America’s Catholic Patriots

When it comes to our Church’s history, we Catholics tend to zero in quickly on canonized saints and those we hope will be canonized. This is understandable, given the importance our faith places on special exemplars of holiness and the supernatural virtues.

Often, though, we highlight well-known saints to the exclusion of the much larger tapestry of Catholic experiences and achievements in which our most celebrated, canonized figures’ lives are interwoven. 

This is true, for example, where the Church in the United States is concerned. We American Catholics tend to lack even basic familiarity with the range of men and women among us who – while not in most cases deserving the honors of the altar – helped to make the United States both a powerful nation and one ever striving to improve itself morally and socially.   

In this year of the nation’s 250th birthday, let us get to know more of these Catholic patriots active in every era since the Founding. 

For instance, two of note who fought in the American Revolution were Commodore John Barry and Colonel John Fitzgerald. Both were born in Ireland and were devout in the faith. Barry, alongside John Paul Jones, was one of the fathers of the American Navy. Indeed, after fighting bravely in multiple sea and land engagements in the Revolution, President George Washington put him in charge of the re-established U.S. Navy, giving him the branch’s very first commission.  

Fitzgerald, for his part, joined a patriot militia in Virginia in 1774 and was a loyal aide-de-camp to General Washington during the war, including during the terrible winter at Valley Forge. Wounded at the Battle of Monmouth, he later served as Mayor of Alexandria and helped found the city’s first Catholic church, the Basilica of Saint Mary. 

In 1831, a French aristocrat named Alexis de Tocqueville was struck while touring the young United States how simultaneously patriotic and devout in the faith American Catholics were, since Catholics in his homeland were typically suspicious of republican and democratic principles in the wake of all the Church suffered in the French Revolution. In his book Democracy in America, he expressed surprise, too, that American Catholics were attracting many Protestant converts to the Church. 

By the eve of the Civil War, such converts included President James Monroe’s grandnephew, Andrew, who became a Jesuit after participating in Admiral Matthew Perry’s first expedition to Japan, and James Roosevelt Bayley, a nephew of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and a cousin of the future President Theodore Roosevelt. Bayley would later serve both as Bishop of Newark and Archbishop of Baltimore and – with both America’s and the Church’s well-being in mind – promote important social welfare and educational initiatives, including the founding of Seton Hall University. 

Another leading convert of the period was the former Unitarian radical Orestes Brownson. A pioneer of American Catholic publishing, he became a leading voice of Catholic fidelity to both the Church and the United States, influencing political leaders of various faiths through writings such as “The American Republic” (1865), his book on the constitution. He was a strong advocate of American labor, favoring trade unions, and he spoke out against slavery and supported the Union during the Civil War – in which two of his three sons who served as Army officers gave their lives. 

American Catholics were as divided as the rest of the country during the Civil War, with few of prominence standing up strongly against slavery until the war started. The Irish-born Bishop of Cincinnati, John Baptist Purcell, was among the first prominent American Catholic churchmen to call for emancipation, declaring in 1862 that “a people could not long survive the fatal contrast between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, the one asserting that all men are born free, sovereign and independent, that the other millions may be slaves.”  

Catholics died in great numbers for both the Union and the Confederacy, and devout Catholics were among the officers leading the war on both sides. Among the Catholic generals who served the Union was William Rosecrans. Converting to Catholicism after graduating West Point and convincing his brother Sylvester (a future bishop) to do the same, he trained cadets and young officers in engineering and later, during the Civil War, helped the Union win many early victories, bringing a crucifix and rosary beads into battle. Although sidelined in 1863 after a major setback at Chickamauga, Georgia, he would go on to serve as our ambassador to Mexico and as a congressman for California’s first district.  

Our nation owes a special debt to Catholics, especially religious sisters, for advances in wartime nursing and hospital services. At the start of the Civil War, the military largely relied on untrained volunteers and male orderlies to tend to wounded soldiers, something very unsustainable as casualties mounted. Daughters of Charity, Sisters of Mercy and many other Catholic women already trained in nursing stepped into the breach.

Sisters staffed, managed and expanded the Union’s and Confederacy’s ability to treat and preserve the lives of countless soldiers. Mother Angela Gillespie of the Sisters of the Holy Cross turned a warehouse in Mound City, Illinois, into one of the largest and best hospitals in the country. 

Religious sisters such Mother Mariana Flynn of the Daughters of Charity and Mother Mary Anthony Bordeaux of the Congregation of American Sisters would serve similarly in the Spanish-American War.
Bordeaux, of the Lakota people in South Dakota, was among the first Native American women recognized by the Army for military nursing service. Sisters of Loretto, Ursulines and women of other congregations would also staff military hospitals during World War I, including in the difficult conditions of Camp Zachary Taylor in Louisville, where more than 10,000 soldiers were hospitalized due to the global flu pandemic of 1918.  

During World War II, numerous Catholic American laywomen and consecrated women served the country as nurses in Europe and the Pacific. Catholic women’s organizations such as the National Council of Catholic Women and the Catholic Daughters of America supported the war effort in many other ways alongside men’s organizations such as the Knights of Columbus. 

Looking far beyond our wartime history, devout Catholics have in every era been among those serving America’s interests – in too many capacities to count.

A Catholic great-grandniece of President Washington, Eugenia Washington, contributed to the nation’s memorialization of its early history by helping to found the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Daughters of the Founders and Patriots of America. Catholic philanthropists such as Sarah Peter of Cincinnati and J.J. Haverty of Atlanta helped raise the cultural tone of the young nation by building up art collections that became important museums. Layman Matthew Ahmann and Franciscan sister Mary Antona Ebo, the latter the first Black woman to run a Catholic hospital, were among numerous Catholics active in the mid-20th-century Civil Rights Movement.  

Then there are the innumerable men and women – many of them very prayerful and committed to the Church’s teachings – who have served in all levels of our government; who have fought for just wages and safe labor conditions for American workers; who have stood up for the most vulnerable among us such as the unborn; and who have built up the most extensive networks of schools, institutions of higher learning, charitable organizations, hospitals and international philanthropic organizations the world has ever seen.  
American Catholics, like all human beings, have much to repent for and which they could have done better. But we also have a long record of noble and righteous contributions to our country. While variously celebrating and critiquing the United States this anniversary year, let us learn and honor more of that history, to better understand who we are, more three-dimensionally, as a people that sometimes produces great saints, and to help inspire our own contributions going forward.

Bronwen McShea is a New York-based historian, author and speaker specializing in early modern European history and the history of Catholicism.

This article is part of a series exploring Catholic contributions over 250 years of American history.