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ST. JOHN CARROLL AND ST. JOHN ENGLAND DEMOCRATIC SAINTS Leonard Swidler Until the 17th century, Christians of heroic virtue were popularly proclaimed Saints locally, meaning that they were popularly judged worthy of emulation and public veneration. It was only after 1634 that canonization was reserved to the Vatican. Unfortunately, the canonization process has become extraordinarily expensive (many hundreds of thousands of dollars!) and extremely politicized—e.g., the beatification of most repressive, reactionary pope in the history of the Church, Pius IX (1846-78). In 24 years Pope John Paul II canonized 468 persons–more than all previous popes together! The Catholic Church today desperately needs held up as models Catholics who exhibited heroic virtue in living out their commitment to Jesus that exemplified the best of the modern, critical-thinking, freedom-loving democratic world. Although we are fortunate to have one such universal model in Pope St. John XXIII, we in the U.S.
are also blessed with two extraordinary men at the beginning of the U.S. Catholic Church who were
outstanding examples of commitment to a profound Christian spirituality as expressed in deeply
democratic fashion: Bishop John Carroll (1735-1815) and Bishop John England (1786-1842). Hence, the Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church (ARCC) invites all Catholics to sign this Proclamation declaring Bishop John Carroll and Bishop John England Popular Saints. Send your name and email address to canonization@arcc-catholic-rights.net, and spread this Proclamation by every means. I. The American Heritage: John Carroll The great Catholic “Americanists” of the end of the nineteenth century─Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop Ireland, Bishops Keane and Spalding, etc.─were by no means the first “Americanists” in the Catholic Church. Already at the beginning of the new country there stood the initial “Americanist,” the first American bishop, John Carroll. John Carroll was born into a founding family of Maryland, the only English colony in the New World established by Catholics, and the first to declare and practice religious liberty. He became a Jesuit, was trained and taught for many years in Europe, until 1773, when the Jesuits were suppressed, and then returned home to America. There he not only continued his priestly work, but also took an active part in the American Revolution as an emissary along with Benjamin Franklin and his cousin Charles Carroll–the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence in 1776–on a diplomatic mission to Catholic Canada in 1776. They attempted to win over the French Canadians to the side of the American Revolution. The effort failed, but a friendship between Franklin and John Carroll was kindled, with the result that later Franklin, when learning that the Pope was going to appoint a bishop for the United States, wrote to the Pope and recommended Carroll (Carroll refused the appointment, insisting on an election by the Americans–more of that below). The Carrolls, including John, were very much at home in America: besides his cousin Charles
Carroll signing the Declaration of Independence, his brother Daniel served in the Continental
Congress and signed the Federal Constitution. John, of course, set the new Catholic Church on a
course that paralleled and supported what he saw as the virtues of the new nation: religious liberty,
democracy, optimism. Jesuit Historian Father James Hennesey observed that John Carroll, “was a
child of the American Revolution, and nothing was clearer to him than that it was his task to
incarnate the church in a world that was distinctively new.” John Carroll came by his democratic virtues through hard experience:
John Carroll had already a deep personal experience of the devastating effects on
religion that came about when Church and State were joined in an unholy marriage.
As a child he had to practice his faith in secret and endure the hostility of an anti-Catholic government; as a newly ordained priest he suffered the destruction of the
order to which he had consecrated his life because of the undue influence of
European Catholic governments on his church; as a dedicated patriot he had been
rebuffed by the Catholic church-government coalition in Canada incenses with a
Protestant one in America. These experiences would have a perceptible influence on
him as a priest and bishop in his new country for the remainder of his life. John Carroll returned the favor to America for “doubtless to him, in part, is due...that the first
amendment passed ...that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’” Carroll published the first book by an American Catholic in the United States, titled: An Address to
the Roman Catholics of the United States of North America (Annapolis: 1784), stressing the
religious freedom and ecumenical dialogue of the Age of Enlightenment and American democracy
a century and a half before Vatican II confirmed them: “General and equal toleration, by giving a
free circulation to fair argument, is a most effectual method to bring all denominations of Christians
to an unity of faith.”
