The legacy of Archbishop John Carroll: The Baltimore Basilica homily on the 200th anniversary of the death of America’s first bishop

This past Sunday—December 6, 2015—the Archdiocese of Baltimore honored the legacy of Archbishop John Carroll, America’s first bishop, at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, on the occasion of the bicentennial of his death on December 3, 1815.

The liturgy, on the Second Sunday of Advent, was presided over by Archbishop of Baltimore William E. Lori, the fifteenth successor to Archbishop Carroll. 

The homilist was Fr. Michael J. Roach, pastor of St. Bartholomew in Manchester, who is an eminent Church historian, scholar, and recipient of the Mount St. Mary University’s 37th annual John Cardinal McCloskey Award. 

Concelebrating was Rev. Michael E. Heine, OFM Conv., director of the Shrine of St. Anthony, Ellicott City. 

Assisting, Deacon Robert M. Shephard of the Basilica staff. 

(Homily Note: I transcribed Fr. Roach’s homily based on his notes and the video that I took of the homily.)

I am an unabashed Irish minimalist never preaching more than seven minutes. Not so today, may it please Your Grace!

There was a man sent from God whose name was John. This man came as testimony, to bear witness concerning the light, that “all might come to believe.” He was not the light, but came to bear witness to the light.

Sixty-one Autumns ago, a wonderful fourth grade teacher, Sister John Theresa La Voie of St. William of York School, introduced me to the person of our first bishop through a landmark book called John Carroll, Bishop and Patriot. Though the Guilday and Melville biographies are more scholarly and elegant, I still have a great place in my heart for this children’s book on our founding ordinary. There was much in it about Jacky Carroll’s childhood down in Charles County that lent an ease of identification for a fourth grader.

Much in the tradition of that son of Zachary and Elizabeth the Gospel speaks of today, John Carroll was himself something of a prophetic figure in the fledgling decades of our Church in this nation. He was a man “wrapped in the cloak of justice” as Baruch says. I can, in truth, say that his was the most fortuitous appointment that this Archdiocese would ever know (saving Your Grace!).

Born “down the counties’ between Piscataway ad Upper Marlboro in Epiphany-Tide of 1735, we have a grand word picture of the event from the pen of Dr. Annabelle Melville, late of Catholic University, who wrote somewhat floridly, “A January child comes close upon the heels of Christmas and heralds wintry weather. John Carroll was one of those, entering the world, as he did, on January 8, 1735 in the middle of the Octave of the Epiphany. A later generation of American mothers might look with loving scrutiny at the face of each newborn son and wonder if he might become, one day, the president of his country. But Eleanor Darnell Carroll, if she wondered at all as she tenderly examined the wrinkled red face of her fourth child, might have asked the older question, ‘Is this the one, is this the one to be the priest?”

We don’t know much about John’s early days in the agricultural and mercantile life of the Chesapeake gentry until he is thirteen. His parents take the costly step of sending him to Europe for a Catholic education. There was a fine involved in doing this, so many hogsheads of tobacco. This was just one of the dozens of annoying penal laws that Roman Catholics had to labor under in the colony they founded as “a land of sanctuary.” There were dozens more at varying times in the colonial period: 

It had all become so harassing that at one time the Carrolls had considered moving to the French territories along the Mississippi where they could practice their ancient faith freely. This explains their family motto “Ubicumquae Liberate” (“Anywhere so long as there be freedom”).    

After a stint at the clandestine school at Old Bohemia, adjacent to the swamps of Cecil County where he learned his Latin, young John Carroll heads off to French Flanders in the company of his double cousin, Charles Carroll, to attend the venerable College of St. Omar’s, founded almost two centuries earlier for the education of the sons of English colonials. He thrived there and his cousin Charlie writes back to Maryland that “Jacky Carroll is often first of all the students here.”

It would seem that here developed John’s vocation to the Society of Jesus. Like so many of these early Anglo-Irish families, the Carrolls would know a number of religious vocations with secular priests, Carmelites, and Visitandines down to the early twentieth century. Young John had entered the Jesuit novitiate at Watten to continue his formation later at Liege and Bruges.

Unfortunately, as Father Carroll is ordained, the fortunes of the Society of Jesus are floundering. They are expelled from country after country, beginning with Portugal. The handwriting is on the wall for a universal suppression, and the Franciscan pope, Clement XIV, takes that final step of dis-establishing the Jesuit order in the Summer of 1773. It was quite a blow to Father Carroll, who really doubted his own resilience. But he adapted, and worked as a tutor to an English Catholic family. One lasting legacy from this period was an innate distrust of Roman politics.

He then returned to his mother’s house over on Rock Creek in 1774, to embrace his mother Eleanor whom he had not seen in some two decades. With real filial affection, he confessed that to see his mother once again was better than having the finest position in the English Church!

Father Carroll was not to fall into any kind of domestic semi-retirement at Rock Creek, but immediately set out riding circuit to visit his scattered co-religionists as far west as Fifteen-Mile Creek, now Hancock, and even to Cumberland, also down to what is now West Virginia.

Our responsorial psalm reflects some of Carroll’s elation over his newly independent land: “When from our exile God brings us home again, we’ll think we are dreaming.”

He was even called on to accompany a diplomatic mission to Canada in 1776. Even John Adams, no friend to Catholics, stated, “We have empowered the committee to take with them anot

her gentleman of Maryland, Mr. John Carroll, a Roman Catholic priest and a gentleman of learning and ability.” 

