Fathers Robert Harding and Robert Molyneux*

David H. Burton SAINT JOSEPH'S COLLEGE THE JESUIT AS AMERICAN PATRIOT: FATHERS ROBERT HARDING AND ROBERT MOLYNEUX* OURS is the age of the computer, the evidence of which is every- 0 where. History, as with other disciplines remote from the market place, has adopted many of its ways. The historian often makes excellent use of computer methodology to rediscover the past by uncovering for the first time facts about the historical experience which could be read only from a print-out. In consequence, fresh and exciting interpretations become increasingly common. Yet this is an age in which there may still be a place-and a useful place at that-for historical inquiry which begins with fragments of letters, diaries, and other records but which, at the crucial phase in the investigation, is carried forward by no force other than informed speculation. History thus considered is not scientific; but it is in- tensely human. What it lacks in scientific verifiability it makes up for in human awareness. As long as history remains in some sense an art, the Muse is honored by the effort to explore corners of the past alien to computer science. Failure to acknowledge the uses of such history may be as unfortunate as claiming too much for it. In taking up an account of the response of Robert Harding, S.J. (1701-1772) and Robert Molyneux, S. J. (1738-1808) to the movement for American independence thoughts about the specula- tive possibilities of history seem appropriate.' This is especially so *This article was researched on a grant from the Penrose Fund of the American Philosophical Society, which support is gratefully acknowledged. 1. There are good accounts of both Harding and Molyneux in Dumas Malone, editor, Dictionary of American Biography, (New York, 1932), 8: 250 1; 13: 81 2. 51 52 PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY since their response rests upon an hypothesis which, with investigation, may lead to a thesis about the "Jesuit as patriot." The hypothesis is simply this: a large proportion of eighteenth century Englishmen, at home and in the colonies, had a strong preference for the Whig philosophy of government. Even George III had a touch of the Whig about him, if his claim be taken seriously-that prior to the American Revolution he was attempting to return English government to that state of balance between King and Parliament which had been prescribed by the Settlement of 1690. Irrespective of background, training, experience, of religion, educa- tion, or vocation, scratch an eighteenth century Englishman and like as not he would be a Whig. The attitudes of Harding and Molyneux toward American independence when taken in combina- tion may be a case in point. Fathers Harding and Molyneux were successive pastors of Saint Joseph's Church, Willing's Alley, Philadelphia, located but a short distance from the State House (Independence Hall). Altogether the church was in their charge from 1749 when Harding arrived, down to 1785, Molyneux having been pastor from 1772, the date of his confrere's death. They were witness to momentous events associated with the movement toward independence, residing as they did in the first city of British North America and enjoying the friendship of several of those who took prominent parts in revolutionary activity. At the core of their response to the cause of independence was their commitment to natural rights as these obtained under secular government and man-made law. Because they were Catholic, Harding and Molyneux had a Catholic conception of the natural order. Their view was derived from the natural rights school associated with the medieval school- men in general and with thinkers like Thomas Aquinas2 and Mar- silius of Padua' in particular. These philosophers, admittedly dom- inated by the doctrines of the ancient Church, upheld individual rights based on the natural condition of man. Harding and Moly- neux, furthermore, were eighteenth-century Jesuits, trained in the style of the universities of Europe and thoroughly knowledgeable in 2. Thomas Aquinas' (1225-1274) interests embraced the political order. See especially De regimine principum. 3. Marsilius of Padua (d. ea 1342) argued in Defensor Pacis that all political power came from the people and that the ruler therefore was merely a delegate of the people. JESUIT PATRIOTS 53 the teachings of such earlier Jesuits as Bellarmine 4 and SuArez. Bellarmine wrote in justification of mixed governments as a check on tyranny. SuArez, whose treatises on law exhibited concessions to voluntarism unusual in contemporary Catholic literature, also championed popular sovereignty. Typical of the instruction received by Harding and Molyneux in their continental schools were the lectures of Thomas Ellenker at the Jesuit College in Liege.6 In his Tractibus Theologica de Jure Et Justitia Ellenker not only presented the views of Aquinas but those of the radical Jesuit thinker, Luis