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Although French Catholics participated in the exploration and colonization of the Mississippi valley, among the 13 colonies of the emerging United States only Maryland, which had been settled in 1634 and established in 1649, included an appreciable number of Catholics before American independence. Catholics were often unwelcome in—and even excluded from—many other colonies, where Congregational or Episcopal churches were supported by law; indeed, only one colony, Pennsylvania, allowed mass to be celebrated in public. According to some estimates, there were at most 25,000 Catholics in a colonial population of about 4,500,000 at the time of independence in 1776. From the ...(100 of 56687 words)