Our Dear-Bought Liberty

An impressive work of historical scholarship that makes a persuasive case for the importance of American Catholics in the story of American religious liberty...Breidenbach has broken new ground. -- Lael Weinberger * National Review * An original, provocative contribution to the study of U.S. Catholic history. -- George Weigel * First Things * The definitive treatment of the Catholic quest for religious toleration in America...An excellent work that should be read by anyone interested in church-state relations in early America. -- Mark David Hall * Law & Liberty * What has medieval Catholic ecclesiology and political thought to do with the US Constitution? Much more than anyone thought, it turns out, as Breidenbach shows in this impressively researched, superbly argued, and beautifully written book. Our Dear-Bought Liberty will compel a rethinking of church-state relations, religious liberty and toleration, and the place of Catholicism in American history. A truly important, original work. -- Brad S. Gregory, author of <i>The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society</i> Breidenbach's provocative book makes the case for Catholics' intellectual contributions to the juridical separation of church and state. Ranging from medieval jurist John of Paris to James Madison, this vigorously argued, richly sourced work should permanently widen the lens through which American constitutional history is discussed and debated. -- Catherine O'Donnell, author of <i>Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship</i> An extremely interesting and well-written book. It isn't easy to make a new contribution to the much-studied topic of religious liberty in colonial America, but Breidenbach does so by exploring the subject within the broad tradition of conciliarist or Gallican Catholic thinking about the nature of papal authority. Situating the American experience within an often overlooked dimension of European religious history, he offers a valuable perspective on historical questions that remain enormously important to the study of early America, early modern Britain, and the Atlantic world. -- Jeffrey Collins, author of <i>In the Shadow of Leviathan: John Locke and the Politics of Conscience</i> In this remarkably well researched book, Breidenbach shows that Anglo-American Catholics embraced a centuries-old intellectual tradition within Catholicism to contribute to the idea of church-state separation that ultimately took root in the United States. He deftly shows that American Catholics were not the grateful beneficiaries of church-state separation; rather, they were early-and natural-architects of it. -- Maura Jane Farrelly, author of <i>Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity</i> Our Dear-Bought Liberty sheds new light on the Catholic origins of religious liberty in the United States and its constitutional tradition. Although colonial Catholics are often forgotten and overlooked, Breidenbach asserts their wide-ranging impact in the Maryland colony and the nascent republic as they helped shape the American understanding of religious liberty. This extensively researched and eloquent work leads the reader to a greater appreciation of this central theme advanced by Catholics from the Constitutional Convention to the Second Vatican Council. -- Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York