In 1785, when America was still governed by the faulty Articles of Confederation, Carroll wrote to
John Thorpe, a former Jesuit in Rome: “Every thinking man amongst us is convinced , that we
neither must request or admit any other foreign interference than such, as being essential to our
religion.” Rome acceded, and John Carroll was in fact elected by the priests of America, receiving 24 votes
to four for two others and three unrecorded. Carroll clearly wanted this tradition to continue, as is
indicated in the above letter to the Pope, as well as in one of his letters to a fellow former Jesuit: “I
wish sincerely, that Bishops may be elected, at this distance from Rome, by a select body of clergy,
constituting, as it were, a Cathedral chapter.” In 1789, the year of the U.S. Constitution, Carroll established the Academy at Georgetown (which became Georgetown University) for “every class of citizens and every religious profession,” and in response to Bishop Carroll’s written congratulation to his becoming President, George Washington wrote on March 12, 1790, a formal Letter “To the Roman Catholics of the United States,” in which he said: “I presume that your fellow-citizens will not forget the patriotic part which you took in the accomplishment of their Revolution, and the establishment of your Government, or the important assistance which they received from a nation in which the Roman Catholic faith is professed [France].” Carroll’s outstanding commitment to freedom, dialogue, and democracy was summed up in the
remarks of Rev. Dr. C. I. White, wrote shortly after his death that Carroll that he relished “the
familiar intercourse of both clergy and laity of the Protestant denomination. He was wholly free from
guile, uniformly frank, generous and placable; he reprobated all intolerance. . . . He ranked and
voted with the Federalist party. He loved republicanism. His manners were mild, impressive and
urbane.” TRUSTEE SYSTEM OR TRUSTEEISM? One of the most difficult issues John Carroll had to contend with, starting even before he was made the first American bishop, was the controversy known as “trusteeism.” The laws of the new nation required that church property be placed in the possession of a lay corporation. In the early American Catholic churches this corporation was known as the Trustees, and it operated much as was already the case in French Canada at that time. For the great majority of cases this system worked very well. However, in a small minority of cases, partly because of a few manipulative, malcontent Irish priests and partly because of some poor administrative tactics by several of the bishops, cases of serious open conflict between the bishop and the Trustees of certain churches developed─in one case a young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln defended the Trustees. Because of their notoriety these few cases attained more importance than they intrinsically merited, and the fumbling of the bishops only tended to exacerbate the problems. The trustees were the laymen of a parish who corporately were responsible for the temporal matters of the congregation. The trustee issue raised not only the question of the election of the parish leaders, the pastors, but also that of serious participation in Church matters in general. Coming from Europe, the Catholic immigrants naturally carried with them the customs of their home
countries, and at the same time were influenced by the new environment. Both the old and the new
pointed to the practice of the ancient principle: cujus est dare, ejus est disponere, that is, those who
contribute should have a say in the disposition of their voluntary contributions. Of course those trustees were correct. One articulate trustee from Philadelphia had earlier noted that
the historical tradition and canon law itself provided a foundation for some form of domestic
nomina-tion of bishops. Matthew Carey was surprised to learn that in canon law there were some
things “almost unknown─certainly unnoticed,” about the election of bishops, noting that the code
of canon law “most expressly declared, that no Bishop shall be appointed for a people unwilling to
receive him─and even that those are not to be regarded as Bishops, who are not chosen by the
clergy─or desired by the people.” However, as the most knowledgeable scholar on trusteeism, Patrick Carey, stated, “The new
institution of the trustee system was a legitimate outgrowth of prior European Catholic customs and
not a capitulation to the republican and Protestant values in American society.” He further stated that
American Catholics did not simply borrow ideas and procedures from the host society, but
reappropriated flexibly and creatively the European Catholic traditions in an American context,
which was the lens by which they were viewed: “Thus, the new circumstances forced them not so
much to create a new sense of lay participation as to nourish and democratize traditions of lay
involvement which were already rooted in their European Catholic experiences. Democratization,
however, was indeed a powerful new element.” The difficulties were known not as the “trustee system,” but as “trusteeism.” It is extremely important to keep this distinction in mind because the vast majority of American Catholic parishes in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries were incorporated under the trustee system, that is, the church buildings and properties were deeded to the trustees─but only a very few experienced any conflicts. It is that grouping of relatively few conflictual situations involving trustees that is known as “trusteeism.” These conflicts almost always arose because of troublesome priests─frequently wandering immigrants─who the congregation, or a portion of it, wished to dismiss. In other words, the congregation through its trustees claimed to have a voice in the selection, and if necessary, dismissal of their pastors. The claims of the trustees were largely accepted during the first decades of the new nation, but the
few prominent “trusteeism” conflicts eventually led to a strong resistance on the part of a growing
number of bishops as the early years of the nineteenth century wore on, and the entire trustee system
was eventually crushed, particularly under the leadership of the archbishop of New York, John
Hughes (originally a Philadelphia pirest), “a forceful advocate and practitioner of episcopal
absolutism,” who “in the same sentence referred to the ‘venerable Brethren of the clergy and the
beloved Children of the laity.’” This development had a lasting traumatic effect on American Catholicism. It engendered a mentality
of opposition to lay and clerical participation in the Church’s administration, producing an American
Catholic Church with few if any local checks on episcopal authority. “Hostile memories were passed
on from generation to generation of American bishops and clergy, creating fears, even in some
contemporary clergy, of recurrences of ‘trusteeism’....they greatly affected... American Catholic
structures and consciousness.” However, in winning, the American bishops “merely ignored,
submerged, or buried the ideological issues of the conflicts and therefore did not really solve the
fundamental problem involved in trusteeism.” This was: to adapt a hierarchical Church “to a
democratic political climate in such a way as to preserve the values of both within the Church. Thus,
the problem of more widespread participation in the American church kept arising in the subsequent
history of American Catholicism.” What the more reflective and articulate trustees, both clerical and lay, attempted to do was to
establish an ecclesiastical “quasi-democracy in American Catholicism that would acknowledge the
lay trustees’ ...rights to elect pastors and bishops, and at the same time the clergy’s canonical status
and prerogatives. The trustees wanted to define constitutionally the relative rights and duties of
people, priests, and prelates within the church.”
