The Anti-Catholic Roots of the Thanksgiving Holiday

I have grown fond of saying, ‘Everyone is Catholic on Saint Patrick’s Day.’ I say that because on every March 17th, at least in the United States, you’ll find people of every sect, creed, and religion wearing green, saying ‘Happy Saint Paddy’s Day’ to friends and strangers alike, and drinking and eating things that should never be the color green. And indeed, many of these souls also happen to be some of the most anti-Catholic persons since John Calvin himself.

It is true, along with many other things, that the Catholic community has lost control of the message of what Saint Patrick and his Feast Day is about. Whether Catholics will ever resuscitate the true meaning of that honored Feast Day will certainly have to overcome Timothy Cardinal Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, serving as Grand Marshall of the first St. Patrick’s Day in which openly homosexual groups march, to which Cardinal applauded (bravo), saying, “I have no trouble with the decision at all … I think the decision is a wise one.”

The Calvinistic and Anti-Catholic Roots of Thanksgiving Day

At least Catholics are not alone in losing control over the original purpose of one of their most honored celebrations. Originally, Thanksgiving Days were the Protestant response to the litany of Catholic Church Holy Days, which required the faithful to attend Mass. Two years after King Henry VIII (1491-1547) had consecrated the Church of England – making himself the supreme head, and during the same year (1536 – perhaps the initial height of the formal repression of Catholicism and Catholics in England) that his Parliament passed the Act Against the Pope’s Authority, Henry also established his church’s own calendar with only 27 Holy Days.

Yet, King Henry’s reforms were not enough for the Puritans, who desired to completely do away with all Church Holy Days, including Christmas and Easter. Their idea was to replace all Holy Days with Days of Fasting or Days of Thanksgiving. Days of Fasting would be for repentance after unexpected disasters. In contrast, Days of Thanksgiving would be celebrated after clear evidence of God’s favor, such as when a Day of Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1606 after the failure of the Gunpowder Plot the year before. Eventually, this annual Day of Thanksgiving became known as Guy Fawkes Day and is still celebrated in parts of England.

The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to rid the Church of England of Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and should become more Protestant. Some Puritan ideals, including the formal rejection of Catholicism, were incorporated into the doctrines of the Church of England; others were absorbed into the many Protestant denominations that emerged in the late 17th and early 18th centuries in North America and Britain.

In church polity, some advocated separation from all other established Christian denominations in favor of autonomous gathered churches. These Separatist and Independent strands of Puritanism became prominent in the 1640s, when the supporters of a Presbyterian polity in the Westminster Assembly were unable to forge a new English national church.

The continued immigration of colonists to New England served to multiply the number of religious denominations, which led to increased conflict. So, it can be said that various Protestant denominations have roots in the Puritan movement.

The other heights of repression of Catholicism in England, when the ‘penal laws’ were either strengthened or vigorously reinforced, include: In 1581, an Act of Parliament made reconciliation to the Catholic Church treason in response to numbers of evangelizing priests and missionary Jesuits arriving between 1574 and 1580. In 1585, an Act of Parliament declared it treason the very presence of a Catholic priest in England and made it a felony for anyone to shelter or assist a priest. Treason and felonies were capital crimes, and many Catholics suffered death due to these new laws. In 1588, after the failure of the Spanish Armada, which intended to overthrow Queen Elizabeth I, the anti-Catholic ‘penal laws’ were again enforced without exception. Of the 85 English-Catholic martyrs, 66 suffered between 1584 and 1691. Yet, it was the aforementioned Gunpowder Plot on the 5^th of November 1605 that aroused anti-Catholic sentiment around the time that the rigorist Puritans were ready to bring their hatred against Catholics to New England. Of the 85 English-Catholic martyrs, 9 died after the Gunpowder Plot.

