The Catholic Patriotic Minute #22: John Carroll: America’s First Bishop
Catholics For Catholics Special Edition | December 1st, 2025
John Carroll: America’s First Bishop
The Carroll Family played significant roles in bringing and strengthening Catholicism in the thirteen colonies. Charles Carroll was the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. His cousin Daniel Carroll was one of two Catholic signers of the Constitution. Daniel’s brother John Carroll became the first bishop and archbishop in the United States. As shepherd for the thirteen colonies, Archbishop Carroll not only fortified the Catholic community, but he also consecrated the United States to Our Lady.
On January 9, 1736, John was born in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. At first, John was homeschooled for his elementary years, and then he attended Bohemia Manor Academy, a school founded by Jesuits. John, with his cousin Charles, left Maryland for French Flanders to study at St. Omer, a Jesuit school. In 1753, John entered the Jesuit Order as a novice, and two years later he started studying theology and philosophy at Liège. He was ordained at the age of thirty-four in 1769 and remained at St. Omer and Liège to teach.
However, direction from the Vatican resulted in Father Carroll returning to Maryland. In 1773, Pope Clement the Fourteenth issued Dominus ac Redemptor, which essentially suppressed the Jesuit Order. The Society of Jesus was not restored until 1814 by Pope Pius VII. Father Carroll left his community and returned to Maryland to his widowed mother’s home. Father Carroll proceeded to build his own chapel on his mother’s land where he would celebrate Mass.
When the Second Continental Congress sent Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Chase, and Charles Carroll to Canada to negotiate an alliance or at least the neutrality of France during the Revolutionary War, Congress requested for Charles to ask Father Carroll to join their trip north, as he may be able to persuade the Catholic clergy in Canada. Although the mission was not successful, Father Carroll and Franklin formed a friendship that later helped Father Carroll become America’s first bishop.
At the onset of the Revolutionary War, the state of Catholicism in the colonies was quite dire. Only four state constitutions–Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, and Pennsylvania– allowed Catholics equality with other citizens before the law. Once the war ended in 1783, Father Carroll met with five priests to discuss how to continue their missionary work in a land lacking faith in Rome. They petitioned Pope Pius VI to select one among themselves to have some responsibilities of a bishop, such as administrating Confirmation.
France’s papal nuncio asked Benjamin Franklin for his suggestion for this position, Franklin recommended Father Carroll. The Holy Father picked Father Carroll as the Superior of the Missions in the United States. In 1784, Father Carroll published, “An Address to the Roman Catholics of the United States of North America,” the first Catholic work published in the United States. Even in a country with predominately anti-Catholic views, Father Carroll appealed to the Catholics that he was now shepherding, “[g]eneral and equal toleration, by giving a free circulation to fair argument, is a most effectual method to bring all denominations of Christians to an unity of faith.”
In 1786, Father Carroll moved to Baltimore. He helped found both Catholic and non-Catholic schools. He directly advocated for religious freedom when Congress debated what would become the Bill of Rights. Protestants would attend Mass for his homilies in St. Peter’s Pro-Cathedral. By 1788, the Maryland priests asked Rome to select a bishop for the United States. When the Holy Father allowed the priests of the U.S. Missions to vote for a candidate, twenty-four out of twenty-five priests voted for Father Carroll. In November 1789, Pope Pius VI made Father Carroll Bishop of Baltimore, a diocese of three-million square miles. Bishop John Carroll was consecrated a bishop on August 15, 1790, the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady. In 1808, Pope Pius VII made Bishop John Carroll the Archbishop of Baltimore.
On November 7, 1791, Bishop Carroll hosted twenty-two priests at the First Synod of Baltimore, where he instructed his priests to sing or recite the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary before Sunday Masses and Masses on Holy Days. He administered Holy Orders to the first priest to be ordained in the United States, Father Stephen Badin. Bishop Carroll founded Georgetown College, now known as Georgetown University, in 1791. He recommended the introduction of various religious communities, such as St. Mary’s Seminary and College in Baltimore, Mount St. Mary’s College and Seminary in Emmitsburg, and Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton’s American Sisters of Charity in Emmitsburg. In 1792, he consecrated the United States to Mary, under the title of The Immaculate Conception.
Bishop Carroll commissioned the Basilica of the Assumption in Baltimore, the first Cathedral in the United States. With Thomas Jefferson’s guidance, he selected Benjamin Henry Latrobe–the “Father of American Architecture” and the architect of the first and second Capitols–so that America’s first Cathedral reflected America.
Archbishop Carroll suggested that new churches be built with an Episcopalian semblance in order to integrate Catholic churches smoothly amongst the churches of other denominations. In 1784, when he was a Superior of the Missions, he told his flock that unity of all Christian denominations in the Magisterium can occur if fair discussion is allowed and religious toleration is permitted. Not only did he befriend those of other denominations, but under his leadership, the number of Catholics in the colonies increased from 25,000 to 200,000.
When a Protestant minister noticed the Archbishop’s decline in health in 1815 and commented that the Archbishop must be thinking of the next life, Archbishop Carroll told him, “Sir, my hopes have been always fixed on the Cross of Christ.” Archbishop Carroll passed away on December 3, 1815 and was later buried at the Baltimore Cathedral, now the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
On his deathbed, Archbishop Carroll said, “[o]f those things that give me most consolation at the present moment, one is that I have always been attached to the practice of devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary; that I have established it among the people under my care, and placed my diocese under her protection.” His devotion to the Blessed Mother led to his consecration of the nation to Mary, under the title of the Immaculate Conception, making the Blessed Virgin Mary the patroness of the United States.
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