>>17454820
>>17454780
Infiltration
"The religious toleration that was a hallmark of most of the colonies did not extend to Catholics. Most of the inhabitants of the colonies had grown up in a world filled with animosity for the Church of Rome and were conditioned to fear and despise the Catholic Church by Elizabethan propaganda and England’s struggle against the Catholic powers of Europe. Not surprisingly, then, anti-Catholic laws, disabilities, and hatred permeated almost all of the English colonies."
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/americas-catholic-colony
Surely, it had nothing to do with Catholic (esp. Jesuits) war on the "sectarians". . . . right?
The 1552 Peace of Passau ended the Schmalkaldic War between Protestants and Catholics in the Holy Roman Empire, while the 1555 Peace of Augsburg tried to prevent future conflict by fixing existing boundaries. Under the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, states were either Lutheran, then the most usual form of Protestantism, or Catholic, based on the religion of their ruler. Other provisions protected substantial religious minorities in cities like Donauwörth and confirmed Lutheran ownership of property taken from the Catholic Church since Passau.[21]
The agreement was undermined by the post-1555 expansion of Protestantism into areas previously designated as Catholic, as well as the growth of Reformed faiths not recognised by Augsburg, especially Calvinism, a theology viewed with hostility by both Lutherans and Catholics.[22] Religious disputes were increasingly superseded by differing economic and political objectives; Lutheran Saxony, Denmark-Norway and Sweden competed with each other and Calvinist Brandenburg over the Baltic trade.[23]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years'_War