Whenever parishes are established, no doubt a proper regard, and such as is suitable to our Governments, will be had to the rights of the congregation in the mode of election and presentation; and even now I shall ever pay to their wishes every deference consistent with the general welfare of Religion. A few months later he wrote to the pastor in question: “I know and respect the legal rights of the
congregation. It’s as repugnant to my duty and wish, as it exceeds my power to compel them to
accept and support a Clergyman, who is disagreeable to them.” When after two decades the American Church was divided into several dioceses, Carroll was made
in 1810 the Archbishop of Baltimore. Already in 1791 he had summoned a national synod, and later
as archbishop he laid plans for a national council in 1812. However, these plans were blocked by
the War of 1812-14, shortly after which he died. It was clear, however, that his legacy included as
a top priority governance by consensus, as befitted both the new American democracy and the
ancient Church tradition. He wanted American Catholics to make their own decisions as much as
possible. Already in 1785 while he was the American Prefect-Apostolic he wrote to the Vatican
Secretary of State, Cardinal Antonelli: “We desire...that whatever can with safety to religion be
granted, shall be conceded to American Catholics in ecclesiastical affairs.” America was most fortunate in having at its very beginning a giant of a leader who was fully committed to both the Catholic Church and the American nation, with its principles of democracy, religious liberty, and separation of Church and State. Perhaps it would have been expecting too much to have looked for many more bishops of his stature among his successors─though one wonders whether their election rather than appointment might not in fact have much better fulfilled that expectation. In any case, as late as the beginning of the twentieth century less than half of the bishops of the world were directly named by the pope. Thus it is only within the last century that the right of choosing our own bishops has been almost completely taken away from the priests and people─contrary to almost the whole history of the Catholic tradition, and the beginning of the American Catholic Church. II. The Democratic Giant: John England There was only one other giant church leader in America following upon Carroll’s demise in 1815 until the latter part of the nineteenth century when the subsequently “condemned” Americanists arrived on the scene. That giant was John England of Cork, Ireland, who, in 1820, was named by Rome Bishop of Charleston, South Carolina. John England was called by his first biographer “Apostle of Democracy.” England was indeed a fervent admirer of democracy, but more importantly, he was also a committed and skilled practioner of democracy in all aspects of his life, and especially as bishop. In the matter of the selection of bishops he followed in the footsteps of his great predecessor, John Carroll, in his dissatisfaction with the cabalistic appointment of American bishops by Rome. He was so frustrated in the matter that at the point when both the important sees of Boston and New York were vacant and all sorts of power brokering was in process he took the extraordinary step of placing a notice in his weekly diocesan newspaper: To the Roman Catholic Clergy and Laity of the United States
The Sees of Boston and New York are now vacant, or if Prelates have been appointed for them, I am not aware of who they are. They will both be filled before I shall probably address you upon the necessity of having some permanent and known mode of having our Sees filled, not by faction, intrigue or accident─but in a manner more likely to be useful and satisfactory than that which is now in operation. [His plea is equally pertinent─and unfulfilled─today!] England took extraordinary steps in making his diocese a model of American, and Catholic, democracy, but to appreciate them fully they must be seen against the background of the chaos and near-schism that he walked into in the Charleston of 1820. American Catholic Church history is marred in the beginning much more by the specter than the reality of “Trusteeism” (which ever since has been used by bishops as a club to keep laity in submission). Charleston of 1820 was the scene of one of the longest, bitterest of these Trustee conflicts. One might have expected that this situation would have forced a vigorous young bishop from outside of America to make authoritarian kinds of moves. Nothing, however, could have been farther from the truth with Bishop England. His initial, and subsequent, actions were the very epitome of toleration, democracy and voluntaryism. THE CONSTITUTION To begin with, he wrote a Constitution by which his vast mission diocese (comprised of the states of North and South Carolina and Georgia with perhaps only 1000 Catholics) was to be governed─a most extraordinary procedure, to say the least, especially in the time of the flood-tide of reaction after the ebbing of the French Revolution and the defeat of Napoleon. He wrote that he had carefully studied the American Constitution, as well as other writings on the subject, and the laws and tradition of the Catholic Church, and was persuaded that his Constitution was in the best spirit of both Americanism and Catholicism. Just two years after he arrived in America he wrote to Cardinal Fontana in Rome when sending him a copy of his Constitution:
Having paid great attention to the state of several Churches in America, and studied as deeply as I could the character of the government and the people, and the circumstances of my own flock, as well as the Canons and usages of the Roman Catholic Church, and having advised with religious men an Clergymen, and lawyers, I this day...published the Constitution by which the Roman Catholic Church under my charge is to be regulated, and I trust with the blessing of Heaven much disputation and Infidelity restrained. It was subscribed by the Clergy and by many well-disposed Laymen. Only a few weeks after his arrival in Charleston and a strenuous pastoral journey through much of his mammoth diocese (twice the size of Ireland), he wrote in his first Pastoral Letter: “And we ourselves have for a long time admired the excellence of your [American] Constitution.” Three years later, in 1824, writing to Rome, he stressed the importance of written laws in America and hence their importance for the healthy governance of American Catholicism:
