Fr. John Carroll is Appointed Bishop of Baltimore: November 6, 1789
This text comes from our book, Lands of Hope and Promise.
One man who understood the new state of things in America better than most was Father John Carroll. Born in Maryland in 1735, John Carroll and his cousin, Charles, had attended the Jesuit school at Bohemia Manor in Maryland before being sent to St. Omer’s in France in 1748. Both had entered the seminary, but Charles later decided to study law and returned home to become the lord of Carrollton. John, however, entered the Society of Jesus, taught at St. Omer’s and then at Liege in Belgium. He later served as chaplain to Lord Arundel of Wardour in England. After the suppression of the Jesuits, Carroll returned to Maryland and lived at his mother’s house at Rock Creek, where he said Mass and from whence he set out to minister to Catholics in Maryland and Virginia.
During the revolution, John Carroll had taken the part of the colonies. In 1776 he had accompanied his cousin, Charles, Benjamin Franklin, and Samuel Chase to Quebec in an unsuccessful attempt to convince the Canadians to join the rebellion. On this trip he earned Franklin’s respect and friendship. Throughout the war years, Carroll remained at his mother’s house.
The question of an American bishop was raised again after the war. In a declaration to Rome in 1783, Carroll and five other priests resolved that no bishop was needed in the United States. The priests did, however, petition Rome to allow one of their number to serve as a superior, and they nominated Carroll for this position. The pope, Pius VI, approved, and on June 6, 1784, Carroll was named prefect apostolic of the Church in the United States, with the faculties to administer the Sacrament of Confirmation.
One of the greatest problems Father Carroll faced as prefect was a lack of priests. Priests sent from Europe often proved troublesome. Claude Florent Bouchard, abbé de la Poterie, a priest from France, for example, settled in Boston in 1788 where he issued a pastoral letter claiming he had special powers from Father Carroll. When it became known that the archbishop of Paris had suspended the abbé before he came to America, Father Carroll too had to suspend him. Bouchard then published an inflammatory tract charging that Father Carroll was working secretly to revive the Jesuits in America.
Father Carroll had to struggle with a peculiarly American form of Church government — trusteeship. Since there had been no established Church government in English America, Catholic laymen, designated trustees, had established and funded Catholic congregations and paid priests’ salaries. Because of their status, it was not long before trustees began to see themselves as the final authorities in Church matters, hiring priests, and firing them at will if they did not approve of them. This problem became especially troublesome when certain charismatic priests with a gift for eloquence became focal points for factions within the Church, opposing at times Father Carroll’s authority. Once, in New York, the trustees refused to allow Father Carroll to say Mass in St. Peter’s church, and in Philadelphia, the trustees of a German church led a group of Catholics into schism over a controversy about a priest.
Such troubles finally convinced Carroll and others that someone with more authority than a prefect apostolic was needed to guide the American Church — it needed a bishop. In 1785, Carroll suggested to Rome that the first American bishop be elected by the priests so that it would not appear to Americans that the bishop received his authority from a “foreign power.” (The pope, one must remember, was at that time the temporal ruler of central Italy.) Rome agreed. When the American priests gathered to select one of their number to be bishop, they chose John Carroll. On November 6, 1789, Pope Pius VI appointed Carroll bishop of Baltimore with jurisdiction over the entire United States. He was consecrated a year later in England by the Benedictine bishop, Charles Walmesley, at the chapel of Lulworth Castle.
