Susan Juster, "A Common Grave: Being Catholic in English America" (UNC Press, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network

Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Dr. Susan Juster
Episode: Susan Juster, "A Common Grave: Being Catholic in English America" (UNC Press, 2025)
Date: September 12, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode explores Dr. Susan Juster's new book, A Common Grave: Being Catholic in English America. Through an in-depth conversation, Dr. Juster details the lived experiences of Catholics in colonial America—a history typically overshadowed by narratives centered on Protestant settlers. The episode unpacks the complexity, diversity, and persistent invisibility of Catholic communities (including Irish, African, Indigenous, and English Catholics), highlighting how they navigated a landscape marked by anti-Catholic rhetoric, precarious coexistence, and limited religious freedom.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Motivation and Background for the Book

• Dr. Juster’s background as a historian of early American religion set the stage for the book, which emerged in response to a paradox she noticed: heated anti-Catholic rhetoric contrasted with relatively little recorded violence against Catholics.
  • “Why this disjuncture between this overheated rhetoric and this record of fairly benign, even permissive practice on the ground?” (04:20, Dr. Juster)
• While acknowledging infamous incidents such as the 1650s Maryland battle, Juster notes these were exceptions.

2. Pluralism vs. Coexistence (06:26)

• Juster is careful to distinguish between pluralism and coexistence in describing colonial religious life:
  • Pluralism suggests a celebratory, progressive narrative ending in modern religious liberty; coexistence denotes a more contingent, uneasy proximity, often marked by resistance rather than tolerance.
  • “Coexistence, to me, was just a better term to capture the contingent nature of community and religious life in this period…” (08:25, Dr. Juster)

3. The Methodological Challenge: Finding Catholics in the Sources (09:22)

• Because Catholic practice was illegal or suppressed, Catholics practiced in secret, leaving few records.
• Most surviving evidence comes from adversaries—colonial officials, Anglican ministers—reporting on suspected Catholics.
• Juster discusses the challenges of building a narrative from these “fundamentally problematic” sources:
  • “How do you find the people who do not want to be found?” (09:23, Dr. Juster)
  • “So we don't have much evidence written by Catholic men and women themselves...much of the book is written on the basis of accounts that are fundamentally problematic.” (13:19, Dr. Juster)

4. Catholic Practice: Home as Sacred Space (14:13)

• With public worship restricted, Catholics adapted by domesticating rituals—baptisms, marriages, funerals—within their homes.
• Spiritual communion and clandestine sacraments replaced traditional church rites.
  • “The essence of what it meant was to follow the rituals and sacraments of the Church...All of those things were almost impossible to do in an environment in which there are no Catholic churches.” (14:16, Dr. Juster)
• Home ritualization provided both camouflage from authorities and autonomy for believers.

5. Race, Ethnicity, and Catholic Diversity (20:05)

• The majority of colonial Catholics were not white, English elites but Irish, African, and Indigenous peoples—often doubly marginalized.
  • Irish Catholics: Targeted and policed due to their numbers and suspected threat, sometimes allied (in fear-mongering narratives) with enslaved Africans.
  • African Catholics: Often overlooked by authorities; many enslaved people brought from Catholic regions of Africa or former European colonies.
  • Indigenous Catholics: Feared as potential allies with French or Spanish imperial rivals.
  • “The majority of Catholics, certainly in the 17th century...were Irish. They were African, and they were indigenous.” (20:26, Dr. Juster)

6. Material Culture: Surviving Traces (26:13)

• Catholicism’s distinctive material culture—rosaries, crucifixes, statues—suffered from iconoclastic destruction but also adapted.
• Small devotional objects survived as portable, easily hidden emblems of faith.
  • “The rosary becomes the probably most important object that a colonial Catholic or an English Catholic in general can own…” (28:30, Dr. Juster)
• Larger objects were sometimes repurposed in Protestant churches, producing hybrid spaces.
  • “Objects that began their lives as Catholic objects and then became repurposed as Protestant objects absolutely fascinated me.” (32:59, Dr. Juster)

7. Religious Hybridization: Shared Rituals and Home-Based Practices (35:45)

• Both Protestants and Catholics in under-resourced colonial environments domesticated religious rituals—a practice that upset clergy seeking authority.
  • “This domestication of ritual becomes a really pervasive fact of colonial religious life that affects both Protestants and Catholics...” (39:17, Dr. Juster)

8. Funerals and Final Rites as Contested Terrain (40:54)

• Funerals, more than baptisms or weddings, became tense religious flashpoints, deeply symbolic of belonging and posthumous dignity.
  • “To die well and to bury well is one of the most cherished, cherished goals of Christians in this period.” (41:03, Dr. Juster)
• Denial of burial was a particularly cruel aspect of violence against enslaved Africans.
  • “One of the cruelest fates that could await an enslaved African of any religious conviction was death at sea during the middle passage, when dead bodies were simply tossed overboard and there was no way to mark that burial site...” (43:56, Dr. Juster)

9. Patterns and the Role of Women (45:38)

• Despite wide diversity in Catholic experience, two themes emerge:
  • Domestication of Faith: Most Catholic religious life centered in the home.
  • Central Role of Women: Women sustained Catholic practice—hosted secret priests, maintained ritual objects, led prayers, oversaw burials.
    • “At every sort of point along the lifetime of a Catholic, from birth to death, women are presiding over doing the organizational work, doing the commemorative work, doing the communal work of gathering people together in these households.” (48:54, Dr. Juster)