But the people desire to have the Constitution printed, so that they may have a standard by which they may be guided. I have learned by experience that the genius of this nation is to have written laws at hand, and to direct all their affairs according to them. If this be done, they are easily governed. If this be refused, a long and irremediable contention will ensue. By fixed laws and by reason much can be obtained, but they cannot be compelled to submit to authority which is not made manifest by law. (It should be remembered that this published Constitution─in the English vernacular─preceded by almost a hundred years the first publishing of a Code of Canon Law, 1917─still in Latin.) The Constitution laid out the rights and responsibilities of the several parties involved in the diocese: the laity, the clergy, the bishop. Moreover, the Constitution was not simply unilaterally declared in force by England. Rather, it was submitted for acceptance to every priest and all the leading laymen of the parishes for voluntary adoption; each new congregation, as it was formed, adopted it voluntarily. In fact, St. Mary’s church, the oldest church in the diocese and the one that had previously been involved in the bitter Trustee dispute with Archbishop Marechal of Baltimore, did not accept the Constitution until 1829, at which time their representatives at the annual Convention were warmly received. Until then, England was careful to let them make up their own minds. Furthermore, the Constitution itself included a procedure for amendation. Though, with the single exception of St. Mary’s, England’s Constitution quickly gained warm acceptance by his laity and clergy, it met with a very cold response by the other American bishops. At the First Provincial Council of Baltimore, in 1829, which all the American bishops attended, it was rejected as unacceptable in the other dioceses, stating merely that, “by this decree we do not desire to interfere with the method which the Bishop of Charleston now follows in his diocese.” Indeed, England’s Constitution stood in the way of his being recommended for the much more populous and important sees of Boston or New York. Bishop Kenrick of Philadelphia magnanimously wrote to Cardinal Cullen in Rome, in 1834, after the Second Provincial Council of Baltimore, that England was,
Perfectly disgusted at the treatment he received at the last Council.... Besides, Charleston diocese is not a fit theatre for a man of his splendid talents... and I would at any moment resign my mitre to make place for him. This I authorize you to communicate to the Sacred Congr.... I had proposed him for the administration of New York which most sadly needs an efficient Prelate, and in consequence of the entire unwillingness of Bp. Dubois I had offered my place in case I should be forced to put on the thorny crown of that diocese. The Archbishop had signified assent, provided the Constitution would be left behind; but now that hope vanishes. Somewhat earlier England and his Constitution had suffered the venom of the poison pen of Kenrick’s predecessor, Bishop Conwell of Philadelphia, who, Father Andrew Greeley in his brilliant book The Catholic Experience (1967) says was,
In the process of making a complete fool of himself...nevertheless had time to warn the Holy See that “if this constitution or democratic method of ruling the Church be approved by the Holy See, it might become necessary to extend it to all the dioceses here; it would mean the quick collapse of the American Church. Greeley added:
It never occurred to Conwell that such a democratic method might have saved his diocese from utter chaos. Later he wrote to Rome warning them once again that England was violating the most sacred of ecclesiastical traditions and was threatening the American Church with ruin. England was convinced that despite the Trustees’ difficulties, it was far better that the Church and its clergy depend primarily on the Catholic people at large rather than the government─as it still is in many European countries. According to his Constitution each congregation elected representatives who were to constitute a Vestry. Then, also despite the Trustee controversies, the Constitution provided that, “The churches, cemeteries, lands, houses, funds, or other property belonging to any particular district [here meaning parish], shall be made the property of the Vestry of that district, in trust for the same.” All money belonging to the congregation could be “expended only by authority of an act of the Vestry of that district.” At the same time the approval of the bishop was also required for the sale of any property. Thus, the key notions of the American constitution of “election of representatives,” “separation of powers,” and “checks and balances” were here incorporated into England’s Constitution. In addition, the salary of the parish priest was also to be raised by the Vestry, but kept separate from the general funds so that no improper pressure could be levied on the pastor. The wisdom and practicality of this structure was demonstrated by the fact that it operated flawlessly for the twenty years of England’s episcopacy. ANNUAL CONVENTION A second critical element of the Constitution was the pro- vision for annual diocesan Conventions for all the clergy, and a proportional representation of the laity from each congregation elected by all the people. The Convention possessed certain decision-making powers parallel to those of each Vestry, such as control of the General Diocesan Fund (used for the seminary, schools, hospitals─all of which England started─widows and orphans and similar concerns). The bishop was required to make a full report on the expending of all funds to the Convention; England in fact did an exemplary job of this at every Convention. In addition, he took the opportunity to present an overview of the Church in all America as well as in his diocese at each Convention. Consequently his 26 Convention Addresses give a history of the Catholic Church in America for those years. Most importantly, it was through the Convention that the scattered Catholic churches began to grow together with a sense of unity and belonging to a larger church, a “catholic” Church, which was their Church where they had both rights and responsibilities. In the beginning years of his episcopate the Convention was legally incorporated in each of the three states and met accordingly. It was only in 1839 that the mission diocese had developed sufficiently to legally incorporate the Convention for all three states together so that there could be a single annual diocesan-wide Convention (26 state Conventions were held between 1823 and 1839). The first General Convention of the diocese lasted for 7 days, with 16 priests and 30 laymen present as delegates; in 1840 there were almost double that number. The third Convention was scheduled for late in 1841, but was delayed because of England’s extended mission in Europe. Then, early in 1842, he died, and with him his Convention, Constitution, and mostly everything else, it seemed, that made him great, for the small leaders who came after him could not match the stride of his footsteps. AMERICAN COUNCILS Dialogue and democracy on the national level were also major concerns of England from the very beginning of his time in America. Although Archbishop Carroll had scheduled a first national Provincial Council of all the American bishops already in 1812, he was, as noted above, prevented from carrying that plan out first by war and then death. His second successor Marechal (Carroll’s first successor, Ambrose Neale, outlived him only a little over a year), a French prelate, who perhaps somewhat understandably was not enthusiastic about procedures which smacked of “democracy,” did not see fit to call a Provincial Council. England wrote him often, urging the many good reasons for an immediate convocation of the Council─including the requirement by the Council of Trent that they be held every three years─but on the back of each of these letters of England’s that are in the Baltimore archives there is the single word written in Marechal’s hand: “Negative.”