The mission had hoped to seal an alliance with the Catholic Quebequios against the English. The hierarchy, then in negotiations with the British for some religious concessions, was furious about this American priest accompanying the mission and forbade his clergy to receive Father Carroll. One old school friend did invite the American priest to dinner; Bishop Briand suspended him for this. 

The diplomatic mission was not a success, though it did forge a link between John Carroll and Benjamin Franklin, who was gouty and uncomfortable in the long trek. Dr. Franklin so appreciated Fr. Carroll’s kindness that several years later, when meeting the Holy See’s minister to Paris at the Bourbon Court, Archbishop Doria Pamphili, he wholeheartedly recommended John Carroll to head the Church in the new republic.

Another common sense reason to think of Fr. Carroll to captain the Church in the new land was that he was one of the youngest and most vigorous of the former Jesuit missionaries left in Maryland. The erstwhile Jesuits, meeting at White Marsh down near Bowie, has asked for a vicar early on, then for a bishop. Their clear choice would be John Carroll, and Rome agreed in 1789. 

America would have its first Catholic bishop. Now where to be consecrated, ordained a bishop?

After his Canadian experience, he wasn’t heading north, so he went to England where the ceremony would take place on August 15 at the chapel at Lulworth Castle, ancestral home of his friends, the Welds.

While there, he received two additional gifts for his nascent diocese. Mother Ann Hill, his cousin (yet another cousin from the limited gene pool among Catholics in southern Maryland), a Carmelite in the lower countries, contacted him to say that she was sending four of her nuns to Maryland to establish the first convent in the new nation down in Charles County.

Even more fortuitous, the French Sulpicians sent word from Paris from the Sulpician Father General, Jacques-André Emery, that they would like to come to the bishop’s new diocese to start a seminary, and would even bring some seminarists with them… Offers one could never refuse!

The newly-minted bishop was anxious to get back to his See and, in February of 1790, he would take official possession of his pro-cathedral down the hill on Saratoga Street. There he said, in part, “In God alone, can I find my consolation. He knows by what steps I have been conducted to this important station and how much I have always dreaded it. He will not abandon me unless I first draw down His malediction by my unfaithfulness to my charge. Pray, dear brothers, pray incessantly that I may not incur so dreadful a punishment.”

So, for another two and a half decades, Bishop Carroll would lead this new and ever-expanding Church. He had more than enough pains. Ungovernable clerics and feisty trustees were a constant thorn in his side. He even wrote to Europe to tell certain prelates to keep their problem priests at home. He never was able to curb the interfering ways of his Church trustees, particularly in the south. 

But he had many joys. Given his classic Jesuit formation, he found great delight in the foundation of educational establishments for men and women at Georgetown, Baltimore, and Emmitsburg. He was nationally respected,and served on many boards for the public good. From Boston to Savannah, John Carroll was a man of great station.

His diocese was far too vast. He wasn’t interested in power. He understood John the Baptist’s dictum, “Jesus Christ must increase, while I decrease.” So he petitioned Rome for more sees in the new land in Boston, Philadelphia, and Kentucky. I like to remind Cardinal (Edwin) O’Brien that he (Carroll) wasn’t really in favor of New York as a diocese, but later agreed.

The War of 1812 was a great sorrow for him, particularly the attack on Baltimore. Complicating things was the fact that, like most of the Carrolls, he was an Anglophile. He had no use for the radical ideas that had gained hold in Europe. He thought that the Irish had been driven mad by their suffering, but the French had no excuse, this wanton eldest daughter of the Church.

As “Sister Death” approached, Bishop Carroll evinced no fear. Part of the reason, he had told his old friend, John Grassi, SJ, who headed the Academy at Georgetown, “One of those things which give me such consolation at the present moment is that I have been attached to the practice of devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that I have established it among the people under my care, and placed my diocese under her protection.”

His unofficial coat of arms shows an image of the Blessed Virgin surrounded by a circlet of thirteen, not twelve, stars, a clear reference to the thirteen original colonies.

Dr. Melville paints another great word picture at Carroll’s reception of the Last Rites: “The archbishop’s rheumy eyes roved over the faces of the good men who stood about his bed, Moranville who so loved his music, Babade whose mysticism had inspired Mother Seton, Tessier whose theology had been his very staff, the solemn young faces of the seminarians who  had never seen a bishop die.” His was a sublime tranquility of spirit which faced mortality and death as though it had already been met and conquered. Dr. Melville concludes, “Making the Sign of the Cross over them all, he had turned his head aside and died. It was Sunday, December 3, 1815… The heart of the whole city was heavy with mourning.”

Great postmortems follow, of course. Let me, for the sake of time, mention just a few:   

The Patriarch of the West, Bishop Benedict Joseph Flaget, wrote, “This holy man has run a glorious career. He was gifted with a wisdom and a prudence which made everyone esteem and love him.”

A young friend, Robert Walsh, said of his mentor: “His patriotism was as decided as his piety.”

Bishop John Cheverus (Jean-Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus) of Boston described the late archbishop as “God’s charioteer.”

The Servant of God Simon Gabriel Bruté, hearing these accolades in the sanctuary of this cathedral, said he half expected John Carroll down below in the crypt, to raise himself up on one arm and smile at all the praises.

The very literate historian, Theodore Maynard, wrote of John Carroll, that the archbishop was rather a sober character, perhaps in reaction to the overly-convivial Gaels who made up much of his clergy and congregations, but he concluded, that Archbishop Carroll’s “ monument is not merely his cathedral—which he never thought of as such—It is rather the whole history of the Catholic Church in the United States… It was providential that through the first critical years, the hand upon the rudder was that of John Carroll.” 

May God be praised!