Apostolic Prefecture of the United States Apostolic Prefecture of the United States The Apostolic Prefecture of the United States () was the earliest Roman Catholic ecclesiastical jurisdiction to be officially recognized after the United States declared independence in 1776. Before and during the American Revolutionary War, the Catholics in the Thirteen Colonies (not including Canada) were under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the bishop of the Apostolic Vicariate of the London District in England. The war was formally ended by the Treaty of Paris, which was signed on September 3, 1783, and was ratified by the Congress of the Confederation (of the newly independent United States of
United States Declaration of Independence colonies. The orthodox British view, dating from the Glorious Revolution of 1688, was that Parliament was the supreme authority throughout the empire, and so, by definition, anything that Parliament did was constitutional. In the colonies, however, the idea had developed that the British Constitution recognized certain fundamental rights that no government could violate, not even Parliament. After the Townshend Acts, some essayists even began to question whether Parliament had any legitimate jurisdiction in the colonies at all. Anticipating the arrangement of the British Commonwealth, by 1774 American writers such as Samuel Adams, James Wilson, and Thomas Jefferson were arguing that