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Who was John Carroll? Why is he important in American Catholic history?

How was the American Catholic spirituality practiced by Carroll and others during this era connected to American republicanism?

On April 30, 1789, on the balcony of New York City's
Federal Hall, General George Washington was inaugurated
the first President of the United States. Several weeks
later, at Whitemarsh Plantation in Maryland, John Carroll was
elected the first American bishop of the Roman Catholic
Church. Carroll was elected by his peers in the American priesthood,
who numbered fewer than 30 in active service at the time.
Many, like Carroll himself, were Jesuits who had been serving in
a freelance capacity since the suppression of their order in 1773
by Pope Clement XIV, who had feared the Jesuits' growing
international influence. In 1784 Pope Pius VI, with the urging
of U.S. Minister to France Benjamin Franklin, named Carroll
the Prefect Apostolic, or chief administrator of the church in
the United States. In 1788 the pope granted a request of the
U.S. clergy that they be empowered to choose their first bishop.
John Carroll's election as bishop in 1789 confirmed his stature
as the most revered and influential leader of Catholics living in
the new American nation.

Carroll's "see," or center of authority, was in Baltimore,
from which he presided over a diocese (the district under a
bishop's supervision) spanning the entire country. While slightly
more than half of the nation's 30,000 Catholics resided in
Maryland, the remainder were distributed throughout the
nation, with significant communities found in the Philadelphia
area as well as in rural Kentucky, where frontier Catholics were
served by several highly energetic French missionary priests.
Like his distant cousin Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a signer
of the Declaration of Independence, the new bishop had been
educated in Europe in the pre-revolutionary era, where he was
introduced to the Enlightenment notion of egalitarianism, the
idea that all men and women are created equal. While the anticlericalism
(hostility to priestly authority) of the French
Revolution posed a grave threat to the church in Europe,
Carroll was certain that Catholicism could thrive under
America's republican form of government, in which religious
freedoms were guaranteed and the state neither aided nor hindered
the activities of the church.
In 1782, prior to becoming a bishop, John Carroll told a
friend that he had "contracted the language of a republican."
Republicanism is a system of government in which power
resides in voting citizens, who elect representatives to legislative
bodies that serve the interests of the whole community. In
the 1780s and 1790s, John Carroll and other American priests
encouraged a new type of American Catholic spirituality that
stressed the values of reason and personal virtue, the same
themes promoted by the republicans dominating the early
political life of the nation.
Spirituality entails the manner in which individuals develop
their relationship with God and the world God created. For
Catholics, spirituality is always linked to the concept of

"grace," which is God's free self-communication through the
power of the Holy Spirit. Spirituality fosters an awareness of
the presence of God's grace in human activity and in the
world of creation. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries,
when American Catholics were few in number and shared
much in common with their Protestant compatriots, their
spirituality tended to foster a personal relationship with Jesus
and a faith in the power of reason to confirm Christian truths.
A 1791 church document called on every American priest to
preach Sunday sermons that "aim at both educating and correcting
the listeners, and encouraging them in the quest for
Christian perfection." Anthony Kohlmann, a Jesuit stationed
in St. Peter's parish in New York City, preached an Easter
sermon in 1809 in which he offered "authentication" of the
Resurrection of Christ to "everyone capable of reasoning on a
matter of fact."
In 1790, at the urging of Bishop Carroll, Mathew Carey, a
prominent Irish-born publisher living in Philadelphia, produced
the first U.S. edition of the Douay-Rheims version of
the Bible, often referred to as the Catholic Bible, because it was
based on the official Latin translation of St. Jerome and differed
in significant ways from translations favored by
Protestants. Carey had come to the United States in 1784 after
serving a jail term for his writings protesting British mistreatment
of Irish Catholics. In 1785 he founded the Pennsylvania
Herald, a newspaper known for its coverage of local politics,
and later barely survived a duel with a bitter opponent of his
views. He went on to marry Bridget Flahavan, with whom he
had nine children. Carey's edition of the Douay-Rheims Bible
enabled members of the laity (parishioners other than
clergymen) to read the gospels and epistles and provided an
essential source for personal reflection and meditation.

