Roads to Rome: the antebellum Protestant encounter with Catholicism

Abstract

The mixture of hostility and fascination with which native-born Protestants viewed the "foreign" practices of the "immigrant" church is the focus of Jenny Franchot's cultural, literary, and religious history of Protestant attitudes toward Roman Catholicism in nineteenth-century America.Franchot analyzes the effects of religious attitudes on historical ideas about America's origins and destiny. She then focuses on the popular tales of convent incarceration, with their Protestant "maidens" and lecherous, tyrannical Church superiors. Religious captivity narratives, like those of Indian captivity, were part of the ethnically, theologically, and sexually charged discourse of Protestant nativism.Discussions of Stowe, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Lowell - writers who sympathized with "Romanism" and used its imaginative properties in their fiction - further demonstrate the profound influence of religious forces on American national character.