13 Jesuits in the New American Nation
When word spread of Pope Clement XIV’s plan to suppress the Society of Jesus, one Maryland-born Jesuit living in Europe made plans to return to a home he had not seen for decades. John Carroll had left Maryland while still an adolescent, studying first at St. Omer’s and then at Liège, before being ordained in 1761. He taught theology and philosophy and took final vows as a Jesuit in 1771. Carroll believed Clement to be a weak pope who had not defended the Society or church against European monarchs’ demands, and he found the destruction of the institution to which he had devoted his life crushing. Yet he remained faithful to the Catholic Church, and in 1774, he sailed to Maryland a reluctant secular priest.
Many Maryland Catholics—including Carroll’s cousin Charles (1737–1832), who would sign the Declaration of Independence—favored the patriots’ cause. Having long practiced their faith in a distinctive and largely self-sufficient way, and having long blamed Britain for the civil restrictions they faced, Catholic Marylanders did not fear a break with England. Instead, they hoped independence would bring full inclusion in the polity and economy. After a period of disorder at the war’s start, Charles Carroll helped to turn the Maryland convention toward independence in the summer of 1776. After voting to declare Maryland’s independence on July 3, the convention selected Carroll as one of its delegates to the Second Continental Congress. He arrived in time to sign the declaration in early August. Carroll was the only Catholic to achieve that distinction. But Maryland’s Catholics were in the main patriots, and many served in government, militias, and the Continental Army during the war.
Pennsylvania’s Catholics displayed more diversity in their choices. Most were of German descent, and historians believe that the greater part were either loyal to the crown or neutral. A significant number of Irish Catholics were loyal as well and formed the majority of those who joined the Roman Catholic Volunteers, organized by an Anglo-Irish Catholic named Alfred Clifton (dates unknown) in service of the British cause.71
In the colonies as a whole, Catholics were understood to have served the patriot cause in equal or greater proportion to Protestant colonists. The revolution also found a Catholic monarch aiding colonists in the struggle against their Protestant king. As would be the case in American wars to come, Catholics felt they had proved their loyalty through their service, and they did enjoy expanded civil liberties during the revolutionary and early national eras. Virginia’s 1776 Declaration of Rights stated that “the Duty which We owe to our Creator, and the Manner of discharging it, can be directed only by Reason & conviction […] and therefore that all men should enjoy the fullest Toleration in the Exercise of Religion.” Pennsylvania and Maryland included all Christians in their guarantees of religious liberty, as did Massachusetts and Connecticut, though they maintained an established church. It is true that Catholics continued to be banned from holding office, and in some states, test oaths persisted into the national era. Nonetheless, the new nation held out the promise of full inclusion in the polity.
Confident that Catholics had proved their patriotism and aware of his own good standing among the nation’s leaders, John Carroll believed American independence would create a country in which Catholicism might thrive. The year that delegates signed the Treaty of Paris (1783) establishing the terms of American independence also found Carroll and confrères creating the Select Body of the Clergy, an institutional successor to the suppressed Jesuit community. The select body was designed to be representative in nature and practical in its duties, meant to carry Jesuit charism and property through to a hoped for restoration. Three districts that together comprised Maryland and Pennsylvania would each send two representatives to the organization’s meetings; the organization would oversee management of what had formerly been Jesuit properties.72 Once the Select Body was incorporated by the Maryland legislature, the Corporation of the Roman Catholic Clergymen became the property-holder, with its trustees as its agents. The organization neatly melded American respect for the importance of property with the institution of slaveholding, which turned people into property: it drew most of its revenues from plantations.
