In Good Company George Washington Among The Catholics

Feb 16, 2010

The mattress sales of Washington’s Birthday may have passed, but as his actual birthday isn’t until February 22,  we still have time to recall specific reasons we as Catholics have to be grateful to George Washington.

There are the reasons for our gratitude that are shared with all Americans.  As commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Army, he won our independence as a nation on the battlefield. 

He could have been our king. Instead, he resigned his military commission and went home. Later he presided over the Constitutional Convention which ordered our polity. As our first president, he governed prudently and he relinquished power freely which was an astonishing thing at the time.  In short, he taught us how to be free.

He was a champion of religious liberty for all, particularly of Catholics, who occasionally needed to be defended in the early days of the Republic.

During the American Revolution, General Washington outlawed Guy Fawkes’ day celebrations.  Denouncing the custom of burning the pope in effigy as ridiculous and childish, he called on the Army to have some gratitude for the many Catholics fighting the war in their ranks or as their allies, particularly the Canadians: “At such a juncture, and in such Circumstances, to be insulting their Religion, is so monstrous, as not to be suffered or excused; indeed instead of offering the most remote insult, it is our duty to address public thanks to these our Brethren.”

Washington sometimes attended Mass too, notably during the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, when he led delegates from the convention to a local mass, just as he’d earlier led them to local Protestant services.  He was establishing the principle that Catholics were not to be second-class citizens.

As President, Washington wrote a Letter to Roman Catholics in which he expressed his desire that Catholics would flourish in the United States and be accepted by their fellow citizens.

“I presume that your fellow-citizens will not forget the patriotic part which you took in the accomplishment of their Revolution, and the establishment of their government; or the important assistance which they received from a nation in which the Roman Catholic faith is professed.”

Pope Leo the XIII was so grateful for the Church’s liberty in our fledgling nation he mentioned it in an encyclical. “Thanks are due to the equity of the laws which obtain in America and to the customs of the well-ordered Republic. For the Church amongst you, unopposed by the Constitution and government of your nation, fettered by no hostile legislation, protected against violence by the common laws and the impartiality of the tribunals, is free to live and act without hindrance.”

Pope Leo thought the friendship between America’s first bishop and her first president was providential in creating a model of fruitful relations between Church and state:  “The well-known friendship and familiar intercourse which subsisted between these two men seems to be an evidence that the United States ought to be conjoined in concord and amity with the Catholic Church. And not without cause; for without morality the State cannot endure-a truth which that illustrious citizen of yours, whom We have just mentioned, with a keenness of insight worthy of his genius and statesmanship perceived and proclaimed.”

Perhaps Washington’s most “Catholic” quality, however, was this. He was, of all the Founding Fathers, the one “most likely to be interrupted at prayer.”

From a diary of the time comes Isaac Pott’s touching description of Washington’s prayer at Valley Forge. At a time when things looked hopeless for the Americans, Potts stumbled upon Washington on his knees in the woods beseeching God from his heart for his blessing.

Potts, a Quaker, testified: “Such a prayer I never heard from the lips of man. I left him alone praying. I went home & told my wife, I saw a sight and heard today what I never saw or heard before, and just related to her what I had seen & heard & observed. We never thought a man could be a soldier and a Christian, but if there is one in the world, it is Washington.”

From that moment, Potts was sure the Americans would prevail. 

It would be interesting to know how much of our national gratitude we owe to Washington’s military skill and how much we owe to his prayer.