John Carroll SJ (January 8, 1735 – December 3, 1815) was an American prelate of the Catholic Church who served as the first bishop and archbishop in the United States. He served as the ordinary of the first diocese and later Archdiocese of Baltimore, in Maryland, which at first encompassed all of the United States and later after division as the eastern half of the new nation.
Carroll is also known as the founder of Georgetown University, and of St. John the Evangelist Parish of Rock Creek (now Forest Glen), the first secular parish in the country.
John Carroll was born in Upper Marlborough, Maryland (as it was then spelled), to Daniel Carroll I and Eleanor (Darnall) Carroll at the large plantation which Eleanor had inherited from her family. He was of Irish ancestry.
He spent his early years at the family home, sited on thousands of acres near Marlborough Town, the county seat of Prince George's County in the Province of Maryland. (Several remnant surrounding acres are now associated with the house museum known as "Darnall's Chance", listed on the National Register of Historic Places and part of the system of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission for northern suburban Washington, D.C.).
Other Carroll relatives were instrumental in the development of the colonial Province of Maryland and the establishment of Baltimore (1729), soon to be the third-largest city in America, and developed as a port on the Chesapeake Bay. His older brother Daniel Carroll II (1730–1796) became one of only five men to sign both the "Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union" (1778) and the Constitution of the United States (1787). His cousin Charles Carroll of Carrollton (1737–1832) was also an important member of the Revolutionary Patriot cause, and was the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence (1776). Charles Carroll lived long enough to participate in the industrial revolution, with the ceremonies of the 1828 setting of the "first stone" for the beginning of the construction of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
John Carroll was schooled at home by his mother, before being sent to a Catholic school at Bohemia Manor in Northeastern Maryland, secretly conducted by Father Thomas Poulton, a Jesuit. At the age of thirteen, he was sent to the College of St. Omer in French Flanders (northern France, bordering southern edge of modern Belgium). (This was established for the education of English Catholics after they suffered discrimination following the Protestant Reformation instituted by King Henry VIII in England). During the upheavals of the French Revolution (1789–1799), the College migrated to Bruges, and then Liège. It returned to England and was located at Stonyhurst in 1794, where it remains today.) Also attending St. Omer with him was his cousin Charles, who was to become the only Catholic signatory of the Declaration of Independence, and the first United States Senator (1789) from Maryland.
The American clergy, originally reluctant to request the formation of a diocese due to fears of public misunderstanding and the possibility of a foreign bishop being imposed upon them, eventually recognized the need for a Catholic bishop. The election of Samuel Seabury (1729–1796) in 1783 as the first bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church (the name chosen as the daughter denomination of the Church of England in the former 13 colonies, now original 13 new states, later part of the worldwide Anglican Communion) in the United States had shown that Americans had accepted the appointment of a Protestant bishop.
A year after the end of the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), on November 26, 1784, the Holy See in Rome established the Apostolic Prefecture of the United States. Carroll, as Prefect Apostolic in February 1785, urged Cardinal Antonelli to create a method of appointing church authorities that would not make it appear as if they were receiving their appointment from a foreign power. A report of the status of Catholics in Maryland was appended to his letter, where he stated that despite there being only nineteen priests in heavily Catholic Maryland, some of the more prominent families were still Catholic in faith. He did say that they may have been prone to dancing and novel-reading. The pope was so pleased with Carroll's report that he granted his request "that the priests in Maryland be allowed to suggest two or three names from which the Pope would choose their bishop".
Interior of the chapel at Lulworth Castle in Dorset, England, where Fr. John Carroll was consecrated a bishop for the former 13 British colonies, now the United States in August 1790. The priests of Maryland petitioned Rome for a bishop. Cardinal Antonelli replied, allowing the priests to select the city as the site for a cathedral and, for this case only, to name the candidate for presentation to the pope. Carroll was selected Bishop of Baltimore by the clergy of the new independent United States of America in April 1789 by a vote of 24 out of 25. On November 6, 1789, Pope Pius VI approved the election, naming Carroll the first Catholic bishop in the young nation. He was consecrated by Bishop Charles Walmesley and others on August 15, 1790, in the chapel of Lulworth Castle in Dorset, England, without an oath to the English church. Carroll was invested in his office at the parish of St. Thomas Manor in the south at Charles County, Maryland. After recrossing the North Atlantic Ocean, When he returned to Baltimore, he took his chair in the town's parish Church of St. Peter, which would serve as his pro-cathedral until 1821. This early St. Peter's was also the first Catholic parish in Baltimore Town from two decades earlier in 1770 and was located in a group of red brick structures at the northwest corner of North Charles and West Saratoga streets. It had an attached rectory and school, and was surrounded by a small cemetery at the heights sloping down to the waterfront harbor to the south and on a cliff overlooking a loop of the Jones Falls stream to the east which divided the town. It would be the site of several Catholic "firsts" in the U.S.A. such as first ordination of a priest and additional bishop to assist Carroll with the growth and administration of the new first Diocese of Baltimore which then encompassed most of the Eastern U.S., and the first diocesan synod gathering of American Catholic priests and deacons.
Coincidentally across the street was Old St. Paul's Protestant Episcopal Church, oldest in the city, established 1692 in southeastern Baltimore County and relocated to the newly founded Baltimore Town a year after its laying out in 1729–1730, representing the established state Church of England (Anglicanism). In 1804 Carroll was given administration of the Danish West Indies and other nearby islands that were under no ecclesiastical jurisdiction and in 1805 the Louisiana Territory was added. In April 1808, Pope Pius VII made Baltimore the first archdiocese in the United States, with jurisdiction in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Bardstown. Archbishop Carroll made three new bishops in 1810, after which an unofficial provincial council lasted for two weeks. Carroll was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in July 1815.
He died in Baltimore on December 3, 1815. His remains are interred in the crypt of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which can be visited by the public.
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