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The Catholic Democracy of America, 47
German Catholics in Philadelphia outnumbered those who
spoke English. A remarkable relic of this period and region
is a manuscript missal in duplicate written in characters clearer
than print by the Jesuit Father Schneider, who was too poor to
buy mass-books from Europe, and the distance between his
mission stations was so great that he undertook the laborious
task in order to lighten the load he had to carry as he tramped
through the Delaware valley. At this time there were in
Pennsylvania about 3,000 " customers," that is, adult Roman
Catholic communicants, and in Maryland about 10,000.
The non-communicant Catholics under age are reckoned to
have been about the same number in each colony.
The settlement now known as the State of New York
deserves a word of mention. When New Netherland was
colonized the dominant party in Holland laid down in the
charter that the Protestant religion as set forth by the Synod
of Dort should be maintained by the Company. In 1664
New York was captured by the British, and having passed
into the hands of James, Duke of York and Albany (after
whom the capital and the commercial port are named), a
Roman Catholic governor was sent out from England in
1683. Catholic influence in the colony seems -to have been
only transient, as before the end of the century " there were
only seven Papists—or, at most, seven Papist families—in
New York," and in 1700 a law was passed declaring Jesuits
and Popish priests incendiaries and disturbers of the peace.
Thenceforward until the Revolution the history of the
Catholic Religion in New York is almost a blank. In 1741
a curious incident occurred. The negro slaves, who were a
sixth of the then population of 12,000 were accused of a
conspiracy to burn the city and massacre the inhabitants. The
Reverend John Ury was condemned—it is said unjustly—as
one of the white leaders of the plot, and he was put to death
chiefly on the ground that he was a Catholic priest, but to this
day the doubt has never been cleared up whether he was a
Roman ecclesiastic or a nonjuring Anglican divine. It is an