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such issues as narcotics, prostitution, pornography, cohabitation, same-sex
“marriage,” and contraception. On the latter, he underscores the prophetic
and profound witness of Humanae Vitae and its life- and love-affirming
teaching about the true meaning of sexuality. At the heart of the contemporary tendency to disregard temperance, of course, is the sexual revolution.
His brief refutation of the arguments of same-sex “marriage” promoters
and how they are really bent more broadly on the outright destruction of
marriage as an institution is particularly worth noting. Not surprisingly,
he emphasizes how the family is the crucial foundation for the good society and how the “annexed virtue” of chastity is needed for self-mastery
that, in turn, is required for the true freedom he talked about earlier in the
book. With his sociologist’s sensibility, he makes reference to the recent
empirical research that is simply confirming the Church’s perennial teaching about sex, marriage, and family. He says that the Church’s “wisdom
in this area is unparalleled.” Who could deny that? What Donohue says
in this final chapter is that, as the Church has known all along, so-called
“personal” morality profoundly affects the community—it can advance or
retard the forging of the good society. The Church has stood for what the
Western world has known since Socrates: The condition of the soul affects
the condition of the commonwealth.
The bottom-line argument of Donohue’s valuable and very interesting book is (1) Social revival requires the practice of the cardinal virtues
by individuals and society, and their on-going neglect can lead to social
catastrophe, and (2) The Church’s consistent, resolute teaching that a life
in accordance with them is essential and her institutional integrity and
strength and worldwide presence—from a sociological as well as spiritual standpoint—make her perhaps the crucial force in rectifying our
wayward culture.
Stephen M. Krason
Franciscan University of Steubenville
Maura Jane Farrelly, Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
305 pages.
Maura Jane Farrelly’s Papist Patriots, an interesting but flawed book,
explains why Maryland Catholics supported the American Revolution in
such great numbers. Farrelly contends that persecuted English Catholics
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who persisted in their religion despite many obstacles developed “a new
Catholic identity that was comfortable with the individualistically oriented language of the independence movement” (15). English Catholicism,
highly self-conscious and individualistic, gelled with aspects of Enlightenment liberalism. Suffering Maryland Catholics, who had been shut out
of all power in the colony since 1692, assumed “the mantle of not English
identity, but ‘Marylandian’ identity” in seeking to recapture the early religious toleration of the colony’s history (17). They saw in the American
Revolution a moment to join with revolutionaries and seize freedom for
themselves.
For Farrelly, the Reformation in England shaped the Catholicism
brought to North America (20–47). Public expressions of Catholicism
in England were banned. Thus, Catholic priests operated in secrecy. The
gentry led English Catholicism because they possessed the means to hide
and support priests, leading to their ability to select the clergy that they
wanted. Farrelly pictures pre-Reformation Catholicism as a religion led
by elites with little knowledgeable popular participation. When the Reformation occurred, most English priests accepted Protestantism, leaving
Catholics a scorned minority community. Sold out by most of their clergy,
lay Catholics persisted in their faith only by choosing to follow their religion. As sovereign consumers, they exercised control over their religion.
The center of political identity for Maryland Catholics lay in the proprietary charter George Calvert obtained from King Charles I in 1633.
Calvert, who had already led a failed colony in Canada, wanted a place for
English Catholics to live in relative peace (22), a profitable colonial economy, and absolute political control over his colonists. Calvert gained what
he desired. The king granted him “the special privileges that the bishops of
Durham had” (65). Calvert, who had lived for a time in the unstable border
town of Durham, knew that the bishop of Durham had almost complete
control over the justice system of the area and could “declare war” and
raise armies on his own initiative (64). Calvert recognized that in order to
make Maryland profitable he needed a large number of settlers. Thus he
recruited many Protestants, who became the majority of the colony from
the beginning (71). But, Farrelly notes, “To keep Maryland’s Protestants
in line, he relied on good old-fashioned nepotism, constructing a government in his colony that was made up primarily of Catholics and sympathetic Protestants who either had Catholic mothers, or else had married
into prominent Catholic families and were willing to work hard, therefore,
to protect the political status of their relations” (67). Calvert’s plan was
not religious freedom. He envisioned a colony of religious peace united
behind his authoritarian rule.