10. Historical Silences and Interpretative Challenges (50:00)

• Cautions that much of the historical record comes from hostile or uninterested sources; urges readers to approach these stories with humility and imagination.
  • “So much of what we know about these people's lives does come to us from tainted sources, from sources...who did not understand them, did not respect them, and wanted to destroy them.” (50:00, Dr. Juster)

11. Dr. Juster’s Next Project (52:08)

• Hints at research plans focusing on the Wesley brothers’ failed ministry in colonial Georgia, likely with continued themes of religion, gender, and laity-clergy conflict.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the anti-Catholic myth vs. reality:
  • "Why this disjuncture between this overheated rhetoric and this record of fairly benign, even permissive practice on the ground?" (04:20, Dr. Juster)
• On the limits of pluralism:
  • “Pluralism...has had this other connotation. It has tended to be viewed as a teleological process...that somehow leads us inexorably to...freedom of religion. That's a story that is far too neat, I think, and far too one dimensional.” (07:00, Dr. Juster)
• On women’s centrality:
  • “At every sort of point along the lifetime of a Catholic, from birth to death, women are presiding over...gathering people together in these households.” (48:54, Dr. Juster)
• On historical silences:
  • “We really do have to create a kind of imagined bridge between our own selves as scholars and researchers and interpreters and the lives of people whose existence in the records is itself a mark of the violence done to them.” (51:07, Dr. Juster)
• On religious hybridization:
  • “This domestication of ritual becomes a really pervasive fact of colonial religious life that affects both Protestants and Catholics...” (39:17, Dr. Juster)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 02:28 – Dr. Juster's Introduction & Book Motivation
• 06:26 – Pluralism vs. Coexistence
• 09:22 – Tracking Catholics Through Adversarial Records
• 14:13 – What Set Catholics Apart / Practicing in Secret
• 20:05 – Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Catholic Colonials
• 26:13 – Material Culture: Surviving Objects & Hybridization
• 35:45 – Hybridization & Shared Rituals among Protestants and Catholics
• 40:54 – Funerals as Battlegrounds
• 45:38 – Patterns: Domestication of Faith & Role of Women
• 50:00 – Silences in the Record; Interpretative Cautions
• 52:08 – Future Research Plans

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Takeaway

Dr. Juster’s work reframes the story of Catholicism in English America as one of inventive, often invisible survival in the shadow of both official suspicion and historical erasure. The episode offers listeners a new appreciation for the diversity of American religious experience, the importance of material and home-based devotional practice, and the deep interpretative challenges of working with adversarial and limited sources—while foregrounding the pivotal role women played in sustaining faith amid adversity.

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Transcript

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[C]

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Susan Juster about her book titled A Common Grave Being Catholic in English America, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2025. This book helps us understand what it was like to be Catholic. Catholic from a whole bunch of different places, different kinds of Catholic in colonial what became the United States. Now this is of course really interesting because a lot of what we hear sort of in the kind of more generalized history of the period is often focused on the Puritans of on the Protestants. They're doing a lot of the colonizing and seeing the Catholics understanding where they were, what they were doing, what stuff they had or didn't is not usually where we put the focus. And as I think we're probably going to talk about, in some ways it's kind of tricky to figure that out, but thankfully Susan has figured a bunch of things out because it turns out it's really interesting. So I'm quite looking forward to having a bit of an excavation in our discussion. Susan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[B]

Thank you for having me.

[C]

Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?

[B]

Sure. So I'm a historian of early America. That is a period of time that has been quite expanded in both its geography and its chronology since the history profession started. So that term has really shifted around quite a bit. I'm primarily a historian of religion. I have spent most of my career looking at the various things that Protestant colonizers and settlers did in the part of the world that is North America that will become the United States. I am. For 30 years, I was a professor of history at the University of Michigan. And then two and a half years ago, I left that position to take up my current role as director of research at the Huntington, which is one of the world's great libraries, museums, botanical collections and research program out here in California. So I began this book began, I think, as an outgrowth of my previous book, as, of course, many doctor I had spent quite a while studying the linguistic and social and political accounts of religious violence that had erupted in the North American colonies in the 17th and early 18th centuries. It was a pretty grim book, I will say. It was a hard topic to research and an emotionally draining one as well. And in the course of that book, I had been reading a lot about how Catholics had been the great boogie bears of the Protestant Reformation. There was so much anti Catholic polemics, so much anti Catholic writing. They seem to embody everything that Protestant Englishmen and women detested. They were traitorous, they were suspicious, they were seductive, they were overly emotional. They believed in such gross practices as transubstantiation or the actual eating of the body and blood of Christ during the communion service. So the Protestant colonies, as well as England at that time is awash in literature that depicts the Catholics as everything the Protestants are not. And yet, in the course of studying this book and writing this book about religious violence, there were very few actual incidents of violence against real Catholics as opposed to imagined Catholics. And I found that really fascinating. Why this disjuncture between this overheated rhetoric and this record of fairly benign, even permissive practice on the ground, what is it about anti Catholicism that enabled it to thrive so viciously and heatedly in rhetoric? And then what was it about the lives of actual Catholics, to the extent that we can identify them on the ground, that allowed them to sort of slip under the radar to live their lives largely undetected and largely unmolested? Although there were some pretty well known and well publicized incidents of violence, the most stark of which was a pitched battle between armed Catholics and armed Protestants in Maryland in the 1650s, which did lead to bloodshed. Some 17 people died on the battlefield. Four people were executed on the spot on the battlefield. But that was such an exception in the historical record that I was intrigued by that gap.