Archbishop Marechal did not trust this young Irish prelate. He considered him to be
too liberal and to be negligent in protecting episcopal rights and authority. He also
looked askance at his unique adaptations to American republicanism. Marechal ran
his own diocese like a French aristocrat accustomed to obedience and control. For
him the church functioned as a monarchy with the pope as supreme ruler and the
bishops his supportive aristocracy. Hence, it was only after Marechal’s demise that England was able to persuade his successor, Whitfield, to call the first American Provincial Council in 1829. It is clear from records that England dominated this Council, and all rest during his lifetime (four altogether). He was asked to write all the Pastoral Letters (five) coming out of each of the Councils, which he did with his customary talent. For example, concerning the first Pastoral Letter, which was on clergy (a second one was on the laity) the premier American Catholic Church historian of the early twentieth century Peter Guilday wrote in 1923: “The Pastoral stands today, as it did then, as one of the clearest mirrors of priestly zeal and devotion in the English language.” Difficult though these Provincial Councils often were, they nevertheless did resolve many pressing problems of a growing American Church, whose population and geographical expanse was exploding, in effective collegial fashion, operating in a land that insisted on religious liberty, democracy and separation of Church and State─all Catholic neuralgic issues during the time of Popes Gregory XVI (1831-1846) and Pius XI (1846-1878). Moreover, the work of these Councils, of which Bishop England has been called the “Father,” had wide influence in world Catholicism. Theodore Maynard, in The Story of American Catholicism, says these Councils, “through their inclusion in the collection published at Maria Laach [1875], have had a remarkable influence on conciliar legislation and Catholic life throughout the world.” Just eight years after the death of England, Bishop Kenrick of Philadelphia wrote: “The Church in this country owes to Bishop England the celebration of the Provincial Councils, which have given form and consistency to the hierarchy and order to her internal economy.” It was precisely England’s strengths, however, that were his undoing with his fellow bishops. He could not get Archbishop Whitfield to call the second Council, but was able nevertheless to persuade Rome to insist on it to Whitfield─which fact doubtless galled the latter. After the Second Provincial Council, in 1834, Kenrick wrote to Cardinal Cullen:
Little was done in consequence of the suspicion with which every measure emanating from Bishop England was viewed. The prelates for the most part second the archbishop who felt mortified that he had been obliged by the influence of Bishop England to call the council .... The talents, learning, fame, eloquence of Bishop England rendered him not an object of envy for I believe the good prelates superior to this narrow passion but fear for they dreaded lest his active mind and liberal views might lead them into the adoption of measures which might weaken their authority and disturb the repose of the Church. To me they appeared to fear where there was no cause for fear. Their votes could always outweigh his arguments. Had they manifested a respect for his judgment, a disposition to hear his reasons, and to adopt his suggestions if found correct, had there been more personal courtesy, fraternal charity...the results of the council would have been more consolatory. We would have not seen....a young man having no experience of the ministry save that which he would have had within the college walls [Eccleston] raised to the office of coadjutor to the archbishop.... Greeley commented that the bishops led by Archbishop Whitfield “were more eager to block John England than they were to govern the American Church, so eager in fact that they selected a thirty-one-year-old coadjutor for Whitfield, to lessen so far as they could the possibility that Rome might be remotely tempted to make England the Archbishop of Baltimore.” What a different course American Catholic history might have taken had England had the personal ambition to circumvent the cabal to make the disastrously incompetent Eccleston the archbishop and had eventually ended there himself. Unfortunately for the Catholic Church he did not; he promptly rose at the Council and approved the nomination of Eccleston as coadjutor of Whitfield at Baltimore. OPENNESS AND DIALOGUE We have seen something of England’s commitment to openness and dialogue in the very act of setting up a Constitution which included real shared responsibility, the requirement that the bishop report on all financial transactions to the priests and laity, and the holding of annual Conventions, at which England gave thorough reports on the past actions and present status of the Church in nation and diocese; we have seen something of how he worked prodigiously to have regular and open discussion of all matters with his fellow bishops in frequent Provincial Councils. To these systemic actions of openness and dialogue should be added his establishment of the first Catholic newspaper in America less that two years after his arrival (his younger sister Joanna took on the immense task of editing the weekly United States Catholic Miscellany until her untimely death in 1827). Msgr. John Tracy Ellis, the Nestor of living Catholic Church historians, wrote that the Miscellany was England’s “greatest single contribution” to the American Catholic Church and that “it exerted a powerful influence on American Catholic thought during the early nineteenth century.” One wonders why American Catholicism had to wait several decades for an outsider sent to a largely non-Catholic mission area to receive its first newspaper─especially with the recent vital role the press and pamphlets played in the American Revolution. In any case, Ellis reported that England’s courageous move emboldened other Catholics to take advantage of “the opportunities offered by the press...during the next two decades Catholic newspapers were established in the country at the rate of about one a year” (thirteen Catholic periodicals were founded in America between 1825 and 1842, the year England died). In addition, England constantly poured forth a stream of published lectures, pastoral letters, pamphlets, exchanges of public letters in newspapers. In March, 1921, a scant three months after his arrival he wrote and published an extensive catechism (71 pages in booklet form) for his people─many places were without priests where the laity were appointed to lead Sunday prayers and give instructions. In July of the same year he wrote that he just finished writing an English Missal; it was published in 1822, the first in the U.S. This Missal, however, was much more than just a felicitous translation of the Latin text into English; it also included a 120-page history and explanation of the Mass ritual─at precisely the same time a similar kind of work on the Mass in the vernacular (this time, German) by the Tübingen theologian, Johann Baptist Hirscher, was condemned and indexed by Rome. (It was only in 1897 that Pope Leo XIII lifted the official prohibition of vernacular translations of the Missal.) That difference of fate was accentuated by the fact that England’s Missal along with an equally lengthy explanation of the Vatican Holy Week ceremonies, written by England in Rome at the request of the Vatican, were jointly published in English in a single volume of 310 pages in Rome in 1833─and then translated into French and Italian and published in all three languages at the Pope’s expense─Pope Gregory XVI, known for his devastating attack on religious liberty, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, in his 1832 Mirari vos (more on this below). All during his time of massive writing activity and administrative responsibilities, England also exhibited openness by constantly accepting invitations to explain his views in discussions, talks and lectures. He recorded in his diary between January 1, 1821 and December 5, 1823, 207 public discourses of one kind or another─all besides his regular preaching in Catholic churches─normally three times on Sunday when home, but often every day when on a journey. DELIBERATION AND DISSENT In many ways England made it abundantly clear that American Catholics felt─and he obviously agreed with them─that they ought to be consulted in all important matters, including church matters. He wrote to Rome that, “The American people are a law-abiding people, and the laws are respected so long as the voice of the people is heard in their making.” He reported elsewhere that the American Catholic “will never be reconciled to the practice of the bishop, and oftentimes of the priest alone, giving orders without assigning reasons for the same.” He told his 1827 Convention that he was searching for and training clergy who were “attached to our republican institutions.” England recognized that there could still be disagreements with church authorities and spoke of “dissent” in a letter to U.S. Secretary of State John Forsythe in 1841 wherein he wrote that if the American bishops had found in a papal Apostolic Letter “anything contrary to their judgment, respecting faith or morals, it would have been their duty to have respectfully sent their statement of such differences to the Holy See, together with their reasons for such dissent.” He even went so far, when addressing a joint session of the U.S. President (John Quincy Adams), Supreme Court, Senate and House of Representatives in 1826, as to say:
A political difficulty has been sometimes raised here. If this infallible tribunal which you [Catholics] profess yourselves bound to obey should command you to overturn our government, and to tell you that it is the will of God to have it modeled anew, will you be bound to obey it? And how then can we consider those men to be good citizens, who profess to owe obedience to a foreign authority, to an authority not recognized in our constitution, to an authority which has excommunicated and deposed sovereigns, and which has absolved subjects and citizens from their bond of allegiance?
