Each November, the bishops of the United States gather for their annual meetings in Baltimore, during which we proceed to the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (erected in 1821) to celebrate Mass together. In these meetings, we gather and pray in the location of the first diocese established in the United States (the only officially established diocese until 1815), in the state where the first glimpses of the free exercise of our Catholic religion was recognized (“toleration” was the legal term used — not sanctioned, of course), and in the diocese presided over by our first Catholic Bishop, John Carroll (1735-1815).

The Catholic Carroll family exerted significant influence amid the activities of the founding of the Republic. Bishop Carroll’s older brother Daniel Carroll II (1730–1796), was one of five men to sign both the Articles of Confederation (1778) and the US Constitution (1787). Carroll’s cousin, Charles Carroll (1737–1832), was the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence (1776).

Because Catholic education was then prohibited in the Province of Baltimore, John Carroll attended a secretly run Jesuit academy in Bohemia Manor, Maryland, and then was sent to Europe by his family for further education. In Belgium, Carroll became a postulate in the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1753 and was there ordained a priest as a Jesuit in 1771. Returning to the United States, he was in 1784 appointed “Apostolic Prefect of the United States, when the Vatican established the Apostolic Prefecture of the United States, the precursor to a diocese. When the Diocese of Baltimore was established in November 1789, he was ordained its first bishop and served over a diocese whose area encapsulated the entirety of the territory of the United States east of the Mississippi River. That’s a big diocese! In his “spare time,” he also was the founder of Georgetown University (1791).

Bishop Carroll set a vision for the presence of the Catholic Church in the United States when he sought a distinctly American Catholicism, one faithful to Rome yet engaged with democratic society, a pattern for Catholic civic participation without sectarianism. This vision of course sought a robust experience of the free exercise of the Catholic religion, as envisioned by the First Amendment to the Constitution, but realized only through tenacious advocacy to the vision that was imperfectly lived out after the adoption of the First Amendment.

Evidence of this “distinctive American Catholicism” can be seen in his famous “Prayer for Our Government” that is still used. After petitioning God to preserve the Church and its leaders, he invited Catholics to pray for our civil government, for the President, Congress, the Judiciary, and then invited us to pray for all the citizens of the nation. His sense of the place of Catholics in the civil sphere is suggested by his prayer for the U.S. President:

We pray O God of might, wisdom and justice, through whom authority is rightly administered, laws are enacted, and judgment decreed, assist with your Holy Spirit of counsel and fortitude the president of these United States, that his administration may be conducted in righteousness and be eminently useful to your people over whom he presides; by encouraging due respect for virtue and religion; by a faithful execution of the laws in justice and mercy; and by restraining vice and immorality.

His prayer for the Holy Spirit’s wisdom to be granted to our chief executive as an essential agent of the common good of all the nation, and his plea that the Spirit’s inspiration would encourage a “due respect for virtue and religion” suggests the essential role that civil government would have in preserving right to free exercise of religion that is a natural right of all human persons and our need to support this role with prayer.

Finally, Bishop Carroll asked us to pray for our beloved dead, whether his co-religionists or not, saying:

Finally, we pray to you, O Lord of mercy, to remember the souls of your servants departed, who are gone before us with the sign of faith and repose in the sleep of peace; the souls of our parents, relatives and friends; of those who, when living, were members of this congregation, and particularly of such as are lately deceased; of all benefactors who, by their donations or legacies to this Church, witnessed their zeal for the decency of divine worship and proved their claim to our grateful and charitable remembrance. To these, O Lord, and to all that rest in Christ, grant, we beseech you, a place of refreshment, light and everlasting peace, through the same Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior. Amen.

Bishop Carroll set the example for us: to engage in our civil society as Catholics and to pray for our nation and its leaders, with whom, living in peace, we may all prosper. May his example be our model as citizens of our nation, this year celebrating 250 years of striving after a most noble ideal.

Next Month: Immigration and the Catholic Century (1840s–1920s)