Even as the former Jesuits sought to preserve their corporate identity, John Carroll devoted himself to convincing Rome to create an American See. He believed the country urgently needed a bishop who could build a church suited to American circumstances while concordant with Catholic doctrine. That person, Carroll and his fellow former Jesuits agreed, should be John Carroll himself. As he worked to summon a see into existence, Carroll sought to convince his countrymen that Catholicism was simply another form of Christianity, one that entailed no unpatriotic loyalties and demanded no authority over non-Catholics. At the same time, he turned anti-popery to his advantage, reminding Roman authorities that the imposition of an inappropriate bishop—or even a refusal to use the kind of collaborative process in selecting the first bishop that Carroll recommended—might rouse the dangerous prejudice that Anglo-American culture had long harbored.73
In 1790, Carroll’s patience and labors bore fruit; he was made bishop through a process concordant with both Catholic tradition and an American and Jesuit respect for election. As the nation’s first and for a time only bishop, Carroll worked to craft an orthodox but irenic American Catholicism. The faith, he assured his countrymen, did not “keep her votaries in ignorance” nor prevent anyone from being “a candid inquirer in matters of religion.”74 Carroll also valued the First Amendment’s assurance that the United States would establish no religion. Carroll saw the American constitutional system’s refusal to establish any single religion as a positive good, not simply something to be endured until a Catholic polity could be established.
Whatever the advantages of the nation’s legal regime, Carroll also knew that American Catholics were dispersed, priests few, and Protestant neighbors skeptical. The nascent church needed clergy who could work within its distinctive circumstances and with its distinctive people. By the time of his investiture, Carroll was deeply involved in creating a school that he hoped would serve as “a nursery of future clergymen.” In addition to a seminary, Carroll’s institution was to contain a college that would educate boys as young as twelve, in the practice common to the era. Protestants as well as Catholics were welcome; Carroll did not believe an exclusively Catholic school necessary to the spiritual health of Catholic children and in fact believed that self-segregation courted mistrust. Carroll’s creation, Georgetown, enrolled its first student in 1790.75
As he fostered Georgetown’s growth, Carroll turned to brethren in England for advice, funds, and personnel—and he received plenty of advice. Chronically short of money and priests, Carroll struggled to find instructors and had constantly to weigh the needs of the present (the nation’s Catholics had few pastors) against those of the future (a growing population needed a seminary to carefully and thoroughly train priests). Carroll also believed that women religious were essential to the growth of the church, particularly given the low numbers of clergy and the ignorance of many American Catholics about their faith. After seeking unsuccessfully to attract an Ursuline community to the new nation and even to draw an existent cloistered community into active life, Carroll encouraged the creation of the first American sisterhood, Elizabeth Seton’s (1774–1821) Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph.76
The American Catholic Church drew in all its works from wealthy donors and from the plantations now owned by the former Jesuits’ corporation. Lacking state support or aristocratic patrons, the American church, Carroll had explained to Rome, was “supported […] by the farms which the first missionaries acquired by purchase and transmitted to their successors.”77Those who owned slaves on the church’s behalf insisted that they had no choice but to accept the evil of slavery in order to do good, and they believed that their pastoral care of enslaved people significantly ameliorated the cruelty of the institution. As was the case earlier in Maryland’s history, there is some evidence that the former Jesuits could be reluctant to separate families, but there is also evidence of the inevitable brutality of the institution. A priest in charge of a Jesuit plantation during the early nineteenth century complained that he was restrained from extracting more profit not by Christian charity but by slaves’ determination to defend themselves from the lash. And when in 1805 the Jesuit corporation found itself facing a shortfall, Carroll wrote that “the sale of a few unnecessary Negroes, three or four, and stock would replace the money.”78 Slaveholding became increasingly controversial in the global Society as the century progressed, and even within the American church, some clergy voiced unease. But it was an unease that brought no action. “I sincerely regret that slaves were ever introduced into the United States,” one Jesuit wrote, “but as we have them, we know not how to get rid of them.” This self-exculpation linked the former Jesuits to their non-Catholic countrymen. “Americans had ‘the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go,’” Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) famously declared.79
From the book:
Jesuits in the North American Colonies and the United States
Faith, Conflict, Adaptation
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