Our answer to this extremely simple and very plain; it is that we would not be bound to obey it, that we recognize no such authority. I would not allow to the Pope, or to any bishop of our church, outside this Union, the smallest interference with the humblest vote at our most insignificant balloting box. He has no rights to such interference. Strong words in such a public forum in a period when reaction, not liberty, was in vogue with the papacy, as, e.g., when Catholic Polish freedom-fighters were condemned and handed over to the tender mercies of the Orthodox Czar by the Pope (1830), and again the Catholic Hungarians in 1848. INFALLIBILITY Papal infallibility was not declared a dogma until 1870 (though it had long since been condemned by Pope John XXII at the end of the 13th century). But it was a major question in the battle for Catholic civil rights in Ireland and England (which did not come until 1829) and resulted in an oath of allegiance to the King of England in 1821 approved by all the bishops of Ireland (a similar one had already been accepted in England by the Catholic Vicars Apostolic) which denied that papal infallibility was a Catholic dogma: “I also declare that it is not an article of the Roman Catholic Faith, and I am not thereby required to believe that the Pope is infallible.” England was obviously of the same mind as his fellow Irish bishops, for in a series of letters written in 1824-5 to the Rev. William Hawley, Protestant Chaplain to the United States Senate (and published in 1825 in the Miscellany and as a separate pamphlet) he explained that “Catholics do not hold as one of their doctrines, that the Pope is infallible.” A year later in his address before the U.S. Congress he restated: “We do not profess to believe our Pope infallible.” England did, however, write of the infallibility of the Church as a whole and the entire body of bishops together. For many Catholics today even this might still seem too mechanistic, too much of a kind of a deus ex machina theology based on an “it is seemly, therefore it is,” decit, ergo fecit principle. However, in trying to make sense out of the notion of infallibility in the Church, England used an analogy in his “Letter on Infallibility” which probably still would make sense to many Catholics, and non-Catholics. He compared the U.S. Supreme Court and infallibility and argued that the decisions of the former are treated as if they were infallible, that is, they demanded acceptance: “Society cannot make it infallible; but it can have it treated as if it were an infallible tribunal.... the good of Society requires that it must be treated as if infallible. Indeed...in practice, it is made so.” England suggested that infallibility in the Church is like that. Now decisions of the Supreme Court can later be reversed, but they are always done with a great show of precedent, stress on continuity─ but influenced by new evidence and new circumstances. Is this, however, not how the solemn condemnations of religious liberty and freedom of conscience by Popes Gregory XVI─ referred to as deliramentum─and Pius IX (and if they were not pronounced ex cathedra it is difficult to imagine what papal statements would be so considered) were reversed by Vatican II’s Declaration on Religi-ous Liberty─naturally with respectful, reasoned, but continued, and ultimately vindicated, dissent? CHURCH-STATE RELATIONS The motto on the top of every issue of England’s United States Catholic Miscellany tells the entire story: “Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”─the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, part of the so-called “Bill of Rights.” England wrote the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Lyons, France that he did not know “any system more favorable to the security of religious rights...than that of American law.” England strongly and frequently approved and advocated the separation of Church and State, and did so with particular vigor and greatness of vision in his 1826 two-hour oration before the U.S. Congress; (already within a year of his arrival in Charleston he was invited to preach in the South Carolina House of Representatives, as he was frequently for the rest of his life). Read today, his words are still moving─and hence merit some slightly extensive citation here:
You must, from the view which I have taken, see the plain distinction between spiritual authority and a right to interfere in the regulations of human government or civil concerns. You have in your constitution wisely kept them distinct and separate. It will be wisdom, and prudence, and safety to continue that separation.... You have no power to interfere with my religious rights; the tribunal of the church has no power to interfere with my civil rights.... We do not believe that God gave to the church any power to interfere with our civil rights.... Any idea of the Roman Catholics of these republics being in any way under the influence of any foreign ecclesiastical power, or indeed of any church authority in the exercise of their civil rights is a serious mistake. There is no class of our fellow-citizens more free to think and to act for themselves on the subject of our rights than we are; and I believe there is not any portion of the American family more jealous of foreign influence or more ready to resist it.... We know of no tribunal in our church which can interfere in our proceedings as citizens....