[C]

Yeah, that's always really interesting to come across something and go, hang on a second, what's actually happening here? And this environment you're describing is honestly pretty tense, pretty fraught. And I think that's worth mentioning, especially at the beginning, as, in fact, you do in the book, discussing how you sort of conceptualise these communities, where it turns out we do in fact, have mixed religious practice going on. You're very careful to assure readers that you don't want to talk about this in terms of pluralism, but rather use terms like coexistence. Can you tell us more about kind of why that's important conceptually and how this might translate to a better understanding of what the experience was like on the ground?

[B]

Yeah, that's a great question. I would say that for many historians of early America, especially in early American religion, we have tended to view the colonial period as one of pluralism, meaning essentially one in which people of different faiths lived in the same communities in the same polities. And pluralism is, as a descriptive term, not a bad way to think about the early colonies. But in the hands of professional historians, and I think, of the general reading public, it has had this other connotation. It has tended to be viewed as a teleological process in which the pluralism, the multiplicity of religious communities and faiths in early America, somehow leads us inexorably to the enshrinement of First Amendment rights to the freedom of religion. In other words, the story has been that out of this pluralistic context came a toleration, first for difference and then ultimately a desire, desire to protect difference and to even celebrate it and embrace it, that we would see after the idea of a religious establishment was demolished after the Revolution with the First Amendment. So there is this sort of storyline, this narrative line that historians have often told, from the multiplicity of faiths in early America to the enshrinement of freedom of conscience, religious liberty as one of the core principles of the United States. That's a story that is far too neat, I think, and far too one dimensional. And so I decided not to use the term pluralism, but to use the term coexistence. They in some ways mean the same thing, but coexistence, to my mind, has a much more contingent quality to it. That is, people are coexisting side by side, and it does not mean that they embrace that coexistence. It often they fought against it. It does not necessarily imply that they coexisted peacefully or in any way benign. So coexistence, to me, was just a better term to capture the contingent nature of community and religious life in this period and would get us away from that more teleological narrative that would somehow end up inexorably leading to the First Amendment. Because I think that pluralism, and it's not a bad term descriptively, as I said, that pluralism of faith in the early colonies had a very different texture at a very different historical import than we often give it in our stories.

[C]

Yeah, it's definitely helpful to have that more nuanced picture in mind. Can I ask, though, about how you were able to track down these Catholics given this tension, given all this contingency? I mean, how does one actually go about in the record identifying an early modern colonial Catholic in what becomes the United States?

[B]

That was the key question. How do you find the people who do not want to be found? Right. That was the real methodological challenge of this book, colonial Catholicism. And to give you a little bit more of the sort of the legal and political background, Catholicism was a faith that could not be practiced openly by law in either England or in most of the colonies most of the time in the Elizabethan Reformation. When Queen Elizabeth came to. This is really going deep back history, so feel free to stop me if I'm getting too far off track. But when Elizabeth came to the throne in the late 1550s, she inherited a very uncertain and very unstable religious system. And she was. She is the one who is credited with really putting the Protestant Church, the Church of England, on a firm and stable foundation in England. It certainly would face its challenges going forward. But the Church, as it took shape in England, was one that decided not to outlaw being a Catholic. In other words, you can believe what you wanted, but you could not practice Catholicism. And so much of the punitive and disciplinary infrastructure of the state is directed against prosecuting Catholicism where it surfaces in public. So what that means is that Catholic communities, and of course, the Protestant Reformation, did not turn Englishmen from Catholics to Protestants overnight. Many, many, many people retained an allegiance and a commitment to the traditional faith. But Catholics learned to be very good at hiding that faith, at not allowing their faith to be seen in public, whether that meant performing the basic rituals of faith and sacraments of faith in the privacy of their homes, whether it meant saying one thing in public and then saying something else and doing something else in private, what people at the time would have called dissembling. And so this is a community that is very well versed in the arts and practices of deception, of concealment as a practical necessity in order to avoid the kind of punitive fines and even physical punishments up to and including execution that awaited Catholics who dared to practice their faith more publicly. So that's the background. So Catholics are very good at hiding their faith. And so how to find them in the kind of records that historians usually have to work with in the colonial period became the biggest challenge of all. And what that meant was that most of my evidence comes from people, institutions, communities, who are motivated by a desire to root out and punish the Catholics in their midst. So we don't have much evidence written by Catholic men and women themselves. We have some. And I can talk more about that, and you'll find it more in different places and different time periods. But a lot of this evidence is, for instance, comes from government officials, colonial officials like governors of the. Of the colonies, who would write back to Whitehall, to the Crown, to say, I'm very worried that there is this community of suspected papists in the midst, how I need to find them, I need to disarm them. We need to make sure that they don't trouble our state. So there's complaints written back to London by colonial officials about the people they think, and they may be right or they may be wrong. We're Catholics. We have ministers, missionaries, Anglican missionaries sent to the colonies to help create a more stable Anglican church in North America who are very alert and very attuned to the presence of heterodoxy in their midst. And they write back to their superiors back in England saying, there's a suspected Papist in the town next to me. This person doesn't come to communion. This person refuses to bring his children to us to be baptized. I suspect that they are a secret Catholic and are baptizing their children at home. So a lot of the evidence is coming from people who are the enemies, right, the opponents of these Catholic communities. And so you have to take their evidence with a great deal of suspicion and a great deal of caution. But in the absence of more overt records that record the actual doings of people who self identify as Catholics, they're often what we have. And so much of the book is written on the basis of accounts that are fundamentally problematic.

