FROM Apostasy in America by Solange Hertz:
Like the Civil War a century later, the Revolutionary War never enjoyed popular support, but was engineered by the proverbial active, well organized minority intent on its peculiar agenda, who “while men were asleep” or otherwise occupied in earning a living, “oversowed cockle among the wheat” (Matt. 13:25). On January 30, 1648, when Charles I of England was “put to death by the severing of his head from his body” as ordained by the Death Warrant issued by Oliver Cromwell and his Republicans, the assembled multitude:
…far from accepting the executioner’s invitation to ‘rejoice at the death of a traitor,’ uttered a dismal universal groan such as one hearer had never heard before nor desired to hear again. She was only twenty when she heard it, and she never forgot the sound.”[15]
A similar reaction on the part of the people would occur at the execution of Louis XVI of France in 1789, so firmly is monarchy rooted in natural law and so ingrained in Catholic hearts is love for their anointed kings.
Had Maryland’s political elite kept the Faith in its integrity, one cannot help wondering whether they might not have been able to check, or even withstand the onslaught of the Revolution as did the French Catholics of Canada, who so indignantly refused the seditious overtures of Benjamin Franklin and the future Bishop John Carroll. Had Maryland followed their example, an effective counter-revolutionary base for royalist sentiment – which actually predominated throughout the Colonies before large numbers of loyalists took flight for Canadian Ontario – might have taken shape in what became the United States. By then, of course, it was too late. The Revolution promised the Maryland Catholics the same freedom they had held out to others, and they not only welcomed it with open arms, but succeeded in winning to its cause every Irish immigrant who hated England more fervently than he loved his Catholic faith.
The Catholic founders of St. Mary’s City are now revolutionary heroes in American history books, whereas they might have been martyrs and saints. The Maryland experiment is living proof of our Lord’s words that “Every kingdom divided against itself shall be made desolate: and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.” And almost in the same divine breath He said, “He that is not with me is against me, and he that gathereth not with me scattereth” (Matt. 12:25,30). As Maryland went, so goes the nation, for under the principle of religious freedom, God and Satan are accorded equal rights before the law.
Read more here.
