Coming Out Catholic in Colonial Maryland
In 1633, 13 years after the Pilgrims disembarked from the Mayflower to establish Plymouth Colony, another band of would-be settlers from England boarded a ship named Ark and set sail from the Isle of Wight. Accompanied by the supply vessel Dove, Ark and its complement headed for Chesapeake Bay, on North America’s mid-Atlantic coast. The travelers intended to develop a colony called “Maryland” on territory carved from the existing Virginia colony.
English law had propelled some Pilgrims across the Atlantic seeking freedom to worship as they pleased. The same restrictions animated Maryland’s founders, who were Roman Catholics and whose goals included establishing a colony that separated state and church—for its era, a revolutionary thought. Nearly 150 years before the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protected religious freedom, Maryland colonial law, in a limited, imperfect, and impermanent way, codified the principle of freedom of worship.
The new colony’s emphasis on religious tolerance didn’t spring solely from idealism on the part of Cecil Calvert, who with his family established and essentially governed Maryland for most of the 1600s as a business enterprise. Cecil Calvert sank every penny he had, and then some, into Maryland. He and his kin saw tolerance as a practical way to keep the peace.
Robert Wintour, an early settler of the colony, embraced Calvert’s vision for a new society, which Wintour dubbed the “Maryland designe.” The attempt at creating and maintaining a distance between religion and politics lasted only briefly and the Calverts had to struggle to keep the colony free of sectarian turmoil, but in time the founders of the United States adopted the principle. In the shorter term a high-stakes tug of war pitted Catholic colonists supported by a royal grant to Cecil Calvert, Lord