Mathew Carey and other early U.S. Catholic publishers
took advantage of lax copyright laws to reproduce devotional
and popular works by British authors. American Catholic religious
practice was deeply influenced by English traditions.
Robert Molyneux, an English-born Jesuit who came to
Maryland in 1770, produced a widely used catechism—a
handbook on the fundamentals of the faith—that was adapted
from English bishop Richard Challoner's catechism, A Short
Abridgement of Christian Doctrine. Molyneux's version, which
became known as the Carroll Catechism, in honor of America's
first Catholic bishop, provided basic religious instruction to
young Catholics from the era of the American Revolution
until the late 19th century. This American catechism offered
specific prayers that Catholics were urged to recite at different
parts of the day, and included the following guide to
morning prayers:
When you are awake you must give your first thoughts to God,
saying: O my God I give myself entirely to thee. When you are
dressed you must kneel down and say the following prayers. O my
God, I adore and love thee with all my heart: I return thee thanks
for the innumerable favours and benefits which I have received
from thy infinite goodness and mercy, especially for having preserved
me this night. O my God, amiable above all things, I repent
and am sorry for having offended thee, for thy own sake! Be
pleased to grant, that I may spend this day well, and would rather
die than commit any mortal sin.
The blend of English tradition and American innovation
found in this catechism was encouraged by Bishop John
Carroll, who supported the use of English at Mass along with
the more customary Latin. Carroll also advocated the election
of bishops by those he termed the "older and more worthy clergy."
At the parish level Carroll inherited a democratic tradition

known as the trustee system, through which elected members
of the laity directed the everyday affairs of their churches. The
trustee system enjoyed many advantages at a time when priests
were extremely scarce and many American Catholics sought, in
the words of a Charleston, South Carolina, trustee, to "rear a
National American Church, with liberties consonant to the
spirit of Government, under which they live; yet, in due obedience
in essentials to the Pontifical Hierarchy, and which will
add a new and dignified column to the Vatican."
The situation of Catholics in America posed an unprecedented
dilemma to the Vatican, the church's worldwide headquarters
in Rome. The church's European leadership viewed
America's developments with some wariness. There were, to
be sure, drawbacks to the trustee system, which generally
granted authority to affluent, well-connected members of the
laity but offered little to poorer church members, who often
sided with the clergy when conflicts arose over the authority
of trustees to hire and fire parish priests. John Carroll
became embroiled in several such disputes during his long
tenure as head of the American church, which he served as
bishop until his death in 1815 at the age of 80. Like many
bishops who succeeded him, Carroll sought to balance his
deep loyalty to the pope, to whom he readily deferred as the
"spiritual head of the Church," with a conviction that
American Catholics must chart their own unique course.
After 1790, as Rome sought to impose the familiar European
model of authority on the American church, Bishop Carroll
grew more conservative and halted such innovations as the
English-language liturgy.
John Carroll and his relatives Charles and Daniel Carroll
were prominent members of the small American-born contingent
of Roman Catholics found in Maryland and the mid-

Atlantic states during the early period of the American nation.
The social profile of such figures scarcely differed from that of
many leading Protestants of the era. Unlike the colonial days,
in the early republic there was substantial intermarriage among
elite Catholics and Protestants, and shifts in religious affiliation
were common. At the same time, many European priests
played a key role in the American church between 1790 and
1840. They viewed themselves not as immigrants but as missionaries—
with good reason, since the Vatican would officially
continue to view the distant United States as "mission territory"
until 1908.
In the early decades of the 19th century, tensions between
European tradition and American innovation pervaded the life
of the nation, sometimes with creative results. Among the most
influential figures of the period was Elizabeth Ann Bayley
Seton, the descendant of a wealthy colonial family with strong
ties to the Episcopal Church (as the Anglican Church in
America became known in the years following the Revolution).
Elizabeth married New York merchant William Seton in 1794.
They had five children, but the Setons' warm family life was
shattered by the bankruptcy of William's business and then by
his severe illness. In 1803 the couple, along with their eldest
child, sailed for Italy in a desperate and ultimately futile bid to
seek a cure for William's fatal tuberculosis.
While in Italy, Elizabeth Seton was introduced to the
Catholic faith by family friends. She returned to New York in
1804 and was formally received into the church the following
year. Although an attraction to the Catholic traditions of
Europe is often cited as a factor in the conversion of American
Protestants, Elizabeth Seton's spiritual journey was even more
notable for its distinctly American character. Long before she
traveled to Italy, Seton wore a Catholic crucifix (a replica of

