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The Catholic Democracy of America, 64
The new century opened with the first episcopal consecration
in the United States, when Dr. Leonard Neale, a Marylander,
descended from a maid of honor of the queen who
gave her name to his native State, was made coadjutor to the
Bishop of Baltimore. Three years later, in the same procathedral,
Bishop Carroll officiated at another interesting ceremony,
when he "joined in holy matrimony Jerome Bonaparte,
brother of the First Consul of France, and Elizabeth Patterson,
daughter of William Patterson, Esq., of the city of Baltimore."
One of the best-known inhabitants of the Monumental
City to-day is a grandson of the King of Westphalia
by this marriage, and an inheritor of the unmistakable Napoleonic
cast of features. The First Consul liad already that
year taken a step of great moment to the Catholic Church
in America when, on the retrocession of Louisiana by Spain
to France, he had forthwith transferred that territory to
the United States. This accession to his jurisdiction was
an additional motive for the bishop to urge the Holy See
to create new dioceses. Pius VII. had consulted an American
priest upon Bishop Carroll's projects when he went
to Paris to crown Miss Patterson's brother-in-law, but it was
not till 1808 that Bulls were issued for the erection of the
sees of New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Bardstown,
which last see included Kentucky, Tennessee, and the northwest
region. The nominees for Boston and Bardstown were
Frenchmen, and for the other two dioceses Irishmen. All of
them were consecrated at Baltimore except the Bishop of New
York, but Father Concanen, the Dominican priest designated
for that see, received his episcopal orders at Rome, where he
resided. He however died in 1810 at Naples, where he had
been delayed by the blockade of the Mediterranean ports.
He was to have been the bearer of the archiepiscopal pallium
to Dr. Carroll, who had now been named metropolitan of the
United States, and it was eventually brought" to Baltimore by
the British minister a few mouths before Congress declared
war against Great Britain.