The Catholic community in Clinton, Md., will celebrate the
first Catholic baptism of Native Americans in the original 13
Colonies July 5. It took place 375 years ago in 1640 when
Jesuit Father Andrew White baptized the Tayac (emperor) of
the Piscataway Indians. A mural by a Catholic artist from
Virginia, Henry Wingate, records the moment on the wall above
the vestibule of St. Mary Church in Clinton, Md.
The painting in oil on canvas was glued to a panel and then
hoisted into place. “We had to cut into a wall in my studio
to get it out,” Wingate recalls. When it was unveiled on
Easter Sunday 2014, three children were baptized under it in
the new baptismal font – including two direct descendants of
the Tayac who received the faith in 1640.
The mural depicts Father White, then 61 years old, baptizing
the Tayac, Kittamaquund. Behind Kittamaquund stands his chief
aide, Mosorcoques, holding the symbols of the Tayac
authority, along with his young son. Both were baptized that
day, along with Kittamaquund’s wife, who took the Christian
name Mary.
A key figure for the early Catholic history of both Maryland
and Virginia is the 6-year-old daughter of the couple,
peeking around her mother’s skirts in the picture. She
received the sacrament a year later, when the Tayac gave her
to be raised by Governor Leonard Calvert and his
sister-in-law, Margaret Brent, so that she could communicate
between the two cultures. Later still, this child, also named
Mary, married Giles Brent. The couple eventually moved to
Virginia and became the founding family of Catholicism in
this colony.
Heroic Jesuit missionaries
A detailed account of the ceremony was included in The Jesuit
Relations, an annual report from Jesuit missionaries to their
superiors in Rome. Since no portraits of Father White
survive, for costume details Wingate drew upon portrayals of
the canonized St. Isaac Jogues, martyred as a missionary to
the Iroquois in northern New York in 1646.
One of the two priests on the right side of the mural, Father
John Altham, died of yellow fever a few months after the
baptism, one of the many heroic Jesuits who lost their lives
in the hardship of the Colonies. (The average life expectancy
after arriving in the colony was 10 years).
Father White made history by insisting on evangelizing the
Indians instead of limiting his ministry to the colonists.
Five years after the English Catholics first landed in
Maryland in 1634 aboard The Ark and Dove, Father White moved
120 miles north of St. Mary’s City to Piscataway village. His
patient, personal witness eventually bore fruit. In the words
of St. Mary’s of Piscataway Director of Religious Education
Bill Keimig, “It was a textbook example of Catholic
inculturation done the right way.”
In 1641, Father White founded St. Thomas Manor in Port
Tobacco, Md., the oldest Jesuit residence continuously in use
by the order in North America.
Father White was captured in 1645 by Protestant partisans,
taken back to England in chains, and put on trial for his
life on the absurd charge that he had illegally entered the
country where Catholic priests were banned. Although he was
set free, Father White was not allowed to go back to Maryland
due to his age. He did write a catechism that is the only
example of the Algonquin language to come down in written
form.
Catholic struggles in Maryland
At the mural’s right edge stands the colonial governor,
Leonard Calvert, a devout Catholic who helped carry the cross
in the procession. In the background the artist depicts the
bark wall chapel Father White built for the occasion.
English persecution of Catholics took its toll. Puritans
attacked the colony at St. Mary’s City and burned it down.
The Jesuit priests were either sent back to England or to
Virginia, where two of them soon died of exposure.
Lord Calvert regained his colony in 1649 and wrote the
Maryland Toleration Act, the first law on religious tolerance
in British North America. Portions of the act are echoed in
the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution enshrining
religious freedom in American law.
The Maryland colony was lost to Protestant control, and by
1689, deep persecution of Catholics took hold and continued
until 1776, when Maryland’s legislature finally removed the
anti-Catholic laws.
Wingate – admired in the Arlington Diocese for his four
scenes from the life of St. John the Baptist for the parish
church in Front Royal – worked closely with members of the
Piscataway tribe to ensure that the final work accurately
represented 17th-century accounts of the event and its
participants.
“They even lent me artifacts from their tribal collections,”
he said. Two Piscataway tribe members volunteered as models
for the Native American figures on the left side of the
scene.
Hamerman, who teaches art and catechesis at Christendom
Graduate School in Alexandria, can be reached at
[email protected].
If you go
A celebration of the 375th anniversary of the founding of the
Piscataway Catholic community will be held July 5 at St.
Mary’s of Piscataway Church, 13401 Piscataway Rd., Clinton,
Md., from noon to 5 p.m., beginning with Mass celebrated by
Washington Cardinal Donald Wuerl. Go to
saintmaryspiscataway.net.
