Thomas Jefferson Owes Thomas Aquinas

Several months ago, I came across a two-volume history of the Church in the United States I’d never read before: Theodore Maynard’s “The Story of American Catholicism,” first published in 1941. Maynard was not a professional historian and his telling of the American Catholic story has a bit more of the apologetic edginess of early 20th-century Catholicism than a 21st-century audience might find congenial. Yet Dr. Maynard manifestly did his homework in the pioneering tomes of such giants of U.S. Catholic history as John Gilmary Shea and Peter Guilday; his judgments are usually judicious, even if his ecumenical sensibility is not overly developed; and every once in a while he comes up with an insight that is truly refreshing—and very neatly put.

Take, for example, the following passage—a bit baroque rhetorically, but nonetheless worth pondering: