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Competing Loyalties: Nationality, Church Governance, And The Development Of An American Catholic Identity, Margaret Wilson Gillikin

Margaret Wilson Gillikin

The Catholic community in Charleston, South Carolina, found itself torn by competing identities and conflicting ideas about how to be Catholic in the new American democracy. During the late eighteenth century hundreds of refugees arrived in Charleston from France and Saint Domingue as a result of the French and Haitian Revolutions, and numerous immigrants from Ireland found their way to Charleston as well. A complicated struggle over who should be their priest, the one chosen by the local trustees or the one appointed by their bishop in Baltimore, developed and tore the worshiping community apart. Debates like the one that …