The key question of my dissertation is why American Catholics were so supportive of the US political system after the Revolutionary War. Other scholars have demonstrated Catholics’ nearly uniform support of the Revolutionary War and subsequent US government. The usual explanation given is that they finally received religious liberty. My dissertation agrees with this explanation, but expands it by identifying a democratic spirit in American Catholic ecclesiology. My central claim is that Catholics’ experience of democratic practices within their faith community predisposed them to embrace the new political democracy. This democracy-inflected Catholicism went against both how the Protestant mainstream viewed Catholics and how Catholics in other countries viewed democracy. Thus, American Catholics found themselves navigating an identity contested on all sides, and yet remained ardently American and committedly Catholic.
One of the most significant aspects of my dissertation emerges from my archival research. Scholars of American Catholicism have been generally aware of a document known as “the White Marsh Constitutions,” which has been assumed to be the structure of self-governance drafted by American Catholic clergy in the late colonial or early federal period. However, the survival of this document has been in doubt among some scholars, and therefore it has received almost no scholarly attention. In the archives, I found not only the original draft of the White Marsh Constitutions, but also the series of debates and revisions through which it evolved in the federal period. My key finding in the study of these documents is that, given the opportunity to organize the structure of the Catholic Church in the US without external influence, the clergy opted not to recreate the more familiar Catholic polity of strict, quasi-monarchical hierarchy. Instead they crafted a system of checks and balances, channeling the representative democracy of their young nation.