Thanksgiving Day Comes to New England & the State Takes it Over

Two things should be made clear at this point. The first is that the English Protestant ‘Reformation’ was not only a theological reform of Catholicism, but it was also an intelligent war and an institutionalized partisanship against Catholics. The second is that the Puritans and the Pilgrims believed the English Protestant Reform had not gone far enough. They were completely dissatisfied with the Church of England’s tolerance towards Catholic ‘practices.’ They were demanding a church that was pure from the influence of all Catholic teaching. Succinctly, the Puritans adopted Calvinism theology, which Chesterton called in his Eugenics and Other Evils “immoral” and “the most non-Christian of Christian systems.”

The small group of ‘Pilgrims’ who settled the Plymouth Colony in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620 were a conglomeration of early separatists from the Church of England who were seeking refuge from conflicts in England that eventually led up to the English Civil War. The overall opinion this group would have had of the Catholic Church was very close to that of Puritans, who began immigrating to New England in 1620 and established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629.

The Anti-Catholic Pilgrims who settled in Plymouth Colony were Puritans from the Church of England. These separatists were a sect of Puritans within the movement who felt that the Church of England was too corrupt to save and had given up on the idea of real reform within the church and decided to separate from it. Their leadership came from the religious congregations of Brownists, or Separatist Puritans, who had fled religious persecution in England to tolerate 17th-century Holland in the Netherlands. They held many of the same Puritan Calvinist religious beliefs. Still, unlike most other Puritans, they maintained that their congregations should separate from the English state church, which led to them being labeled Separatists. They established Plymouth Colony in 1620, where they erected Congregationalist churches. So, while the Pilgrims were part of the broader Puritan movement, they were a distinct group, known as Separatists, who chose to break away completely from the Church of England.

In Massachusetts in 1621, there was a good harvest, which, according to the anti-Catholic tradition of the Englanders, demanded that a Day of Thanksgiving be held in response to God’s good favor shown to them. This was the very first Day of Thanksgiving, and whether any Native Americans were there remains disputed. Nevertheless, by the late 1660s, the Day of Thanksgiving for good harvest would be an annual occurrence in New England, with church and state leaders offering their proclamations. During the American Revolution, political leaders began announcing the Day of Thanksgiving in response to God showing them favor in battle. President George Washington proclaimed the first nationwide Thanksgiving celebration on November 26, 1789, “as a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favours of Almighty God.”

While the clear roots of Thanksgiving Day proclamations are Calvinistic and religious and exclusively for offering thanks to God for showing favor, today, the national holiday in the United States is marked with the President issuing a proclamation and ‘pardoning’ a turkey for life.

Again, this Anti-Catholic Puritan Thanksgiving Day is the precursor to the Federal Thanksgiving holiday, not the 1565 event in the newly founded city of Saint Augustine. Florida, where Captain Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, Franciscan priests, and around 800 Spanish settlers (including enslaved Africans), celebrated, perhaps, the first thanksgiving Mass in North America.

Giving Thanks for Conclusions

After Anglicanism became the official religion in Virginia, a band of Puritans left there in 1642 for Maryland, where they founded Providence – a fitting name for the city of Calvinists. It would later be renamed Annapolis (named after the Protestant Queen Anne). In the late 1600s and early 1700s, the Puritan Revolution government had seized governance of Maryland and began violating the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649, which established tolerance of various forms of Christianity. These Puritans persecuted Maryland Catholics by burning down all the original Catholic Churches in southern Maryland and moved the seat of government from St. Mary’s City to Annapolis.

Could you imagine these Catholics celebrating the Puritan’s Thanksgiving Day? I couldn’t. Could you imagine these Puritans celebrating a Day of Thanksgiving after burning down those Catholic Churches? I could! And here we are, many centuries later, celebrating the most anti-Catholic holiday of all.

While Catholics in the United States have lost control of the message of Saint Patrick’s Day and Saint Valentine’s Day and are starting to lose control of the message of Christmas, we certainly have to be thankful to God that Protestants have lost their message of Thanksgiving Day! Let us pray that they rediscover it where Christ Jesus intended – in the thank-offering (todah) of the Holy Eucharist!