[C]

Well, that's why we're trained as historians to figure out what to do with those sorts of sources. So that's definitely very helpful to know kind of whose voices we're hearing, but also the sorts of things that they were noticing. So can you tell us a bit more about kind of what would set a Catholic apart in this context. I mean, not going to church would be one. But what if someone wanted to kind of not be quite so obviously Catholic? Like, what sorts of things might you do to keep your faith but not make waves?

[B]

So I think the essence of what it means to be Catholic in this time period, and possibly to this day, although I don't want to go into such great claims, but the essence of what it meant was to follow the rituals and sacraments of the Church. It was to baptize your children into the faith, to marry into the faith, to attend the Mass and receive Communion, the central sacrament, the central ritual of the faith, at the hands of a priest in a concert, consecrated space, to bury your loved ones and to in turn be buried yourself in consecrated ground using all the rituals of the church last rites, and then at the end, hoping that your, the people you leave behind, your loved ones, will say prayers for your soul after you die. That's the most important sort of components, I think, of being Catholic in this period. There's a lot of other things too, but that's the centrality of it. All of those things were almost impossible to do in an environment in which there are no Catholic churches. There are very, very few Catholic priests there to serve you. And so the officials were always alert to when those types of sacramental practices may have been taking place. So from the, from the official's point of view, whether they're ministers or government officials, the signs of being a Catholic are one not adhering to, not availing yourself of the rituals that are available through the established church. So again, not taking your children to communion, having secret burials at home on your home plantation or in your garden, using the services of a secret Catholic priest who's there in disguise and there under. Under cloak of darkness. So those are the things that they are looking for. They are looking for clandestine and illicit either practices or refusal to participate in the practices that are available to you. For Catholics themselves, what. This is the most important adjustment that Catholics made living in Protestant countries. This is as true of colonials living in, in Boston or in Barbados as it is Catholics living in London or in Plymouth or in any other country, Catholic country. The most important adjustment they made was to try to domesticate those rituals that normally take place in a church and have them take place at home. So you cannot go to a church and receive Communion at the hands of a priest, but you can practice what they would call spiritual reception. In other words, an act of imagination in which you in your home with your family gathered around you, if you're lucky enough to have a family, would recite the prayers of the Catholic Mass and would imagine receiving Communion. It's a you're not trying to substitute it with some other sort of sham ritual, but you're imagining that you are able to do it and you're imagining all the other Catholics around the world receiving communion at that time sort of on your behalf. You would so you would have sort of might be called sort of or sacks Catholic Masses in your own home. You would baptize and marry and bury at home using rituals that had been designed to retain as much of Catholic sacramentality as possible, but without the presence and assistance of a priest. So because so much of Catholic ritual and practice is taking place in home at the home, that makes it very difficult to detect. It's a great camouflage, right? It's a really great way to continue to find a way to practice your faith without exposing yourself to public danger. But it made it it frustrated colonial officials and ministers who were well aware that this was happening but didn't have any access point into which to see it and find it and prosecute it. And it's very frustrating for historians because people don't leave records of what they do in their home often. So we get back again to the problem of sources.

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[C]

Yeah, I mean, the whole thing is like, let's keep it all private. It's like, well, that works for you in the moment, but it's hard for us to investigate now. To what extent were these suspicions about Catholicism kind of the same if it was just sort of anyone who could be Catholic? I mean, you mentioned right at the beginning that Protestants really seem to be quite concerned about Catholics generally. But was it worse if the people who were suspected were seen as not white, were seen as not English?

[B]

