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Additional ResourcesCHAPTER 5: MISSIONS IN NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADORClick on a section below:
IntroductionYou read in "A New Beginning: Roman Catholics in Avalon," the first section in Chapter 5 of Expressions of Faith, that in Lord Baltimore's seventeenth-century settlement at Ferryland, Anglicans and Roman Catholics lived peacefully side by side. Let us explore this religious experiment of Lord Baltimore a little further. Two items deserve special attention:
Who Was George Calvert, Lord Baltimore?George Calvert was educated at Oxford University, knighted by King James I in 1617, and became the king's Secretary of State in 1619. In 1625, Calvert converted to Roman Catholicism, and because no Roman Catholics were allowed to hold public office, resigned. James I rewarded him for his service by making him a Baron and granting him tracts of land in Ireland. Calvert founded Avalon in 1621. In private life, he had accumulated considerable wealth through investments and, at first, saw Newfoundland as an investment opportunity. In 1623, James I granted him the charter that made him Lord of Avalonia, extending from Ferryland to Petty Harbour near St. John's in the east and Placentia Bay in the west. He even visited twice, the last time in a party of 40 that included his family. But the inclement weather drove him from Newfoundland.
Click here to view a larger image. Fig. 2: Calvert's Avalon Courtesy Gillian Cell
Why Did Lord Baltimore Name His Colony Avalon? The name Avalon has religious significance because important ancient traditions and stories are associated with it. Avalon is the area near the present-day community of Glastonbury in Somerset, England. Some people believe that Joseph of Arimathea visited there just after Christ's crucifixion, and was the first person to preach the gospel in England.
Joseph of Arimathea was a Jewish councillor and follower of Jesus. He was a minor figure during Jesus' lifetime but achieved fame after Jesus' death because he asked Pilate for permission to bury Jesus in his own grave. Later, legend has him collect some of the blood shed by Jesus in the same cup that Jesus drank out of during the Last Supper. That cup was also called the Holy Grail, and Joseph is said to have brought it with him to England. According to other legends, his coming to England to preach the gospel was not his first visit. These legends report that Joseph had been there before as a businessman and had brought the young Jesus with him on some of his trips. The poet William Blake wrote about the possibility that Jesus had visited England as a young man in his famous poem The New Jerusalem.
Joseph of Arimathea was buried in Glastonbury (Avalon), where later, also according to legend, another famous Briton, King Arthur, was buried. Over their graves the famous Benedictine monastery of Glastonbury is said to have been built. In short, Avalon was an important place associated with the spread of Christianity in the Old World. Father Simon Stock, a Roman Catholic Carmelite monk and advisor of George Calvert, wrote in his letters to Rome that the Avalon plantation of Lord Baltimore in Newfoundland was named after old Avalon in England. The same point is also made in a seventeenth-century biography of Lord Baltimore, which states that Avalon in Newfoundland was "called Avalon from Avalon in Somersetshire where Christianity was first received in England." It is therefore safe to assume that when George Calvert called his settlement Avalon, he had in mind a place where Christianity would be preached in the New World, just as it had been for the first time in England's Avalon. Simon Stock, Lord Baltimore's advisor in England, went a step further and saw in the Avalon settlement the hub for future missions in the New World. Stock hoped that the Colony of Avalon would be a place where Christianity would be preached, and would also serve as a gateway to other missions in America and in the Far East. Why the Far East? It was hoped that soon the NorthWest Passage would be found, allowing a faster route to Asia.
One thing that made it possible for Roman Catholics to come to Newfoundland at a time when they were forbidden to worship freely in public in England was the liberally phrased charter of George Calvert. Calvert's charter incorporated religious tolerance. Roman Catholics were entitled to the same rights and privileges Anglicans received as long as they were loyal to the king and his heirs. It was common for charters to be written for colonies being established during these years, such as those in Virginia and New England as well as for the first settlement in Newfoundland at Cupids, where John Guy and his party first settled in 1610. However, if we compare the two charter's, John Guy's and George Calvert's, the religious requirements are quite different. John Guy's charter reflects the penal laws of his day, which did not permit practising Roman Catholics to settle in the colony. In fact, they were required to swear the Oath of Supremacy, which asserted that the English ruler-not the Pope-was the spiritual head of the Church of England. The charter issued to Guy and the Newfoundland Company read:
Here we have a document that states that the Roman Catholic religion is superstitious and that requires of any future colonist an oath that denies that the Pope is the head of the Church. How different and more lenient is the charter of George Calvert! It merely states that
Bishop Raymond Lahey, a historian of Newfoundland Roman Catholicism who has written on religion in Lord Baltimore's Avalon, thinks that "the absence of restriction on Roman Catholic colonization in the Avalon charter is indeed remarkable" and highly unusual for that time. If we see how lenient the charter of Avalon was in comparison with that of John Guy, it becomes clear that even if Calvert had no Roman Catholic settlement in mind when he drafted the charter, later on it was so much easier for Roman Catholics to come and live in Newfoundland.
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