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The Catholic Democracy of America, 50
had decided to enter the Society of Jesus, and after his period
of discipline at Watten he was sent on to the Jesuit college at
Liège to prepare for the priesthood. In 1759 he was ordained,
and while preparing for his final vows he occupied at St. Omer,
and again at Liège, a chair of philosophy, and not till 1771 did
he take the final vows of a professed father.
The Jesuit society had fallen on troublous times, and it was
in France, in 1762, that the first open attack was made on the
order. The college of St. Omer was consequently expelled
from French territory and re-established at Bruges, on the
invitation of the Austrian Government. While Father Carroll
was reorganizing the seminary, in 1771, he was selected by the
superiors to make the tour of Europe with the son of Lord
Stourton, and had they a more direct connection with our subject,
we should be tempted to dwell on his letters, written
from places which were soon to be the scene of the most
momentous changes in the modern history of the world. At
Rome, however, events were proceeding which gravely concerned
the history of the Church in America, and the results
of which to the present day are affecting one great Catholic
community on the Western Continent. The young Jesuit
priest, when he arrived on the banks of the Tiber with his
pupil, found his order in the coldest shade of disfavor; its
coming overthrow was publicly discussed, and lampoons on
the Society were openly sold in the streets of the Eternal City.
His position must have been one of peculiar delicacy. The
Roman priesthood in the British colonies was subject to the
Vicariate-Apostolic of England, and the person at the Vatican
who exercised a controlling influence in all ecclesiastical
appointments in Great Britain and her dependencies
was Henry Stuart, Cardinal York, the arch-adversary of the
Jesuits. Father Carroll, moreover, wag on terms of close
intimacy with many of the English Catholic families of
ancient lineage. The Stourtons, whose son he was educating,
the Arundells of Ward our, whose friendship for him may
have arisen from the tradition that Lady Baltimore was a