What was the religion of William Tell? He was a Roman Catholic.... What is the religion of the venerable Charles Carroll of Carrollton? Men who make these assertions cannot have read our Declaration of Independence. What was the religion of the good, the estimable, the beloved Dr. Carroll, our first Archbishop of Baltimore, the founder of our hierarchy, the friend of Washington, the associate of Franklin? Have these men been degraded in our church because they aided in your struggle for the assertion of your rights, for the establishment of our glorious and our happy republics? No, they are the jewels which we prize, the ornaments of our church, the patriots of our country. They and others, whom we count as our members, and esteem for their virtues, have been the intimate and faithful associates of many of our best patriots. Later, in reporting to Rome on his Vatican mission to Haiti (which had confiscated Church property and proscribed Church activity), England repeated his advocacy of the separation of Church and State, arguing that he believed “the Church to be comparatively free when those means [of support] are derived immediately from the people,” and that he would “prefer infinitely more, Church liberty and poverty to the subjugation accompanied by the most splendid endowments.” England also played a key role in the further spelling out of the concrete meaning of the separation of Church and State in an incident in 1828 when President John Quincy Adams let himself be led into an unwarranted interference in U.S. Catholic-Vatican relations. England’s protests involved two famous Secretaries of State, Henry Clay and Martin Van Buren (who later became President), two Presidents, Adams and Andrew Jackson, and the Attorney General of Maryland, Edwin Taney, who later became Chief Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court for twenty-eight years (and the first Catholic on that august body). Peter Clark in his excellent book, A Free Church in a Free Society (1982), wrote of this matter:
To claim that England alone was responsible for this developed understanding of the religious clause of the first amendment perhaps cannot be said. But it can be said that it was he who articulated it; it was his initiative that brought a future Chief Justice to articulate a similar position; and that he published a record of this significant incident for all to see and examine. [England obtained the pertinent documents from President Jackson and published them in the Miscellany.] There is a specially ironic dimension to this story. One of the documents President Jackson ordered released to England was a July 20, 1829 letter of his Secretary of State Van Buren to the U.S. Consul at Rome, directing him to congratulate the new Holy Father, Pius VIII, and then:
You will take care likewise, to assure His Holiness that all Roman Catholic citizens stand upon the same elevated ground which citizens of all other religious denominations occupy, in regard to the rights of conscience, that of perfect liberty, contradistinguished from toleration; that they enjoy an entire exemption from coercion in every possible shape, upon the score of religious faith; and that they are free, in common with their fellow citizens of all other sects, to adhere to, or adopt the creeds, and practice the worship best adapted to their reason or prejudices; and that there exists a perfect unity of faith in the United States.... as to the wisdom of that cardinal feature of all our constitutions and frames of government, both those of the United States and the separate states of the Union, by which this inestimable rights is formally recognized. The U. S. Consul in Rome was Felix Cicognani─if not a relative at least the namesake of the Apostolic Delegate to the U.S., Cardinal Amleto Cicognani, during the 1950s when the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray was silenced by Rome for advocating the same separation of Church and State (Murray of course was later vindicated during Vatican II and came to be the chief architect of its “Declaration on Religious Liberty”). RELATIONS WITH NON-CATHOLICS One of England’s glories which put him a century and a half ahead of most other Catholic bishops of the world was his ecumenism. England spoke often of “our separated brethren,” also anticipating Vatican II. He insisted that the Catholic Church of course had no right to force people to accept its teaching and that no one other than God could judge the blame or lack thereof of anyone for not accepting it. He clearly had vast numbers of friends among Protestants─it must be remembered that 99% of the population of his diocese was Protestant. Of the 207 public discourses he delivered between 1821 and 1823, most took place in Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist and Episcopal churches and houses. He spoke often of how he had often been “humbled and abashed at the kindness with which I have been treated...by our separated brethren.” England frequently reported that Protestants offered the use of their churches─which he gratefully accepted─and even contributed funds for his churches and other projects─that is the ultimate test of ecumenical good will! England reciprocated by doing all he could to make Catholic churches and ceremonies as open and hospitable, and understandable as possible; recorded examples of this abound. Two diocesan-wide societies he founded were deliberately opened to non-Catholics─a book society and a workingman`s mutual benefit society: “to secure the health of the industrious and well conducted workingmen and...to afford them an opportunity of complying with their duty in whatever religion they profess.” He once called in a Protestant minister to visit a dying member of his own congregation who wanted one; news of this brought him fame among many Protestants, and blame among some Catholics. The same was true of his having his seminary students go into mourning at the death of the Episcopal Bishop Bowen of South Carolina. RELATIONS WITH ROME Two points about England’s understanding of his relationship with Rome can be made briefly. One, at the very beginning of his Constitution England wrote that he sees the bishop “not as the deputy to the Pope, but as a successor to the Apostles.” Two, without using the term, England operated by the principle of subsidiarity; thus, when he sent Rome his Constitution, he told his Convention:
I could not look for its approbation, because the power of making the regulations which it enacts, resides within each diocese for itself, subject only to the examination of the Apostolic See, to prevent their containing anything incompatible with our holy faith... and to prevent anything which might be incompatible with that general discipline which is the fundamental ecclesiastical law of the entire Catholic world. In general it must be said that England had very good relations with Rome. This is especially astonishing for the pontificate of Pope Gregory XVI (1831-46) since England was notoriously in favor of religious liberty, separation of Church and State, freedom of speech, press, etc., all of which were damned by the Pope in Mirari vos. It was that papal document that in effect drove Lamennais from the Church because of his advocacy of separation of Church and State and the other freedoms listed in the French and U.S. bills of rights; it was the same pope that attempted to smash the liberal reformers, the “Aufklärung Catholics,” of southwestern Germany (Tübingen, Freiburg, Konstanz, particularly under the leadership of Rev. Ignaz von Wessenberg)─but not a breath of criticism of England, who not only favored, and practiced, that horror, democracy, in the civil sphere, but in the Church as well! In fact, in 1836 and following, Pope Gregory XVI sent him on a delicate diplomatic mission to Haiti, supported his promotion of a mission to Liberia, and published his books on the vernacular Missal at his own expense, as mentioned above. Somehow England must have charmed Gregory XVI while he was still Cardinal Cappellari, Prefect of the Congregatio Propaganda Fide (he did in fact charm many people with his innocent openness, wit and articulateness─as indicated by the laudatory letter Cappellari sent England in 1830, just five months before he was made pope:
Your letter gave me the greatest pleasure; for it contains a very clear proof of the remarkable care which your Lordship is giving to the religious problems of your diocese.... I desire eagerly to confess to your Lordship that the Sacred Congregation has a high opinion of your intelligence, your piety, your learning and your other admirable qualities. The French Lamennais and the German von Wessenberg did not have such good fortune. RELATIONS WITH FELLOW BISHOPS If England’s relations with his own diocese, public officials, Protestants, Rome─with practically everyone─were surprisingly good, his relations with his fellow American bishops were surprisingly bad. We have already seen somewhat how badly he fared at their hands in the Provincial Councils. Everything he did─Constitution, Convention, Councils, Miscellany, hobnobbing with Protestants─was overtly or covertly, or both, roundly and bitterly criticized by most of his fellow bishops. Greeley’s evaluation of why he suffered this egregious failure is probably on the mark:
For all the great charm which made him so popular with non-Catholics [and one can add, Pope Gregory XVI], he was quite incapable of adopting the discretion that would be required to win the cooperation of his stodgy and fussy colleagues in the national hierarchy. England never understood them and they never understood him. He was too much for them and they were too small for him....