the cross on which Jesus died), believed in angels, and was
attracted to the cloistered life of monasteries (the areas in
monasteries and convents reserved strictly for their inhabitants
are governed by a set of rules known as "cloister"). Yet as
a young Episcopalian she also enjoyed Methodist hymns and
Quaker meditations.
Seton cultivated her personal spirituality out of a diverse
array of traditions, a common practice among Americans. Yet if
becoming a Catholic did not require as great a theological leap
as some might imagine, Seton's commitment to her new church
threatened the loss of her privileged social position, a price she
was willing to pay. In 1808 she accepted an invitation from
William DuBourg, a French Sulpician priest (the Sulpicians
were members of a religious community deeply involved in
American missionary activities) to open a Catholic school for
girls in Baltimore, the first of its kind in the United States.
Less than a year later, after taking the traditional vows of
poverty, chastity, and obedience, Elizabeth Seton, now known
as Mother Seton, gathered together a group of young women
who shared her desire to live and work in a religious community.
In 1809 Mother Seton and her children moved with this
new community, the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph, to rural
Emmitsburg, Maryland, where they built a permanent headquarters
for their new order. Mother Seton thrived in the
highly disciplined environment of convent life. "I am so in love
now with rules," she wrote to a friend, "that I see the bit of the
bridle all gold, or the reins of all silk." Mother Seton soon
clashed, however, with a Sulpician priest assigned as spiritual
director to the Sisters of Charity, who sought to remove her as
leader and impose a more austere regimen upon the community.
The issues surrounding this power struggle were complex,
but in pitting a French male cleric against an American female

convert it set the tone for tensions that would beset the church
in later decades.
Although Mother Seton freely embraced the spiritual discipline
of convent life, its excessively authoritarian European
rules were, she wrote to a friend, "dreadful walls to a burning
soul wild as mine." Mother Seton prevailed in her struggle and
continued to lead the Sisters of Charity until 1821, when she
died of tuberculosis at the age of 47. She helped launch a tradition
of Catholic community service that saw schools, hospitals,
and orphanages emerge all across the continent, keeping pace
with the great migrations of settlers into undeveloped territories.
With her deep devotion to the Eucharist as well as to a
vocation of service, she served as a role model for many
Catholics in the decades following her death. In 1856 Mother
Seton's nephew James Roosevelt Bayley—the first bishop of
Newark—established Seton Hall College (later University), the
first Catholic college in America operated under diocesan auspices
(as opposed to a religious order). In 1975 Elizabeth Ann
Bayley Seton was canonized as the first American-born saint of
the church.
In the early years of the nation, the great majority of
American Catholics, like most of their fellow citizens, were
more concerned with pursuing opportunities for themselves
and their families than with issues of church governance.
Between the 1780s and the 1830s Catholics were as likely to
be found in the rural South and along the western frontier as
in the growing cities of the Northeast. An African-American
Catholic fur trader, Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable, was the first
settler of the community that became Chicago, and a
Sulpician priest, Gabriel Richard, built Detroit's first schools
and even held a seat in Congress as the delegate of the
Michigan Territory.

