When Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost of Chicago was announced as Pope Leo XIV, people went racing to find some connection to the first American pope.
Chicago White Sox supporters found a fellow fan; photos have turned up showing the future pope at a World Series game in 2005.
Villanova grads found one of the most impressive alumni notes of all time; some students in the 1970s shared classes with the math major who went on to become pope.
There’s no clear Virginia connection that we know of, except for a philosophical and constitutional one: It was Virginians in the 1700s who embraced what was then the radical concept of religious liberty, which allowed the Catholic faith to flourish in a place that once banned its practice.
Thomas Jefferson was so proud of his work on that front that he made sure it was inscribed on his tombstone: “Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom, & Father of the University of Virginia.”
Virginia legislators wrote religious freedom into the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776, a document which later helped influence the U.S. Bill of Rights, which famously begins with “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …” Men such as George Mason and James Madison had a hand in all that. However, it was one of the less philosophical Virginians of that era who may have made the most practical moves to extend friendship to those who followed Catholicism, then seen by many as a foreign and dangerous faith. That Virginian was George Washington.
To understand how unusual all that was, we must go back beyond the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to the bloody religious wars of Europe, specifically the turmoil that followed King Henry VIII’s break with Rome in 1534. A Protestant fear of Catholicism lay behind many of the royal dynastic struggles that followed, because not all those in Britain chose to follow the Church of England, although they did so at great risk. There are some scholars who believe that William Shakespeare was secretly Catholic. Certainly there were British subjects of that era who adhered to Catholicism, usually secretly. Archaeological digs at Jamestown have turned up six crucifixes, which Historic Jamestown says “suggests Catholics were among the first settlers in the English new world.” In 2015, archaeologists in Jamestown unearthed the grave of Captain Gabriel Archer, who died in the winter of 1609-10 and was buried with what some believe are Catholic relics.
History is complicated. Virginia was officially hostile to Catholicism, and the presence of a Catholic-friendly colony next door in Maryland exacerbated matters. In 1642, the House of Burgesses specifically banned Catholic priests from entering the colony, and the practice of Catholicism in Virginia. Nonetheless, in 1651, a Catholic adherent named Giles Brent settled in Stafford County and became prominent enough that he served as a militia captain.
In Britain, the ascension of the Catholic James II to the throne triggered the so-called “Glorious Revolution” that brought the Protestant William and Mary to the throne. That upheaval brought about the English Bill of Rights, which the rebellious colonists of the 1770s insisted they were trying to uphold against violations by royal authority. The point being: Those religious conflicts were not all that distant to our founders, who came to take a very different view of things.
Patrick Henry first came to the public’s attention in a celebrated case called “the Parson’s Cause” that pitted him against the official Church of England. James Madison was outraged that Baptist ministers in Virginia were being jailed for preaching without a license, which was then required.
In June 1776, Virginia was in a state of open rebellion against the crown. It had chased off the royal governor and had formally declared independence, months before the Continental Congress did so on behalf of all the Colonies. In any case, Virginia needed a new set of laws to fit its new condition. One of the measures it passed that June was the Virginia Declaration of Rights. When that declaration came to religion, the original draft called for the “fullest toleration.” Madison proposed a different phrase. He argued that the wording “implied that one religion was approved while the government would merely put up with others,” according to a historical account posted by Montpelier, Madison’s estate in Orange County. Instead, Madison proposed the more expansive “free exercise of religion.” That’s what Virginia adopted, setting the stage for the standard written into the U.S. Constitution years later.
Simply arguing for the theoretical freedom of religions was not necessarily the same as being friendly with those of other faiths. Jefferson was particularly complex. He argued that the “free exercise of religion” was “meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.” Meanwhile, he also authored numerous letters that made clear his distaste for the Catholic Church. He was skeptical that Mexico would ever establish a democracy because Mexicans were “a priest-ridden people” and that “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty.”
It was Washington — known more as a doer than a thinker — who may have done the most to make sure that Catholics were welcomed in the new country he helped birth. In November 1775, General Washington, camped out in Boston, became aware of plans to burn an effigy of the pope — then Pope Pius VI — as part of the Guy Fawkes Day celebration, then known as Pope’s Day in the Colonies. He issued orders that denounced the “ridiculous and childish Custom of burning the Effigy of the pope.” To be sure, his thinking was motivated by military realities. Americans were still hoping to win support from French-speaking (and Catholic) Quebec. “At such a juncture, and in such Circumstances, to be insulting their Religion, is so monstrous, as not to be suffered, or excused.”