That is another great question. The simple answer is yes. So one of the things that I really was hoping to accomplish in this book was to restore the full multidimensional nature of colonial Catholicism to the historical record. Historians have tended to focus pretty exclusively on white English Catholics, those who are more readily identifiable than the sources, those who had the means and the etiquette, education, and the publishing opportunities to leave us accounts of what they did. But they were, in truth, a minority, the vast majority of people who identified as Catholics. And we can talk later about what that means. Does it mean something different, I think for different groups, but to sort of stipulate at the beginning that if you think you're Catholic, you're Catholic, you know how to find those people who were not white and not English. And so the majority of Catholics, certainly in the 17th century and at least until the first decades of the 18th century, were Irish. They were African, and they were indigenous. And that is a community. All three of those communities that are very obscured in the sources usually did not have either the literacy in English. They may have literacy in their own languages, but the literacy in English and the opportunity to leave US records about what they felt and thought and did. So they are very invisible. And they were invisible to historians for a very long time. Time. So I would say at the colonial settlers at the time, colonial governing authorities and the white settlers were certainly very aware that there were Irish Catholics in their midst, and they worried a great deal about that. They passed periodic laws trying to restrict the importation of Irish servants. They kept close tabs on the Irish who were living in their communities, even in their households. They were always worried that Irish servants might ally themselves with African enslaved peoples, in part because of a shared religious culture, but more importantly for the colonial point of view, because of their shared status as servants and enslaved people who were at the very bottom of the social order. So colonial officials are and Ministers are very acutely aware of the Irish in their midst. They don't seem to be that aware of the number of enslaved Catholics in their midst. In part, this comes from just a general callous, complete indifference to the spiritual lives, inner lives of the enslaved men and women who labored in their households and their plantations. They just really didn't care because didn't really matter to them whether an enslaved man was Catholic or not. What mattered was how much labor they could extract from them. So there is a lot of. There's. There's a kind of silence in the archives. Around the religious lives of enslaved people, especially enslaved Africans. And that makes it harder for the historian to find those who may have either considered themselves Catholics, either because they had been born and raised Catholic in Africa. The kingdom of Congo, Angola. These were Catholic kingdoms at the time of the Atlantic slave trade. And so people who were taken captive in those areas. And then forcibly transported to the Americas Would have been raised as Catholics. And then there were many other Africans laboring in North America. Who had at one time been enslaved Under French, Spanish and Portuguese authorities in other parts of the Americas, and had been forcibly converted, forcibly baptized. Most of those forcible baptisms did not take, as we might say, did not actually change the person's self identity. But there was a significant minority of enslaved Africans had been raised and labored in Spanish and Portuguese and French households who did adopt that fate. So there are many African Catholics in North America, In English America in the 17th and 18th century. They are almost entirely invisible to their. To their slave owners. And to the ministers and magistrates who exercise sovereignty over them or control over them. Indigenous Catholics are in a different category. So they're very aware of Irish Catholics, Kind of oblivious to African Catholics. Indigenous Catholics, however, were notable and were a source of fear and apprehension to English colonists Because they were allied with the French and the Spanish. English indigenous converts to Catholicism who would be found in English America. Were, by and large, either military allies of the French to the north, or enslaved indigenous people of the Catholic missions to the south. So because they were identified with these competing rival empires and nations, There was a great deal of fear around what it was. Would mean to have indigenous Catholics in your midst, not so much on their own behalf, but because of their proximity to and their alliance with imperial powers. So it's a complicated question. I'm sorry I went on so long about it, but it's a complicated question to answer. Because these different communities Occupy different positions of visibility. And different positions of threat to white English authorities. And it makes it harder to kind of put them all in one basket to talk about.

[C]

I mean, yes, technically, but much more interesting to understand all of the different groups and nuances and the kind of way that this isn't sort of just one simple brush of sort of if Catholic, therefore. Right. It's much more complicated and as you said earlier. Right. Contingent, too. So what did this mean, then? If we're looking at the material culture of these different communities, you've told us a bit about the kind of beliefs and the different practices and the way this integrated with other questions of violence and race. Do we have any, like, physical objects of these Catholic communities and the way they're trying to exist, or do we. Can we find anything out from that angle?

[B]

