I sent this earlier in the day, but got the address wrong.  In the interim, we've seen the Frederick Co. document about denying transubstantiation, a doctrine associated with Catholicism, and in commenting on that in a post a few minutes ago, I mentioned again the work by Pilcher cited in full below.  -JK

   As originally stated in a discussion of Catholics in Virginia, the test act and communion were meant to bar from office persons whose allegiance to the pope would conflict with his/her allegiance to crown of England.  (The pope and the vatican after all was a temporal as well a spiritual force - acting like other Italian city states or like a small nation - until Stalin asked how many regiments he had.)
  The Presbyterian Scots-Irish ancestor mentioned was a protestant! not likely suspected of allegiance to the pope, and if it came to it, in point of theology, in agreement with vast numbers of Anglicans on the theology of the eucharist.
  Presbyterians in mid-18th century Virginia confronted some de jure limitations on religious freedom and were taxed to support the established Anglican church and its varied parochial/social and local governmental roles, but the de facto situation varied from one area to another and was probably very relaxed among settled Presbyterians in the Valley. New Light Presbyterians were harassed if their evangelicalism was perceived as threatening to the social order, but colonial Virginia authorities certainly came down harder on Baptists, Quakers and proto-Methodists.  A very fine entre into the situation of Presbyterians in mid-century Virginia is George William Pilcher, Samuel Davies: apostle of dissent in colonial Virginia (Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1971) -- and all this figures prominently in Rhys Isaac's work.  As the subject line states above, however, my original statements about the Test Act and communion were in response to queries about Roman Catholics in Virginia. My larger point then (and now, too) is that the full background of these matters is rooted in the English Reformation and its aftermath as it ripples through early American history.

PS: In the 1790s the Spanish imported about 6 Irish Roman Catholic priests as missionaries to the Mississippi Valley in hopes that their presence would help make transmontane Anglo-American settlers on spanish territory into loyal spanish subjects.  But that's a story for another time.





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Jon Kukla ....................... Executive Vice-President and CEO
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