For John England committed the unpardonable crime─he was right. Almost every time he opened his mouth about the United States and the American Church he spoke truth, and such accuracy was intolerable in a man who had barely arrived on the shores of the new republic. For example, the younger bishop of New York, John Hughes, was the very antithesis of England: England saw American society as open and friendly, Hughes as closed and hostile; England thought the Catholic Church would grow quickly within American culture, Hughes saw the culture as dangerous for the Church─and for Catholicism in the U.S. Hughes’s subsequent great influence was a major disaster. LOVED AT HOME John England died an untimely death, aged only 55. He clearly was beloved of all other than his fellow bishops, most of whom were clearly eaten by fear and jealousy. But for those who were not threatened by his intellectual brilliance and his embrace of the American democratic virtues, he was greatly loved. The depth of feeling for St. John England was reflected many times over, starting with the report of his vicar Father Richard Baker when he wrote to Bishop England’s brother Father Thomas England in Ireland of his brother’s death:
Never was there such excitement in the city of Charleston, never will there be such
again. The whole Union is this moment ringing with expressions of regret at what
they term a national calamity. In the city on that morning all was uproar; the bells as
bay broke tolled out what all expected, the notes of his demise. Business was
suspended, the shipping in the harbour hung their flags at half mast, the Judges of the
several courts adjourned, the Governor of the State then in the city to hold a review
as Commander-in-Chief of the forces, suspended and left the military at liberty, and
at once the minute guns boomed in their awful tone the death of a great man. The vestries of Charleston wrote a long tribute to England in solemn, mellifluous tones:
As time tolls on its troubled stream into the peaceful waters of eternity, it
occasionally happens to bear as its burden some being more valued, more beloved
and more useful than those whom every day life presents to our view, whose loss
leaves a void in the community which cannot be filled up, casts a gloom over those
prospects which were brightened by his labors, takes from a fond and devoted
people the object of their admiration, their respect, and their love, and leaves behind
but the memory of his virtues, his piety and his usefulness. Too well and truly have
we experienced this during the last week in the demise of our pious, learned, and
much beloved bishop–an event as unexpected as it is mournful, bringing sorrow and
sadness to all who knew him in public and private life, and making desolate the
hearts of his own affectionate children, who from his lips were gladdened with the
joyful tones of a Redeemer’s promise, and by his hands were fed with that Bread
which sustains man on his earthly journey. The child mourns the loss of a dearly
beloved parent, and the burning tear of sorrow starts to his eye at affection’s call as
he beholds his father’s dust restored to its parent clay. As Father Baker noted, it was not at all just the Catholics that mourned John England’s passing. As he served as chaplain of the Washington Light Infantry of Charleston, that religiously mixed body passed a resolution:
Resolved: That it is with no ordinary feelings of sorrow that the company this
publicly recognizes the loss from among its members of the Right Reverend Bishop
England. The eloquent tones that have stirred our hears as with the sound of a
trumpet shall no more command and arrest our attention. The lips ever devoted to the
advancements of virtue and religion are forever mute, frozen into silence by the icy
hand of death. The earnest vindicator of the liberty of his native land, the devoted
admirer and constant advocate of the institutions of this, his adopted country; the
man of unimpeached and unimpeachable character, of intellect and acquirements
wide and far-reaching, of imagination fervid and poetic–the priest of self-denying
and self-sacrificing virtues, whom all men of every sect and faith delight to
honor–the careful and sleepless watcher over the flick committed to his care–has
finished his earthly course. If all of England’s immediate work seemed to die with him, his memory and inspiration continues to live. His greatest biographer, Peter Guilday, wrote of him:
He was an American with all the mystical love for America which is visible in leaders in the earlier days of this nations’s history. It is on account of his untrammeled Americanism, on account of his thorough grasp of American idealism, and above all because of the unique place he made for himself in American history by interpreting justly and accurately to his own epoch the harmony between Catholic principles and the constitutional bases of the American government... [that England will be valued]. Greeley remarked that “American Catholicism had a splendid opportunity in John England and missed its chance. The opportunity would not return again for almost a half century.” That opportunity─the third one in a century─was that of the “condemned” Americanists. From the vantage point of post-Vatican II Catholicism it is clear that the Americanism of Carroll, Gibbons, Ireland, Keane, Spalding─ and above all, of Bishop John England─was not heresy, but heroism. We need new Americanist heroes today. One step toward inspiring such heroes will be the popular proclamation of the canonization of St. John Carroll and St. John England, to parallel St. John XXIII. The Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church (ARCC) invites all Catholics to sign this Proclamation declaring Bishop John Carroll and Bishop John England Popular Saints. Send your name and email address to , and spread this Proclamation by every means. Please, either click on this link or sign below (if you can see the form)
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