Yeah, that was, I think, both a. It shouldn't have been a surprise to me, but it was that that would be one of the most fruitful avenues to pursue in terms of researching this project. It should have been obvious because, on the one hand, Catholicism as a religious culture is deeply embedded with and deeply identified with materiality, with certain material emblems, symbols of faith, the crucifix, the rosary, the statues of saints, particular kinds of tombstones. The material culture of Catholicism is very rich. It always has been. Catholicism as a world religion has. Has had a deep affinity with these emblems of faith. And it certainly. It was the association with materialism. The materiality was one of the main avenues of attack for Protestant Reformers. They didn't like all of these saint statues, they didn't like all of these relics of bone and splinters of the cross that seemed to be proliferating and be, you know, everywhere in the culture around them. So the materiality of Catholicism is one of the main avenues of attack. And much of the material culture of Catholicism was, in fact, destroyed in the Protestant Reformation in these campaigns of iconoclastic violence that took place both on a kind of spontaneous local level, but also on a national orchestrated level. The very sort of infamous campaign pulling down the altars that the English Crown authorized, Henry VII's son Edward, was very notable for a very vigorous and quite effective campaign that destroyed cathedrals, destroyed the stained windows in these cathedrals, pulled down statues, smashed icons, smashed images of saints, and this continues on periodically throughout the years to come. So a lot of the material culture of Catholicism has been destroyed through these campaigns, and. But what has remained are the smaller devotional items which become so much more important for Catholics living in Protestant lands. The rosary becomes the probably most important object that a colonial Catholic or an English Catholic in General can own, because embedded in the rosary is an entire cycle of prayer. It's the entire theological edifice of Catholicism embedded in these prayers. And it's small art. You can. You can make a rosary out of anything. You can hide it. You can. It can be sort of, you know, squirreled away in your pocket or stashed at the bottom of your trunk when you're migrating. So the smaller devotional items that can be hidden and that can be made out of everyday objects, everyday substances, become the lifeblood of Catholicism in these Protestant lands. So I was really intrigued to sort of find out how much of that material culture I could find. And unfortunately, because these objects are so small and are so fragile and are not necessarily intended to sort of hold up and be, you know, passed on from generation to generation, not of it has disappeared from view. But the archaeological record does give us some evidence that there were rosaries that we can discover buried in and rosary beads even more buried in pits that were discoverable on Catholic plantations. We have a handful of small crucifixes that were clearly made to be very, very small. They're like maybe an inch or two at most, very easy to conceal. Have a kind of homegrown aesthetic to them. These are not things that are great beauty that were made in. In the great workshops of artisans in England that were, in fact fashioned by local artisans, that. We have a wonderful story that comes to us from Montserrat, which is a. An English colony in the. In the Caribbean that is a majority of Catholic and Irish Catholic residents, in which a Irish servant proudly has carved a crucifix out of a piece of wood somewhere on the island and insists on burying it before him as his. As a procession goes, carries the body of his deceased wife to her burial place. So he has managed to find a way to reproduce this ultimate symbol of Catholicism, the crucifix. Clearly, it would not have had any of the ornamentation. It wouldn't. May not have even had a figure of Christ on it, which is what usually distinguishes a crucifix from a cross. But he made it just to assert his Catholicism, came to the attention of the governor, who notoriously allowed it to pass, allowed it to continue. So there are these scattered elements, evidence of these small objects here and there that I could find in the. I could find archaeologists found, and then I read their reports in the record. But another sort of interesting avenue of Catholic material culture was the Catholic sacramental cultures, the baptismal fonts, the larger sort of crucifixes that would have been designed for churches, but ended up being the spoils of war in the many conflicts between England, Spain and France. So in the many wars between England and Spain, There were, for instance, on the island of Jamaica, which was founded by the Spanish, but then was captured by the English in the 1660s. And when the English took over, rather than destroying the Catholic churches on that island, they repurposed them. They turned them into Anglican chapels, and in the process, they kept some of the ornamentation that had been there by. Created by the Catholic church to begin with. So we have these statues who are of. Of saints that are there in Anglican churches in Jamaica that are obviously of Spanish origin, But have been kept to serve now a new Protestant function, a new Protestant community. And so those objects that began their lives as Catholic objects and then became repurposed as Protestant objects Absolutely fascinated me. I wish I could have found more of them, to be honest. I went into this project hoping that there would be a whole material record out there that I could tap into. And I didn't find as much as I had hoped, But I found enough to suggest that this process of material recycling, repurposing, in fact, is going on in almost every colonial region, not just in the West Indies, when you have Spanish colonies now becoming English by virtue of conquest. It's also happening in Maine and in northern Massachusetts, areas where the French and the English have been battling it out for centuries. Many wars as well, between the French and the English that are taking place in the northern parts of North America. And the same process of recycling devotional objects is happening there as well. And so it became, for me, a wonderful sort of example of how these religious cultures that meet and mingle and coexist in North America, that start as in positions of antagonism toward one another and often continue to hate and fear one another, Become combined in and hybridized in unusual ways. So to have the idea of a. A baptismal fount created in Senegal by African Catholics, taken, seized at sea by English privateers, and end up in a church, an Anglican church in New Hampshire, is just as as far wonderful sort of story of how these religious cultures mingle and mix in ways that surprise us.

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[C]

Yeah, this mingling and mixing I definitely found quite surprising. And even just the example you gave a moment ago of kind of, well, what's the difference between a crucifix and a cross? Like, there seem to be so many similarities here, and especially with what you mentioned earlier of the kind of lack of priests. I mean, it seems like there could be ways for all this to sort of overlap a little bit. I mean, rural Protestant communities would also not have a lot of priests, Right. So, like, could they maybe go to the same services and just like mutter different words under their breaths? I mean, was that kind of hybridization a possibility?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, that, that, absolutely that happened. And I was really intrigued by this notion that we tend to think of hybridization syncretism as happening on the borders and fringes of very radically different religious traditions. Right. African enslaved Africans who bring their own traditions from Africa, meet white colonists with their Christian traditions, and out of that mixture comes something that is a hybridized form of Protestantism. That's a story that historians of slavery have told us for a long time. But we don't think of Protestant and Catholic as being hybridized in that same way. It's usually Catholicism and Islam or Protestantism and the animist traditions of Africa or Native America being hybridized. But I think that something similar is happening. It's subtle and it's taking place at the level of ritual. But you're exactly right. The same conditions of scarcity that affected colonial Catholics. No priests or very, very few priests, very few churches. Honestly, for much of the 17th century, very few of the material signs of their own faith. A Protestant in Massachusetts or in New York or in Virginia in the early 17th century was living in a land that didn't have chapels and churches that had, you know, served generations of people before him, didn't have the graveyards that had been the homes of his and his family's loved ones for generations past. So they didn't. Protestants also did not have these material signs of their faith. And so they also had to improvise and they also had to make do. And the shortage of, of clergy, whether we're talking Protestant ministers or Catholic priests, is one of the constant conditions of colonial life. Almost no colonial community had sufficient ministers, clergy to serve them until well into the 18th century. The Puritans in Massachusetts are the one exception to this. So we're going to put them aside for just a moment. But everywhere else in North America, including into the Caribbean colonies, there was a severe shortage of clergy. And so just as it was hard for a Catholic family to baptize their children in a church, it was also hard for a Protestant family to do so. And so what we find is that that domestication of, of ritual life that I talked about earlier as a, and it's as an especial burden challenge for Catholic families becomes something that Protestants also had to face. What's so interesting is that Protestant settlers in the colonies begin to exhibit a real preference for doing, performing many of these sacraments of faith. They're not sacraments necessarily for them, they're rituals of faith. But they also prefer to do these at home, even though, even when they did have a minister available or church administer available. So this domestication of ritual becomes a really pervasive fact of colonial religious life that affects both Protestants and Catholics to the fury of so many clergy. So we have Protestant ministers complaining endlessly that their parishioners don't want to come to church and have their weddings performed in the church. They prefer to have them done at home. They don't want to bring their children to the church to be baptized. They would rather have it done at home. And in part, this is a question of money. Religion often comes down to money. The priests and the ministers, I'm sorry, the ministers would. There was a whole schedule of fees that they could charge to perform these, these rituals within the church. And when they're being taken and done, being done at someone's house, they're kind of at the mercy of the generous impulses of their hosts who can choose to pay them or not pay them. So. So there's always a little bit of money involved in this as well. But really it's more a question, I think, of the laity imposing more control over these rituals, there is a deep well of anti clericalism, I think, in much of the, of colonial North America, a deep aversion to allowing men of wealth and men of gentility and men of education to have that kind of power over their lives. And people preferred to do this at home and to have the ministers come to them as their guests rather than go to, to their homes, the churches as their supplicants. So it's a really interesting process that's occurring on both sides of that confessional divide in Protestant and Catholic households alike.

