Catholicism and the American Founding – Catholic World Report

When the first pilgrims—a small and radical separating sect of English congregationalists—landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, they declared themselves a Christian commonwealth. In just one paragraph known now as the Mayflower Compact (but, originally, as the “Plymouth Combination”), these hyper-Calvinist settlers asserted that they could rule themselves, absent any immediate temporal or spiritual bureaucracy. Whatever their socio-economic makeup, the pilgrims were an astounding people. They barely survived the first year in New England, only to find themselves quickly swallowed up by roughly 30,000-40,000 mainstream Puritans, the non-separating and less radical kind. Still, they matter. Greatly. It’s very difficult to imagine any people taking such a step with such confidence and such fortitude, time and the world over. Granted, most peoples are imperial—that is, they always want to move and lay claim—but they usually do so in the land adjacent to them, not in a world 3,500 miles and an ocean away from their homeland. Yet these pilgrims were the first of those we readily recognize as what would become the “American”. It is even more difficult to imagine an equally-sized group of Catholic families doing the same thing in 1620, anywhere in the world. A band of priests, brothers, and sisters, certainly. But, lay families? Lay Catholics absent any king or bishop? In, say, 1215 or 1275, sure. But probably not in 1620. That spirit seemed to have passed on to the Protestants of that day.

Catholicism and the American Founding – Catholic World Report