On May 26, 1647, Massachusetts Bay Colony Banned Catholic Jesuits

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On May 26, 1647, the Massachusetts Bay General Court officially passed a law banning Jesuit Catholic priests from the Bay Colony.

In part, the law was passed because Puritans insisted upon purifying themselves and protecting the Protestant faith from Catholicism and other religious groups including Quakers and Baptists. The Puritans has originally broken away from the Church of England because it hadn't fully extricated itself from Catholic practices such as holy water, crucifixes and stained glass windows. 

"In the early days the New England colonists considered priests as 'unclean spirits' who should not be allowed within the limits of the colony," according to historian Arthur Reilly, in his scholarly book, Catholicism in New England to 1788.

The other part was political: the Puritans were worried about the incursion of the French from Canada, who were encroaching on Maine, which was then part of the Massachusetts Bay colony.  The French Jesuits were converting Indians to Catholicism, raising the scenario that the French could induce the Indians to help defeat the Protestant New Englanders as the two European powers sought to carve out territories in America. 

It was "the only penal law against the presence of priests to be enacted in 17th century New England," writes Reilly.   "To ensure observance of this law, heavy penalties were annexed,  One suspected of being a member of the Jesuits or an ecclesiastic subject to the See of Rome was to be tried before a magistrate.  If suspicion remained and could be proved, the Court of Assistants was to banish or otherwise proceed against him.  Anyone, so banished, taken a second time, would be put to death after lawful trial and conviction."

In November 1688, indentured servant and house servant Ann Glover, a Catholic, was hung as a witch in Boston, seemingly for casting a Satanic spell on children and at her trial, speaking in tongues, which was actually the Gaelic language.  

In the 18th century, one of the most anti-Catholic displays occurred during the annual Pope's Day holiday in Boston November 5, when Bostonians burned effigies of the Pope in a violent clash between the north and south sides of the town.   The ritual was stopped by General George Washington in November 1775 when he ordered his troops to end the "ridiculous and childish custom." 

Even though Catholics were eventually accepted, starting with a public mass being celebrated in Boston in 1788, anti-Catholic sentiment in New England continued in many quarters.   That prejudice reached a high point in the 1850s, when Irish refugees escaping the Irish Famine landing in Boston, fueling an anti-Catholic movement that came to be called the Know Nothings.  

In September 1888, the Boston Home Journal attacked Father James O'Brien, the son of Boston Mayor Hugh O'Brien, and 'accused' him of being a Jesuit.  The newspaper wrote:

"And this we believe: that no person can be a true American who acknowledges the temporal sovereignty of the Pope; that no person can be a true American who surrenders to a priest his rights as an individual, and his authority as a parent....We know it is said that the mayor's son is not a Jesuit; but we are not compelled to believe this denial."

Read more about the 1647 Jesuit ban at MassMoments.  

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