7 - Theological Controversies, 1790–1865

Summary

On 15 August 1790, American history was made in an unlikely corner of southern England, at an estate owned by a prominent family of Catholic dissenters. Though old British penal laws still officially prohibited public celebrations of the Mass, a crowd packed the Chapel of St. Mary's at Lulworth Castle to receive the sacrament and witness the consecration of John Carroll as the first Catholic bishop to the United States. Born into Maryland's landed gentry and schooled among English refugees in France, Carroll became the superior of Rome's missions in the infant American nation in 1784 and quickly distinguished himself as an energetic administrator. In his new role as bishop of Baltimore, a diocese effectively coterminous with the thirteen original United States, he was in charge of perhaps thirty-five priests in widely scattered parishes, many of them in locales formerly hostile to “papists.” Such hostility had once been evident in Boston, for example, where a small Catholic congregation by 1790 was gaining Irish parishioners. In 1732, when the rumor spread that a Catholic cleric was in town to celebrate a St. Patrick's Day mass, Governor Jonathan Belcher invoked the local antipriest law in dispatching the Suffolk County sheriff on a futile house-to-house search. Decades later in New York, the old canard of a Romanist fifth column found new life in anti-Catholic attacks by the Federalist newspaper Gazette of the United States (1789), prompting Carroll to rebut that Catholics were not enemies of religious liberty.