John Carroll (bishop)

Bishop John Carroll painted by Gilbert Stuart 1804/1805

Bishop John Theodore Carroll, SJ, (January 8, 1735 – December 3, 1815) was the first bishop and archbishop in the United States — serving as the ordinary of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore. He is best known as the founder of Georgetown University, the oldest Catholic school in the United States, and the Georgetown Preparatory School, the oldest Catholic day and boarding school in the United States. He is also the namesake of John Carroll University, which, like Georgetown University, is among the twenty-eight member institutions of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities.

Styles of
John Carroll, S.J.

Carroll was born in Upper Marlboro, Maryland and educated mainly at the College of St. Omer in French Flanders. He joined the Society of Jesus in 1753 and was ordained priest in 1761. Carroll remained in Europe until he was almost 40, teaching at St-Omer and Liège, and acting as chaplain to several British aristocrats traveling on the continent. When the Society of Jesus was dissolved in 1773, he made arrangements to return to Maryland, where he founded St. John the Evangelist parish at Forest Glen (Silver Spring) in 1774. In 1776, the Continental Congress asked Carroll, his cousin Charles Carroll, Samuel Chase, and Benjamin Franklin to travel to Quebec and attempt to persuade the French Canadian population to join the revolution. Although the group was unsuccessful, it made Carroll well known to the government of the new republic.

In 1784, based on Franklin's recommendation to the papal nuncio in Paris, Carroll was made Superior of Missions in the United States of North America, establishing a hierarchy in the United States and removing the Catholic Church in the U.S. from the authority of the Vicar Apostolic of London. He was appointed Bishop of Baltimore on November 6, 1789, by Pope Pius VI, becoming the first bishop in the United States. In 1791 Bishop Carroll convened the first synod of priests in the U.S. In 1806 he oversaw the construction of America's first Catholic Cathedral, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Baltimore, Maryland, which was designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, architect of the United States Capitol. Carroll's remains are interred in the Basilica's historic crypt, which can be visited by the public. He became the first Catholic archbishop in the US in 1808 when Baltimore was elevated to an archdiocese.