In 2004, John D. Krugler argued that colonial historians had not given sufficient attention to the Calvert vision of religious toleration (“An ‘Ungracious Silence’: Historians and the Calvert Vision,” Maryland Historical Magazine 99 (2004): 374–388; English and Catholic: The Lords Baltimore in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). Maura Jane Farrelly, Assistant Professor of American Studies at Brandeis University, takes up implicitly Krugler's challenge and provides a significant broad-based social analysis of the seventeenth and eighteenth century factors that contributed to the making of an American Catholic identity, one that hinged upon Calvert's Act of Toleration (1649). Her work is consistent with some recent transatlantic studies and dissertations (such as Ronald Binzley, “Ganganelli's Disaffected Children: The Suppressed English Jesuit Province and the Shaping of American Catholicism, 1762–1817,” [Ph.D. Diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2011]) of the Maryland Catholic colonial experience.

Papist Patriots demonstrates that a seventeenth century Catholic identity in England provided the historical context that shaped the Maryland Catholic experience and the establishment of Calvert's Act of Toleration (1649). That early Maryland seventeenth-century experience of toleration survived, as least in colonial Catholic memory, even after the Glorious Revolution and the creation of Maryland penal laws against Catholics, and created in the Catholic community a sense of their identity as Marylanders at a time when English identity was tied to Protestant identity. The Maryland Catholic experience, particularly after 1692, prepared Catholics for the American Revolution because they had already separated their own identity as Marylanders from English identity and that separation of identities made them ardent patriots during the Revolution. It was this Maryland experience that shaped an American Catholic identity.

Farrelly makes her case in six chapters, arguing in chapter 1, “The English Origins of American Catholicism,” that the experience of English Catholic political independence from Rome and religious independence from Protestant England that had developed by the beginning of the seventeenth century helped English Catholics, particularly the landed gentry who were the financial backbone of the establishment of Maryland, to distinguish spiritual and temporal realms of authority. Chapter 2, “Prescience, Pluralism, and Profit,” focuses on the early establishment of Maryland (1634–1647), where the Catholic settlers were prominent but always in a minority and where they soon learned, because of the Ingle-Claiborne Rebellion (1644–1646) and the English Civil War, that their connections with the Protestant majority in the colony and with Puritan England were indeed precarious. During this early period Catholic lay leaders began to take a more active role, too, to protect their own tradition, religious pluralism, and their profits, setting up the context for the religious toleration act of 1649.

Chapter 3, “Inconsistencies and Consequences,” outlines the historical events from the origins of Calvert's Act of Toleration (which was “a little too avant-garde to work” [95)], after the execution of King Charles I, to the Puritan influx from Virginia in the 1650s, to the Maryland Puritan reversal of the Act of Toleration in 1654 and the restoration of that Act (1658) under Cromwell's influence. The Glorious Revolution had some considerable effects on the shaping of Maryland Catholic identity. In 1692, the Church of England became established in Maryland, penal laws were enacted against Catholics, and Catholics increasingly became identified as foreigners. To be English after the Glorious Revolution, moreover, was to be Protestant in Maryland as well as in England. These circumstances helped Maryland Catholics to see their own identity in terms independent of England. Increasingly they saw themselves as Marylanders, with only a memory of religious toleration to hold on to, but that memory and identity prepared them for an American identity in 1776.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 outline the consequences of the new situation of Catholicism in Maryland after the Glorious Revolution, from 1692 to 1776 (the penal law period). A few Catholics became Anglican, as was the case with the fifth and sixth Lords Baltimore, during the age of the penal laws that provided considerable incentives for Catholic defections. Nonetheless, Farrelly demonstrates that during the eighteenth century Catholics in large numbers not only remained Catholic by choice as well as by tradition, but also, statistics reveal they participated regularly in the Church's sacramental life. Given the penal law incentives to defect and the scarcity of Catholic clergy, that participation disclosed an American religious voluntaryism in the midst of an inhospitable climate prior to the First Amendment. Papists became patriots after 1765 because they had already separated their own identity from that of England and even the American revolutionary anti-Catholicism surrounding the Quebec Act did not deter them from joining the revolution.

Farrelly relies on a host of previous histories of Maryland, an abundance of primary documents, archival sources in England and Maryland archives (especially the multi-volume Archives of Maryland), family genealogies, newspapers and iconography, legislative decisions, and published as well as unpublished Jesuit documents. She puts her own interpretation of these sources in dialogue with other major studies of colonial Maryland.

Periodically throughout the text Farrelly refers to “Calvinists” and it is not clear to whom she is referring. That designation seems to refer to most Protestants outside the Anglican and Puritan traditions. A more careful designation of Protestant religious bodies would be desirable in any new edition of the text. She might also want to distinguish more precisely “religious liberty” and “toleration,” terms she uses interchangeably.

These criticisms aside, Farrelly's book is a tour de force in developing a new argument about the foundations of an American Catholic identity. Based on an abundance of sources, the interpretation should be of considerable interests to historians and students of colonial history and to historians of American religious history. Her use of appropriate analogies and metaphors that tie historical experience to contemporary events and her lively style of writing, groomed in her previous career as a journalist, moreover, will make her text available to a wide reading audience. The index will be useful to researchers and students of the period. I recommend highly Papist Patriots.