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Several groups threatened Calvert’s vision of harmony. The first offenders were the Jesuits (76). Unable to secure secular priests to minister
to the Catholic colonists, Calvert turned to the Jesuits, whose reputation in
England was suspect due to their supposed participation in the Gunpowder
Plot of 1605. Representing the vigor of the Counter-Reformation, the Jesuits demanded that the state leave them alone. Three Jesuits initially came
to Maryland and spent most of their time evangelizing Indians. Calvert’s
son, Cecilius, the proprietor of the colony after his father died, had granted
the Jesuits a plantation and servants to support them. Calvert required all
large landholders to participate in the assembly. The Jesuits refused, leading Calvert on the one hand to allow them to vacate their political duties
but on the other hand to press for a law requiring clergy to be “pastors,” effectively ending their Indian mission (83–86). The Jesuits protested to no
avail. Outspoken lay Catholics also suffered censure. One Catholic servant
was convicted of “disturbing the peace” for engaging in polemics with his
fellow Protestant servants (81). Finally, militant Calvinists caused the most
serious problems, leading a bloody rebellion in the 1640s and protesting
the 1645 Act of Toleration because it allowed Catholics to worship publically. In the 1650s, Puritans took over the colony and quickly passed laws
ending toleration for Catholics and challenging the Durham clause of the
charter (104). Ironically, Oliver Cromwell restored Maryland to Cecilius
Calvert. Calvert responded by demanding the personal loyalty, expressed
through oaths, of all colonists. Those who refused to comply—such as the
Quakers—were kicked out (111–12). When Cecilius died in 1675, Catholics comprised 14 percent of Maryland’s white population (116–18).
Farrelly laments that while the Catholic Calverts were progressive in
their approach to religion, they failed to appreciate the “new ‘contractarian’ philosophy of government that was gaining adherents in England
in the seventeenth century” (96). Her comments are anachronistic. Maryland’s Catholic proprietors supported religious toleration managed by the
apparatus of the state. The government decided what people could say
and do. While churches did not receive public support (127), people were
not able to practice religion according to their own consciences. Catholiccontrolled Maryland was neither a “confessional state” nor a libertarian religious community. Where the government manages religious expression,
an attack on the government’s brand of religion is taken as an attack on
the government itself. Maryland’s proprietors certainly acted accordingly,
enforcing their religious vision with fines, banishment, and other punishments. By 1692 the Calvert proprietor became Anglican to save his control
of the colony. The Anglican Calverts ruled in ways similar to their Catholic ancestors, using the power of the government to enforce their religious
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settlement. This time Catholics lost as toleration ended. Coming from this
perspective, the Catholic Calverts were not further behind the times than
their Protestant countrymen. Government control of religion was the consensus. Maryland Protestants and Maryland Catholics expected it.
In the eighteenth century, Catholics in Maryland faced serious instability. In the early decades they thrived under relative social peace (136–37,
208). But, as the colonial wars intensified in the 1740s, hatred of Catholic
France and Spain became the patriotic duty of all Britons. Catholics in
Maryland faced greater persecution (210–12). Many Maryland Protestants
requested that Parliament’s recusancy laws, much stricter than the colony’s
anti-Catholic laws, be applied to Maryland. In addition, Maryland Protestants wanted to place a double-tax on all Catholics (214–15). Maryland
Catholics responded by appealing to their charter rights. Marylanders, they
argued, were subject to their assembly, not to the laws of Parliament. Maryland’s charter protected the rights of Englishmen. Marylanders should not
accept Parliamentary statutes that threatened these rights. Maryland Catholics thus defended themselves on the basis of the rights of Englishmen,
not natural rights, and presented the colonial charter as a bulwark against
Parliamentary usurpations. Their arguments fell on deaf ears, until 1773.
In the last chapter of the book, Farrelly argues that while anti-Catholicism remained a powerful rhetorical tool in Maryland, patriot Marylanders trusted the Catholics in their midst and joined with them to fight the
Revolution. Here her argument suffers from lack of compelling evidence.
For Farrelly, a 1773 newspaper exchange between Daniel Dulany and the
prominent Catholic Charles Carroll of Carrollton concerning a fee schedule for public officials issued on the governor’s authority signaled the
turning point. Carroll responded to Dulany in his “First Citizen” essays.
He noted that constitutional corruption had occurred since the Glorious
Revolution, and the King’s ministers, including the governor, had begun
to threaten the charter rights of Maryland, which, though connected to
England, was separate from Parliament’s jurisdiction. Carroll made the
argument in a secular context, but his view of the English constitution and
Maryland’s charter was the same one Catholics articulated throughout the
eighteenth century to protest colonial attempts to suppress Catholicism
(231). Farrelly insists that Carroll’s arguments had an impact that compounded with the passage of the Quebec Act in 1774.
