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The Catholic Refuge - Toleration
In 1649, Maryland passed the first law in English America to use the words "free exercise" of religion — a narrow, conditional, but genuinely remarkable order that quarreling Christians leave each other in peace. It was a fortification thrown up in a hurry by a Catholic lord losing his grip: the King beheaded, the charter worthless, a Protestant majority filling his colony. And in a bitter irony, the law was Protestant toleration of Catholics, passed by the very majority that would, within six years, repeal it.
This is the story of how the high-water mark broke. Of the Puritans whom Catholic…
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