Beyond that, Washington often socialized with Charles Carroll, a prominent Marylander who was Catholic and the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence (and a key financier of the revolution). Washington was well-known for ignoring politics when it came to appointing military officers, instead choosing them on the basis of merit, then something considered unusual. Accordingly, Washington appointed several Catholics as officers in the Continental Army. His aide-de-camp or personal assistant, Col. John Fitzgerald, was Catholic. John Barry, the first American to be put in command of a naval warship during the Revolution, was Catholic. Years later, when Washington became president, he named Barry as the new nation’s first naval officer with the rank of “commodore.” None of this would have happened under the British, who required officers to swear that they weren’t Catholic.
Washington was also known to attend services in churches that weren’t his own, which he later wrote was intended to set an example to fellow Americans that all faiths were welcome, according to a historical account posted by Mount Vernon. On at least two occasions, Washington attended St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Philadelphia, including once during an important political juncture: “While the American Constitution was being drafted in Philadelphia during the Constitutional Convention, George made a point to lead all the delegates to Mass being celebrated nearby at St. Mary’s Catholic Church,” the website Good Catholic says. “This sent a message to the political representatives of the nation: Catholics were to be treated with the same respect as all other citizens.” This came at a time when many states still imposed restrictions on Catholics. It might not have been an accident that the first public religious celebration of the Declaration of Independence was at St. Mary’s.
When the first Catholic bishop in the United States was named in 1790, then-President Washington wrote an open letter of congratulations: “All those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the Community are equally entitled to the protection of civil Government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations in examples of justice and liberality. And I presume that your fellow-citizens will not forget the patriotic part which you took in the accomplishment of their Revolution, and the establishment of their Government: or the important assistance which they received from a nation in which the Roman Catholic faith is professed.”
That same year Washington wrote a more famous letter to a Jewish congregation in Rhode Island that expressed the same sentiments: “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights … the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.”
The Mount Vernon website says that Washington personally donated to help construct a Catholic church in Baltimore. The Good Catholic website says he gave money to Catholic churches in Baltimore and Philadelphia. The Basilica of Saint Mary in Alexandria says that Washington “made a large contribution” toward purchasing the land for that church, a donation the church’s website says grew out of a St. Patrick’s Day celebration at the home of Col. Fitzgerald. Accordingly, in 1932, on the bicentennial of Washington’s birth, the church held a Solemn High Mass of Thanksgiving. “Father Richard Blackburn Washington of Hot Springs, Virginia, a [collateral] descendent of President Washington, was the celebrant,” the church history says. “The church was decorated in red, white and blue bunting. Bishop Andrew J. Brenna of Richmond, Bishop John J. McNamara of Baltimore and 30 other priests participated. The U.S. Marines provided an honor guard and a trumpeter from the Marine Band played with the parish choir.”
Washington certainly did not eliminate all anti-Catholic bigotry in the United States, but he helped push open a door for American Catholics that had previously been shut. Before the American Revolution, most of the Colonies imposed some sort of restrictions on Catholics; by the time Washington took office as president, those were all gone — and prohibited by the new Constitution whose drafting convention he had presided over (although that First Amendment came later, two years into Washington’s first term). Nearly a decade ago, the website Catholic Stand wrote: “Catholics have perhaps more reason than other Americans to keep the memory of Washington alive in our hearts.”
In 1895, the pope issued an encyclical on the state of Catholicism in the United States. The pope praised “the great Washington … that illustrious citizen of yours” who befriended the first bishop in the country. “The well-known friendship and familiar intercourse which subsisted between these two men seems to be an evidence that the United States ought to be conjoined in concord and amity with the Catholic Church,” the pope wrote. He praised the U.S. Constitution that meant “the church in America, fettered by no hostile legislation, protected against violence by the common laws and the impartiality of the tribunals, is free to live and act without hindrance.”
That pope, however, closed on this note: “Finally, We cannot pass over in silence those whose long-continued unhappy lot implores and demands succor from men of apostolic zeal; We refer to the Indians and the negroes who are to be found within the confines of America …”
Who was that 19th century pope who praised Washington, American religious liberty but regretted the “unhappy lot” of some Americans of color?
Pope Leo XIII, from whom today’s Pope Leo has taken his name.
The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a multiyear project to tell the little-known aspects of Virginia’s role in independence. You can read the stories we’ve already done on our Cardinal 250 page. You can also sign up for our monthly Cardinal 250 newsletter; the next one comes out Tuesday. You can sign up for that or any of our free newsletter (including our weekly political newsletter, West of the Capital) below: