New book examines the not so proud history of Catholics in the Civil War | Opinion

Even though my parents were the offspring of immigrants who had arrived in this country decades after the Civil War, growing up in Baltimore I very much considered myself a son of the South steeped in the mythology of the Lost Cause. In parochial school Abram Ryan’s odes conferred a priestly blessing upon the Confederacy’s ill-fated quest for independence. Every day on my bus ride to high school, I passed by monuments to the Confederacy. Four years at a Massachusetts college failed to weaken the mystic chords to the Cause. My senior thesis, “Why Maryland Did Not Secede from the Union,” was a testament to Maryland’s not-so-hidden commitment to the Confederacy.

Then in August of 1963 I just happened to participate in the March on Washington. That day which culminated with Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic address changed my life, although it took some years to fully assimilate the new me.

As a historian it had long been on my bucket list to do a history of the Catholic community in the Civil War era. But it was not until well into my retirement that I finally got to do it. What I did not anticipate was just how long it would take to have a manuscript to submit to a press. I started my research when Barack Obama was running for reelection. By the time I had a manuscript in hand, Donald Trump had incited an insurrection.

Those two presidents, especially the latter, certainly affected my treatment of the Catholic experience during the war and its long aftermath. When, in my epilogue, I decried the persistent support that a majority of white Catholics give Trump, despite his disastrous presidency, including his treasonous attempt to stay in power, one of my readers at the Louisiana State University Press strongly urged that I drop the whole Trump section.

“It has nothing to do with the Civil War,” he complained. “It has everything to do with it,” I insisted. In Trump’s assault on democracy, we were in a new Civil War with a new Lost Cause around the “stolen” election of 2020. Once again Catholics were on the wrong side of history. My epilogue was a desperate plea for them to get to the right one. As in the 1860s, our very republic is at stake.

American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era is an attempt to show how the Catholic majority came to identify with the South and embrace the Lost Cause. As a community whose religious fealty to the head of the Papal States raised serious concerns about its loyalty, the Civil War provided an extraordinary opportunity to prove Catholic patriotism and secure full standing as citizens. With two governments contesting for allegiance in 1861, geography determined the decision for most Catholics. The exception was the border region — Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri — the historic heartland of American Catholicism, where Catholics were overwhelmingly pro-Confederate.

In the war Catholics did make extraordinary contributions. In the first year of conflict, Catholics PGT Beauregard and William Rosecrans were the leading generals in the Confederacy and Union respectively. In 1864, three generals who had worshipped together at St. Joseph’s Church in Somerset, Ohio — Thomas Ewing, William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip Sheridan — arguably saved Abraham Lincoln’s presidency by their victories. The more than 700 Sisters who cared for the sick and dying on battlefields and in hospitals became indispensable healthcare workers for both Confederacy and Union. John Hughes, Michael Domenec, Patrick Lynch and Rose O’Neil Greenhow were prominent Catholic agents trying to shape foreign opinion and win support for their governments.

What united most white Catholics, both in North and South, was a commitment to slavery and the racial order it guaranteed. Slavery was considered an evil necessity in a bi-racial society in which one race was superior to the other. For many northern Catholics, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation delegitimized the war. Louisville Bishop Martin John Spalding submitted a 23-page report to Rome in which he charged that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was nothing less than an instrument of terror, an invitation to the more than three million slaves to rise and massacre the whites in their midst. Catholics became an important constituency in the Sons of Liberty and other organizations that sought to end the war by any means possible, including collaborating with Confederate agents. No surprise then that Catholics were an integral part of the conspiracy to kidnap President Lincoln, which morphed into the president’s assassination. Mary Surratt became the first woman to be executed in the nation’s history.

In the postwar era Catholics both North and South heavily opposed congressional attempts to promote economic opportunity and political equality without regard to race or class. Southern Catholics, particularly in Virginia, South Carolina, and Louisiana, played crucial roles in “redeeming” the region from Republican rule and restoring the old order, if now by new forms of bondage for Blacks. Abram Ryan was particularly instrumental in the shaping of the Lost Cause that came to be the reigning narrative of the war.

The Catholic pursuit of equality was betrayed by a truncated vision of who deserved to share in its realization. Too many Catholics wanted no part of a revolution to put the nation on the path to becoming a full democracy. One hundred and fifty years later, too many continue to display the same mindset.

Robert Emmett Curran is professor of history emeritus at Georgetown University who lives in Richmond.