Four new American dioceses were created in 1808—at
New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Bardstown, Kentucky, a
thriving center of Catholic frontier life just south of Louisville.
The first Catholic church west of the Allegheny Mountains was
erected at Holy Cross, Kentucky, in 1792, but many other
Catholics in outlying communities soon longed for churches of
their own, along with priests to administer the sacraments.
Stephen T. Badin, a French missionary who was the first priest
ordained in the United States, reported to Bishop John Carroll
in 1796 that "probably there is not in all your diocese as large
congregations as are those in Kentucky, and they are increasing
from day to day; there is not a Catholic here that does not bitterly
lament at finding himself deprived of those means of salvation
that were to be had in Maryland."
The shortage of priests on the frontier made the work of
the Catholic women's religious communities more crucial than
ever before. Although prior to 1900 the church officially recognized
only one option for women's religious life—communities
of cloistered nuns who took "solemn" vows—several communities
of religious sisters who pursued active vocations in teaching
and service had emerged in Europe in the 17th century.
The contemplative life, (a life devoted to prayer and solitude),
however, remained the ideal, and women in conventional, noncloistered
communities were often required to undergo the
same rigorous spiritual practices as contemplative nuns. Three
pioneer women in Kentucky—Mary Rhodes, Christina Stuart,
and Nancy Havern—founded the Sisters of Loretto in 1812,
under the guidance of an austere Belgian missionary, Father
Charles Nerinckx. The Sisters of Loretto, the first American
sisterhood without official ties to a European community,
opened schools in Kentucky, Missouri, and other parts of the
Midwest and Southwest. In 1813 another teaching order, the

Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, was founded in a small community
near Bardstown.
The members of women's religious communities working
along the frontier pursued a shared vocation, as one sister
explained, based "not so much in words as in deeds, that is, by a
following of Christ's self-sacrificing love in the service and salvation
of others." During the early and middle decades of the
19th century, a time when many American women were largely
confined to the home, sisters brought their ministry to schools,
orphanages, and hospitals across the United States, providing
services that complemented those of, and occasionally substituted
for, public agencies. When a cholera epidemic devastated
New Orleans in 1837, sisters of the Ursuline order took financial
responsibility for a state-owned orphanage. Following a similar
outbreak in Baltimore, the city council dedicated a monument
to two Sisters of Charity who had died after offering "services
which were given without compensation."
Members of women's religious communities located in
remote rural areas performed the same grueling manual labors as
men. Although the conditions of life in these American communities
were much more difficult than those found in their
European counterparts, which were usually cloistered, the sisters
were often required to combine a demanding spiritual regimen
with exhausting physical work. Mother Rose Philippine Duchesne
of the Society of the Sacred Heart, a French congregation, wrote
from Missouri in 1821 that if the Jesuit missionaries working in
Siberia "are looking for a mission field with the same type of work
and the same climate during a good part of the year, they might
come to our section of the globe." In 1824 Bishop Benedict Flaget
of Bardstown informed a colleague that "in the space of eleven
years, we have lost twenty-four religious [members of the community],
and not one of them had yet reached the age of thirty years."

Explanation / Answer

1.John Carroll was first Roman Catholic bishop in the United States and the first archbishop of Baltimore. Under his leadership the Roman Catholic church became firmly established in the United States. In the post-Revolutionary years, Carroll, who did not take an active part in the war, was instrumental in the reorganization of American Roman Catholics, no longer under the jurisdiction of the English church, and in efforts to establish satisfactory relations with Rome. Under his leadership the Roman Catholic church became firmly established in the United States. Carroll was the son of a prominent Maryland family.He worked for the establishment in the United States of institutions for the training and ordination of native-born priests. John Carroll and other American priests encouraged a new type of American Catholic spirituality that stressed the values of reason and personal virtue, the same themes promoted by the republicans dominating the early political life of the nation. Carroll's goal was to unify the disparate elements in the Church. In 1791 he called the first national synod for the purpose of coordinating the work of the clergy. Irish, German, French, and Spanish priests were jealous and distrustful of each other. The laity was even more seriously fragmented, for control of Church property was in the hands of lay trustees, who were not willing to use the property for the benefit of all Catholics. Carroll insisted that this practice be changed. By 1810 four additional sees had been created—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Bardstown, Ky. After Carroll consecrated the bishops, they worked out a pattern for uniformity of Catholic discipline. These regulations and those Carroll laid out at the synod of 1791 were the first canon law in the United States. Carroll supported the establishment of parochial schools, academies, religious orders, and secular schools. Catholic colleges were established at Georgetown (1788) and Baltimore (1799). He was president of the board of trustees of St. John's College at Annapolis, Md. He died in Baltimore on Dec. 3, 1815. Due to time limit remaining questions can be asked as another question,they will be answered,thankyou for your cooperation

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