Reading of "Rulers of Evil" F. Tupper Saussy by Jörg Glismann End Chap 11

BEFORE THE American Revolution, Roman Catholics were barred from voting or holding public office throughout theBritish colonies. They were a persecuted minority everywhere but in the proprietary domain of William Penn (Pennsylvania and Delaware). Some of their most energetic persecutors, in fact, were the very Huguenots whom the Catholics had chased out of France in the wake of Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

The basis of Roman Catholic persecution was political. Catholics owed allegiance to Pontifex Maximus, the Bishop of Rome. The Bishop of Rome was a foreign ruler who, as a matter of public policy, regarded the British king and his Protestant Church
as heretics to be destroyed. From the American colonists' standpoint, to allow Catholics to vote or hold office was tantamount to surrendering their colonies to a foreign conqueror. A crucial part of maintaining personal liberty in Protestant colonial America was keeping Roman Catholics out of government. But then came the
Revolution. The colonial citizenry fought for and won their independence from Great Britain. They established a Constitution that amounted to . . . surrendering their country to a foreign conqueror. Consider the legalities. Before the Constitution was ratified, American Catholics had few civil rights; after ratification, they had them all. Article VI, section 3 provides that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the authority of the United States,” while the First Amendment denies Congress the power “to make any law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” With Article IV Section 3 and the First Amendment, the Constitution welcomed agents of Pontifex Maximus, the world's chief enemy of Protestantism, into the ranks of government.