ABSTRACT
Beneath the outstretched wings of a sculpted eagle, at a Washington, D.C., pulpit bedecked with velvet, stood the beak-nosed bishop of New York, John Joseph Hughes. Garbing his five-foot-nine frame was an ankle-length soutane trimmed in purple, the same color as the zucchetto that perched atop his discreet toupee. Hughes’s advocacy of the separation of church and state must have struck some in the audience as rather odd. The Roman Catholic Church was renowned among American Protestants for just the opposite––an unquenchable thirst for political power as evidenced not only through the machinations of the Papal States but also the nature of its internal ultramontane power structure, more of which shortly. The apparent Romanist urge for theocratic governance seemed inimical to tenets of the US Constitution, especially in light of the First Amendment that prohibits the establishment of an official state religion.
