieur de Monts, a Huguenot, settled a mixed group of about 80 Catholics and Protestants on Ste Croix Island near what is now the city of Calais. A priest was among them, but he died that winter along with about half the group.
Other Catholic settlements in present-day Maine were established in 1613, 1633 and 1646, and Jesuit missionaries continued to serve in Maine in the 17th century.
In 1647, Giles Brent, former Governor of Maryland, together with his sister, established Virginia’s first Catholic settlement. The Diocese of Arlington dates the establishment of Virginia’s first Catholic settlement to 1647 and says it embraced religious tolerance.
Catholics also played a role in the American Revolution. One of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll, was a Catholic. John Barry, the first commissioned American naval officer, was a Catholic from Co Wexford, Ireland. Col John Fitzgerald, an Irish immigrant, was then-General George Washington’s aide-de-camp, and the two were “dear friends”. Washington, despite not being Catholic, donated money to help Fitzgerald establish St Mary’s Parish, the first Catholic parish in Virginia, in 1795.
The Diocese of Baltimore, the first Catholic diocese in the United States, was established in 1789, the same year Georgetown University, the first Jesuit university in the United States, was founded in nearby Washington, DC. The Diocese of Baltimore was established on November 6, 1789, and was elevated to an archdiocese in 1808.
In 1808, the dioceses of Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Bardstown, Kentucky, were created as suffragan sees of Baltimore.
Around this time, immigration, American expansion and a host of other factors saw the Catholic population grow considerably.
But it is simply inaccurate to say there were “never any” Catholics in the United States before 1801.
