The Catholic Church Dominating North America.

"The first Thanksgiving in America was a Catholic Mass."

-Recent picture on Facebook.​

I don't know about this one though. I was raised Catholic, and when I was younger I would have thought the RC church dominating North America was a good thing. But not anymore. The Catholic Church was evil. It was anti-democratic and supported torture. People like Oliver Cromwell were pretty evil too, and he was evil for persecuting Catholics. But if I had a choice between the RC church or Oliver Cromwell, I'd still choose Cromwell.

And people say that England was hanging people just for being Catholic and attending mass in private. Maybe. But they did grant all protestants the right to worship in the Act of Toleration in 1689. Sure they persecuted Catholics even under Queen Elizabeth I. But that was only because Pope Pius V told Catholics in England in 1570 he really wouldn't mind if they killed the queen. Sure Queen Elizabeth was evil by todays standards. Everyone back then would be. But she was one of the better people of that time. And she did support individual rights, and ruled in a constitutional monarchy. Which is basically the same as a secular democracy now, most would say.

 

That was in Florida, then a Spanish colony, over half a century before the Pilgrims.

That's a little misleading, because it projects modern concepts of constitutional monarchy onto an earlier time. To call what Elizabeth I had as basically "democracy" in any sense of the word is fantasy. A constitutional monarchy is one in which the monarch is constrained by a constitution and doesn't make decisions alone. As early as the tenth century in England, the monarch was expected to consult with a Great Council on important matters like going to war. But that consisted entirely of the nobles and clergy--nothing democratic about it, and very feudal. The king depended on the the knights and barons for his military muscle. In 1215, the noblemen had forced the king to give them and their Council certain rights: protection from illegal imprisonment, impartial justice, and limitations on their feudal payments to the monarch. Not long after that, the Council became known as Parliament, and its consent was needed to pass taxes and to receive petitions for the redress of grievances from the citizenry. And Parliament split into a bi-cameral body, the House of Lords and the House of Commons--the latter including elected representatives from the lesser nobility and the more prosperous of the mercantile, who were gaining in economic power. That is what Queen Elizabeth I inherited. In 1689, after the Glorious Revolution brought William and Mary to the throne, after Lizzie was long gone, the English Bill of Rights was adopted, limiting the rights of the monarchy and establishing Parliament in a dominant position over it . This is when England became a true constitutional monarchy as we use the term today. But it was hardly a democracy. That didn't happen until 1832, when males with substantial property were given the right to vote. It wasn't until 1897 and the Representation of the People Act that most men and women got suffrage, and even then there were property requirements and a higher age requirement for women than men .