In 1774 King George III issued the Quebec Act, which “gave legal sanction to the practice of Catholicism in Canada by removing all references to
Protestantism in the oaths that officeholders in the colony were required to
swear,” to assist his rule of Canada (237). The colonies exploded in antiCatholicism, warning that the King was a tyrant who was imposing an evil
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religion on America. Rumors abounded that the King would appoint a Catholic bishop in Canada who would spread religious tyranny. Farrelly notes
that “the Quebec Act became the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s
back, the final sign that the king had become irredeemably corrupt” (238).
She then notes that Maryland patriots voted and appointed a few Catholics
to represent them in the Maryland Convention to protest the King’s actions.
She concludes that Protestants “understood that ‘popery’ was not what their
Catholic neighbors were practicing when they said the rosary or received
the Eucharist from the hands of a priest” (241). In other words, Maryland
patriots hated Catholicism, but not the Catholics in their midst (see 191).
Maryland Catholics joined the patriot side, it seems, because their
Protestant Whig neighbors accepted their view of the English constitution
and Maryland’s charter. Also, Farrelly suggests, Maryland Catholics preferred religious freedom. She mentions a couple of Marylanders who protested the Vatican’s suppression of the Jesuits in 1773 at the request of several European monarchs (248). But Farrelly never satisfactorily explains
why Maryland Catholics risked independence, knowing that if Maryland
succeeded, they would be under the rule of their Protestant neighbors who
just years before wanted to subject them to harsher persecution. Indeed,
the revolutionary constitutions of five states banned Catholics from political participation (253). Why did this not happen in Maryland? Were some
Maryland Protestants, similar to the Baptists in late colonial Virginia, willing to argue for religious freedom for all, including Catholics? Did Maryland Catholics ally with these groups? Farrelly never tells us, leaving the
evidence for the key part of her book a mystery.
Although Farrelly does not come to these conclusions, her evidence
suggests that Maryland Catholics supported the Revolution not because
they were Enlightenment liberals, but because they saw themselves as
Englishmen whose historic rights were threatened by crown and Parliament. Catholics sought liberty without liberalism. They appealed to older
traditions of liberty, including their colony’s own history of religious toleration. By the end of Farrelly’s book, the reader can appreciate that despite persecution, Maryland’s Catholics believed themselves to be loyal
Englishmen to the end. They would see themselves after the Revolution as
loyal Americans who had sacrificed much for the cause of liberty, a point
they and other American Catholics consistently made to their nativist Protestant neighbors who sought to define Catholicism as foreign to America,
God’s chosen Protestant nation.
Adam Tate
Clayton State University
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Sherif Girgis, Ryan Anderson, and Robert George, What Is
Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense. Encounter Books, 2012.
Paperback. 133 pages.
On the surface, the pleas for access to marriage by same-sex couples are
compelling—and a growing number of Americans are becoming convinced. The problem is that the advocates for same-sex marriage never
attempt to acknowledge exactly what marriage is. Finally, a new book
published by Encounter Books addresses this problem. What Is Marriage?
asks that both sides in the same-sex marriage debate first answer the question of what marriage really is. And, they devote their entire book to helping others understand the conjugal view of marriage—and why it matters.
What Is Marriage? opens with a clear statement that the focus of the
book is about conjugal marriage—and not about the morality of homosexuality: “We will show that one can defend the conjugal view of marriage
while bracketing this moral question, and that the conjugal view can be
wholeheartedly embraced without denigrating same sex attracted people,
or ignoring their needs.”(10) The authors also state that their argument
makes no appeal to divine revelation or religious authority. They maintain, “there is simple and decisive evidence that the conjugal view is not
peculiar to religion, or to any religious tradition. Ancient thinkers who
had no contact with religions such as Judaism or Christianity—including
Xenophanes, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Musonius, Rufus, and Plutarch—
reached remarkably similar views on marriage” (10).
Proponents of same-sex marriage maintain that gay men and lesbian
women need and deserve the protections and perquisites that accompany
legal marriage. They point out that federal law links many important benefits to marital status including Social Security survivor benefits, tax-free
inheritance, spousal-immigration rights and protections against mutual incrimination. They also argue that without equal access to marriage, samesex couples are unfairly denied these benefits—even those living in states
that permit same-sex marriage or civil unions.