[C]

Yeah, this is a really interesting part of it because again, as you're saying, it's not just between the different communities, it's also within them as well. So adding additional nuance to what we've been discussing. But in that list there of baptisms and weddings, you talk in the book as well about funerals and perhaps argue that funerals, even more than those two, might have been the most contentious. So why was that?

[B]

They were. I mean, historically speaking, funerals were flashpoints for a lot of religious antagonism, religious conflict. And in part it's because I think funerals are first of all the last chance that somebody has their family and their communities have to signal the, the end of a life well lived and the beginning of that next journey into the afterlife. To die well and to bury well is one of the most cherished, cherished goals of Christians in this period. Funerals can happen at home, burials can happen at home. But most people really wanted to be buried in consecrated or hallowed ground, ground that had been set aside and blessed in some form by the church or by the representatives of the church as being a place of holiness and sanctity. So this desire to be buried and buried in hallowed ground is. It's a deep, human one, I think. I think we see it in a lot of different cultures, although they may have their own ways of hollowing and sacralizing the ground, own ways of understanding what that means. But I think this desire to have one's final resting place be something special and set apart is deeply human. And so funerals become sort of the last battleground of these communities that are trying to live their own life in the face of this oppressive imperial structure. And we see tussles breaking out, fights breaking out over funerals, over burials in England. And the same thing happens in the colonies as well. So I think that a funeral again encapsulates some of the deepest desires of colonial Christians and some of the deepest fears. That is, when you are gone, that you will be forgotten, that you will not have a way to continue to have a presence in the lives of the people that you have left behind. So there's a lot of skirmishing, a lot of battles over burials, nocturnal burials, sort of the secret burials became one of the prime ways that Catholics in England could protest second class status and insist upon their right to have a Christian life as they defined it. And these battles are notorious. There are whole books written about the kind of funeral battles that broke out in England in villages and communities throughout the 17th century. And some of this does come to the colonies as well. When you start to look away from the usual subjects of these stories, the white Catholics and their funeral battles, and begin to think about what did it mean for enslaved Catholic or an indigenous convert to have a funeral of their own making, of their own meaning? The story then becomes even more complicated and, and in many ways tragic. I think of all the things, indignities, of all the violences perpetrated on enslaved Africans in the New World, the denial of burial was, was perhaps one of the cruelest. There's a deep attachment to having again, in African religious cultures as well as in, in Christian ones, it's a deep connection to the land and a deep desire to be buried in soil, in, in the ground, surrounded by and amidst and done and you know, with the proper rituals and proper ceremonies of one's faith. One of the cruelest fates that could await an enslaved African of any religious conviction was death at sea during the middle Passage, when dead bodies were simply tossed overboard and there was no way to mark that burial site, no way to maintain any connection with ancestors and with families and with gods. And so that sort of fear of being abandoned in the afterlife, of being lost and having no tangible resting place, surfaces again and again in the colonies. And it was one of the additional barriers, I think, that African Catholics faced in these, in this new world societies. Most English Catholics who, you know, in the colonies, white English Catholics, found a way to bury their loved ones in a way that felt sufficient to them. I would say. I think that was almost impossible for enslaved African Catholics.

[C]

Yeah. Very contentious and difficult indeed. Now, one thing that we've been doing in this conversation is not overgeneralizing, kind of all Catholics, all Protestants. Right. And that's what's important and interesting here. But you do cover quite a lot of time and space in doing all of these nuanced investigations. Were there any trends that you observed?

