Angelus News | July 12, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 14

AD REM
ROBERT BRENNAN
America’s ecumenical prophet
You probably didn’t
know this, but George
Washington once had
a brief correspondence with
Moses.
Moses Seixas, that is, who
back in 1790 was the warden
of the Touro synagogue
in Newport, Rhode Island.
The Bill of Rights was still
a year away from ratification,
and Washington was
the leader of a brand-new
country.
Washington was a man of
firsts: He was the nation’s
first president, the first
general of a new army, and
one of the first promoters of
religious liberty.
He could have been a dictator,
but he deferred advice
upon his election to the
highest office in the land
when someone suggested
his title should be “sire” and
opted instead for the simple
“Mister President.” He left
most of the heavy lifting of
forming a liberal democracy
to others. But when it came
time to implement some
of these lofty revolutionary
concepts, he had no equal.
After Washington’s groundbreaking
visit to the synagogue,
Seixas wrote him a
thank-you letter characterizing the event as one of many “…
blessings of civil and religious liberty which we enjoy under
an equal benign administration. …”
There was no instant messaging here, no BTWs, LOLs or
IDKs. This was a time when letters were the sole means of
nonverbal communication and, by the 18th century, writing
them had become an art form when quills were in the hands
of men like Seixas and Washington.
The president’s response to the letter from the warden of the
Pope Francis delivers an address from Independence Hall in Philadelphia in 2016. He
spoke near a statue of George Washington to an estimated crowd of 50,000 people. |
CNS/RICK MUSACCHIO, TENNESSEE REGISTER
synagogue was characteristically
formal and powerful.
“May the children of the
stock of Abraham who
dwell in this land, continue
to merit and enjoy the good
will of other inhabitants.”
Washington was our first
ecumenical prophet, too.
But his pursuit of religious
liberty did not begin in Rhode
Island in 1790, nor at the
Constitutional Convention
in Philadelphia in 1787, or
in 1774, when Washington
attended a Catholic liturgy.
He was by no means some
kind of “secret” Catholic,
but his actions meant a lot
in light of the recent rules
and regulations held fast
before the British were
uninvited to control the
American colonies.
Before the War of Independence,
Catholics in only
three of the 13 American
colonies were allowed to
vote. According to the National
Council for History
Education’s 2016 “Catholics
in America” project,
“most of the New England
colonies and the Carolinas
prohibited Catholics from
holding office; Virginia
would have priests arrested
for entering the colony; Catholic schools were banned in all
colonies except Pennsylvania. “
In 1775, the year before the Declaration of Independence,
General Washington was preoccupied with figuring out how
to not be obliterated by the power and might of the British
Empire. Yet, he took time to issue an order to his army that
had nothing to do with battlement, troop movements, or
strategy.
It was November and an anti-Catholic tradition that had
24 • ANGELUS • July 12, 2024