In contrast, the argument in What Is Marriage? is that the connection
between marriage and sexual complementarity is so foundational, defending it requires drawing extensive connections to other basic principles of
marriage. Maintaining that marriage, as a comprehensive union of mind
and body ordered to family life, unites a man and woman as husband and
wife, the authors attempt to document the social value of applying this
principle in law. This is not an easy task, but authors Sherif Girigis, Ryan
Anderson, and Robert George have much experience in this arena. The
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Anne Hendershott
book emerged from an earlier article published in the Harvard Journal of
Law and Public Policy where it became the year’s most widely read essay
on the most prominent scholarly network in the social sciences.
Girgis, a Rhodes Scholar and currently a Ph.D. student in philosophy
at Princeton University and a J. D. candidate at Yale Law School, is named
as the “first author” in an effort to reflect his primary role in developing
the arguments and drafting the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy
article on which this book is built. Ryan Anderson is William E. Simon
Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the editor of Public Discourse:
Ethics, Law, and the Common Good, the online journal of the Witherspoon
Institute. Robert George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and
Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. George is past chairman of the National Organization for Marriage, an advocacy organization supportive of conjugal
marriage. Professor George drafted the Manhattan Declaration, a manifesto signed by Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical leaders that promised
resistance against any legislation that might implicate their churches or
charities in abortion, embryo-destructive research, or same-sex marriage.
The authors ask—and respond—to several questions throughout What
Is Marriage? One of the first questions the authors ask is that if marriage
is not founded on a comprehensive union made possible by the sexual
complementarity of a man and a woman, then why can’t it occur among
more than two people? They also ask, “Why should an emotional union be
permanent?” If the marital union isn’t founded on the complementarity of
the sexual acts between a man and a woman, then why ought it be sexually
exclusive? Is marriage endlessly malleable?
Girgis, Anderson, and George provide strong answers to these questions. They provide a compelling secular defense of marriage grounded in
philosophy and sociology. Refusing to take the easy way out by defending marriage through theology or scripture, What Is Marriage? should
appeal to those of all religious traditions—or those without any religious
tradition. Its strength is its logic, its rational argument and its compelling
defense of conjugal marriage. But, in some ways, this strength is also its
weakness. The other side—the same-sex proponents—persuade us with an
emotional appeal based upon certain ideas of love, fairness, equality, and
civil rights. It is difficult to fight that emotional appeal—and right now, the
same-sex advocates are winning the battle.
In the 2012 elections, same-sex marriage was approved by voters in
Washington, Maryland, and Maine. These victories for the same-sex marriage side marked the first time that same-sex unions have been endorsed
at the ballot box in the United States. These votes put an end to more than
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a decade of defeat for advocates of gay marriage, which had formerly been
rejected by voters in every state where it appeared.
What Is Marriage? probably won’t persuade those who voted for
same-sex marriage. Still, it is a valuable resource for those of us who believe marriage is worth defending, and their well-reasoned and logical defense of conjugal marriage will aid those of us who need to craft our own
arguments on why marriage needs to be defended. What Is Marriage?
serves as a guide for us in that task and provides an invaluable resource for
fighting the battle to save marriage.
Anne Hendershott
Franciscan University of Steubenville
James Hitchcock, History of the Catholic Church: From the Apostolic Age to the Third Millennium. San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 2012. 584 pages.
“Of making many books there is no end.” These words of Ecclesiastes
seem particularly appropriate with regard to the number of church histories there are out there. Is there need for yet another one? What can one
more work add to the field? In the case of this work, History of the Catholic Church: From the Apostolic Age to the Third Millennium, the answers
to those two rhetorical questions would be “Yes” and “Plenty,” respectively. Hitchcock brings his impressive combination of scholarship and faith
to the kind of project that is the fruit of an academic in the mature years of
his career. It is a big work on a big subject, and succeeds impressively. The
book is comprehensive and magisterial, but at the same time approachable
to the average reader, and manages the difficult task of providing a fresh
approach to a very traditional subject.
History of the Catholic Church weighs in at a comfortable fourteen
chapters and 580 pages (concise considering its subject matter). Its writing
style is learned but neither complicated nor pedantic, appealing primarily
to a popular audience but not without use for an academic one. The work
is well-suited to serve as a textbook: It is written in short, self-contained
passages, and each page has several index terms in its margins. Footnotes
are few and explanatory in nature, with sources listed in a bibliography
at the end, and there is a comprehensive and useful index. The style of
exposition is narrative and (broadly) chronological, covering in turn the
New Testament era, early Imperial Rome, Christian Rome, the Patristic
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