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The Catholic Democracy of America, 63
The last days of the aged archbishop were full of anxiety.
The British fleet was in Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac j
Washington was burnt, and Baltimore, where the first American
Cathedral was rising, was invested by the English troops
and the Holy See chose this moment for imposing upon the
See of New York a subject of George III. The venerable
father of the hierarchy was, however, contented in the knowledge
that the difficulties of the Church in his native land were
due only to its flourishing increase, and a bishop was given to
Louisiana almost at the moment of the battle of New Orleans.
The last year of John Carroll's life was cheered by the restoration
by the Pope of his beloved Jesuit order, which he had
entered more than sixty years before, at a time when the prospects
of Catholicism in the British settlements seemed wellnigh
hopeless. When be died, in 1815, the revolted colonies
had become one of the great powers of the earth, and within
the land, from Boston Bay to the Gulf of Mexico, the Catholic
Church was a living and vigorous organization. Of the patriarch
of the American Church his illustrious successor in the
See of Baltimore—Cardinal Gibbons—has well said that
" He did not wish the Church to vegetate as a delicate exotic plant; he
wished it to become a sturdy tree, deep rooted in the soil, to grow with the
growth and bloom with the development of the country, inured to its climate,
braving its storms and invigorated by them. Knowing as he did the
mischief bred by national rivalries, his aim was that the clergy and people,
no matter from what country they sprung, should be thoroughly identified
with the land in which their lot is cast, that they should study its laws and
political constitution, and be in harmony with its spirit; in a word, that
they should become as soon as possible assimilated to the social body in all
things appertaining to the domain of civil life."
In no part of the United States has the growth of the Roman
Catholic Church been so remarkable as in New England,
where till after the Revolution lingered the spirit which in the
previous century had applauded the Puritan Governor Endicott,
when he cut from the British flag the St. George's cross
" as a Popish symbol savoring of superstition, and not to be
countenanced by Christian men." The French alliance and
other causes produced such a change in sentiment that when