Molina,7 who held that God's grace depended on man's free accep- tance. Ellenker's purpose was not so much to refute as to acquaint his students with traditional and contemporary notions as to the nature of man. Such exposure was sure to have had a pronounced influence on Jesuits in the making. Harding and Molyneux were, moreover, Englishmen born and bred. In a sense they were English before they were Catholic or Jesuit. They were in some measure nurtured on Locke; life, liberty, and property; and the whole Whig tradition. Bernard Basset in his study, The English Jesuits From Campion to Martindale, relates how the Jesuits resisted the authority of the Crown in the days of Elizabeth I: Campion's brag led on to Tyburn's tree.' In contrast, he makes no mention of any such subversive activity after 1721, the implication being that the English Province of the Society of Jesus acquiesced in the political order. The era of resistance had waned. The time of accommodation, despite the formality and in a way the actuality of penal laws against papists, had set in. Mere "acquiescence" and "accommodation" are not likely to transform hypothesis into thesis, however. It must be realized, instead, that the lessons of Bellarmine and SuArez nicely complemented constitutional monarchy and rule by law which increasingly made up the way of political life in 4. Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621), in De Posestate summi ponticifs, developed many ideas regarding temporal political prerogatives. 5. Francisco SuArez (1548-1617) taught in De Defensione Fidei that kingly power came from the body of men, and thus opposed divine right kingship. 6. Ellenker was an eighteenth century Jesuit teacher-ph.losopher. An unpublished manuscript of his lecture on law and justice is in Ms B,v, Stonyhurst College Archives. 7. Luis Molina (1535-1600) was a Spanish Jesuit theologian who tried to reconcile God's power and man's freedom. His Concordia was the strongest Catholic statement of his day supporting the individual in God's scheme. His De Justitia et Jure, in which he was both moralist and economist, may have been Ellenker's model. 8. Bernard Basset, The English Jesuits From Campion to Martindale, (New York, 1968). 54 PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY Great Britain in the eighteenth century. It is likely that Harding and Molyneux as Englishmen were conditioned to accept constitutional government and as Jesuits they were persuaded of its values by mentors who held with Bellarmine and SuArez. The New World environment intensified Whig convictions among people living in the colonies. The pluralism of American society was well advanced by the eighteenth century and that fitted in with constitutional rule. Men came to an awareness of natural rights, for example, in various ways: Judaeo-Christian beliefs, rationalistic propositions, lessons from history, frontier hardships. If Jefferson's appeal in the Declaration of Independence was a general one: "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . .," he cast so wide a net because there were various fish to catch. Irrespective of why men believed in equality, Jefferson appears to have wanted them all on his side. The philos- opher and the propagandist were astutely blended in the patriot. Among the variety of Americans were some Catholics who craved religious freedom as much as any sect, and for whom religious freedom, once experienced, became the first of the several natural rights expressions they would take up and defend. This is another way of saying that in the "Maryland tradition"' the Church of Rome-certainly strongly disposed to be authoritarian in the Old World and holding stiffly to that same line in Spanish America-had softened its stand on the subject of tolerating other faiths in British America. There has been no end of telling how the Puritan Mind was eroded by a remorseless wearing away due to the pressure of New World realities. Much the same thing happened to an equally hard nut, the Catholic Mind, once it faced the day to day demands of the frontier. The common denominator of the American Puritan and the American Catholic Minds was that these diverse sectaries were British in origin. As James I is reputed to have observed,Jesuits are nothing but Puritan-papists. The British factor is central for appreciating the response of the two Jesuits, Harding and Molyneux, to the Revolution. 9. Interestingly enough Jesuit copyists in Maryland in the seventeenth century spent much time in making multiple copies of the Maryland charter, interpolating such comments as Maryland established "for the propagation of the Christian Faith and the enlargement of our Empire and Dominion by the transplantation of an ample colony of the English nation." Province Notes, Folder 4 WI, Georgetown Universities Archives. For a critical yet sympathetic statement of the "Maryland tradition" consult Thomas O'B.

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