[B]

Yeah, I did find that by the end of this, and you're right, I was trying very hard to respect these localities, respect these local differences, to not make the mistake of assuming that what it meant to be baptized would be the same for an enslaved African as it would be for a wealthy white woman living on a plantation in Maryland. So while at the same time I was trying to create a story of colonial Catholicism that could at least make room for these different communities of race and gender and wealth and status, I didn't want to assume that the experiences were all the same. So I tell a lot of stories that are very specific in time and place, I think, throughout the book. But then at the end, I did step back, and I wanted to, in the conclusion, try to find some larger patterns. And there were a few that stood out. One of them is one I've already talked about quite a bit already, which is the domestication of faith. That faith for colonial Catholics was something that took place largely in the home and not in the church. And this was. This went well beyond the sacraments that I've already talked about of baptism, marriage, and burial. It also meant maintaining the liturgical calendar of feasting and fasting, for instance, that is so important for Catholics, that is to. To fast on certain days of the year, to feast, which essentially means taking communion on other days of the year. And maintaining that calendar was something that became even more important for Catholics everywhere living in Protestant lands after the Reformation, because those are one thing they had most under their control. So the importance of the home as the site of the most important rituals of faith, faith is. Is a very common denominator that I've already talked about. The other one, though, that I want to talk about now is the centrality of women to. To the practice of faith. And in fact, that follows directly on the first point. That is, as these rituals of faith become domestic and become things that happen within the home, more than happening within the Church, they come under the purview of women more and more. So what we find this is a. A pretty, I think, consistent theme throughout the lives of colonial Catholics, whether they are white, whether they were Irish or English or African or native, that women take a starring role in much of the practice of faith. It is the women who decide whether to maintain the fasting calendar, right to not prepare meat on Fridays, to have to only prepare one meal a day on other days of abstinence and fasting. It is women who host the itinerant priests when they. When they are available, and they do come under again the cloak of darkness and secrecy to the Catholic homes. It is women who greet them. It is women who maintain the utensils and the devotional objects and the priestly garments that are going to be available to that priest as he performs a secret mass in a. In a home. It is the women who oversee the burial, the burial preparations is women who wash the body. It is women who dress the body. It is women who gather together the grievers around the body. It is women who are present at baptisms. In fact, women midwives are in fact, authorized to perform baptisms in cases of extremity by the Catholic Church itself. That is the recognition that sometimes children are born and face death immediately, and there just simply isn't time to have a priest come and baptize them. So in those traditions of extremity, women in the roles. But midwives can perform those kind of baptisms. So in every respect, at every sort of point along the lifetime of a Catholic, from birth to death, women are presiding over doing the organizational work, doing the commemorative work, doing the communal work of gathering people together in these households. So I would say that is one of the most important themes that ties together the different stories told about different communities throughout this book.

[C]

Yeah, I think that's a really lovely place perhaps, to bring our conversation to a close. But was there anything else that we haven't talked about yet, Especially any sort of intriguing detail or find that you came across in putting this all together that you want to mention that we haven't yet?

[B]

I think I would just re. Emphasize something that I have already said, which is that so much of what we know about these people's lives does come to us from tainted sources, from sources of. Written by people who did not understand them, did not respect them, and wanted to destroy them. And so it's impossible to write with a lot of confidence and a lot of sureness, I think, about the actual lives of people. And I tried throughout this book to give my own readings and my interpretations of the evidence, such as it existed, pointing out wherever I could where the evidence was incomplete or contradictory or in some cases, clearly false, in order to sort of leave room for my readers to tell their own stories and to come to their own conclusions about the evidence that we have. I think the place where this is most important is in trying to evaluate the degree of religious conviction, fiction, or ardor. In the case of enslaved Africans, it is such a blank. It is such an area of absence in the records. And we really do have to create a kind of imagined bridge between our own selves as scholars and researchers and interpreters and the lives of people whose Existence in the records is in itself a mark of the violence done to them them. And so I would invite readers to sort of come to their own conclusions about what Catholicism meant to an enslaved African, as well as to Irish servants, as well as to colonial women, as well as to indigenous converts, all the people for whom we only have the words of others to document their existence.

[C]

That's a lovely place to end our conversation about the book, leaving me with just a final question. You mentioned right at the beginning of our discussion that this book in some ways came out of work you had done before. So has this sparked a new idea? Do you have an upcoming project you want to tell us about?

[B]

Oh, I wish I could say yes to that answer. One of the consequences of moving from a position as a faculty member to a research administrator is that my time to do research is fairly limited right now. But I am returning to an incident that I've always been fascinated by, which is the very unhappy history of John and Charles Wesley, the great founders of Methodism in Savannah, Georgia in the 1730s. Not many people know that John and Charles Wesley sort of began their ministerial careers as missionaries sent to Savannah in the 1730s. They didn't succeed. They had a miserable time. They essentially driven out within 18 months with their tails between their legs. And I'm just fascinated by what happened there. It is involves I know from what little I do know about this incident that it does involve the women of Georgia essentially deciding both individually and collectively that they wanted nothing to do with these two men. So women are at the center of that story as well. It's also a story of a battle over sacraments. The thing that John Wesley eventually was kicked out for was refusing to administer communion to a woman who had spurned his romantic overtures. So it involves religion, it involves gender, it involves this sort of eternal battle between the laity and the clergy. All the things I've been interested in for much of my career. So I will be revisiting that episode and seeing what else I can make of it.

[C]

Well, that certainly sounds like a fascinating investigation. And of course, for listeners who want more about the fascinating investigation we've just been discussing, the book is titled A Common Being Catholic in English America, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2025. Susan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[B]

Well, thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.

[A]

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