The life and times of John Carroll, Archbishop of Baltimore, 1735-1815

Front matter

‘ 23 Sree “ Sterner

Ree

Se aE Se Se RIES NOES TET NE SOE

Preface

John Carroll, the first bishop of the Catholic Church in the United States, was born in Maryland, on January 8, 1735. As a boy of thirteen, after completing his elementary studies at Bohemia Manor Academy, he was sent abroad with his cousin, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, to the English Jesuit College at St. Omer, France. He entered the English Province of the Society of Jesus in 1753, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1769. The year after the Suppression of the Society, he returned to Maryland. In 1776, he accompanied Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Chase and Charles Carroll of Carrollton, in their unsuccessful mission to Canada. Appointed Prefect-Apostolic of the Church in the Thirteen Original States in 1784, he guided the Catholic body, cleric and lay, through the difficult period of reconstruction which followed the Revolutionary War. In 1789, he was elected by his fellow-priests first Bishop of Baltimore, the oldest episcopal see in the nation. For twenty-five years he was the chief shepherd of the Catholic flock in the United States. In 1808, the See of Baltimore was raised to the dignity of an archbishopric and four suffragan dioceses were created—at Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Bardstown. In the consecration of his suffragans, he witnessed the crowning act of his quarter-century of church organization. He died in Baltimore, December 3, 1815, on the threshold of his eighty-first year.

Almost a half-century has passed since the well-beloved historian of the Church in the United States, John Gilmary Shea, began the composition of his Life and Times of the Most Reverend John Carroll. Since that time numerous documents on the subject have been brought to light; some of these have been published in various historical periodicals; while many other documents, lying for a century in the quiet of libraries and archives here and abroad, have added considerably to our knowledge of the problems which John Carroll faced during the twenty-five years of his episcopate. The archival depots of Rome, Paris,

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Westminster, London, Stonyhurst, Liége, and Brussels, were searched for documentary material, and the episcopal archives of Baltimore, Detroit, Quebec, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and old Vincennes were also examined for further information. I have not hesitated to repeat paragraphs from these unpublished sources wherever the clarity or the continuity of the text required it.

These two volumes are the result of my lectures on American Church history at the Catholic University of America during the academic years 1919-1921, and I am happy to chronicle here the cooperation of my students in analyzing and criticising the many photostat documents which have been used for this work. The Catholic University of America has been a centre of study for American history since its foundation, and it is fitting in this regard to offer a tribute of recognition to the present Rector, the Right Reverend Bishop Shahan, for his inspiration in the planning of this work and for his constant encouragement.

My thanks are extended also to the curators of different libraries and archives for substantial assistance. To Canon Edwin Burton, D.D., for valuable direction, and to Father John Hungerford Pollen, S.J., for copies of the Carroll correspondence now in the London Jesuit archives, I am particularly grateful. To a group of personal friends who assisted me financially in having documents photographed and copied for this work, I offer sincere acknowledgement.

To my Ordinary, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Philadelphia, I wish to express my grateful appreciation of the honour he has given me in permitting me to dedicate these volumes to him.

PETER GUILDAY.

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Contents

BirTH AND EarLy EpucaTION (1735-1748)

CotteceE Days ar Sr. OMEr’s; THE JESUIT NoviTiaTE AT WATTEN (1748-1753)

THE LIEGE SCHOLASTICATE; ORDINATION TO THE PRIESTHOOD; TERTIANSHIP (1753-1773)

Chapter II

COLLEGE DAYS AT ST. OMER’S; THE JESUIT NOVITIATE AT WATTEN

(1748-1755)

The great chain of secular and religious educational establishments founded during the era of English intolerance by the English, Irish, and Scottish Catholics stretched from the English Channel to the Eternal City. The English Catholics were for the most part members of the noble and educated classes, and in spite of the ever-growing burdens of the penal code, they never wavered in their determination to keep bright and clear in the minds of their sons and daughters Catholic ideals of faith and of life. From the days when the disheartened Catholic students of England’s two leading Universities sought in 1559 a refuge in Louvain, where they rented two houses, the one called “Oxford” and the other “Cambridge”, down to the French Revolution over two centuries later, the English, Irish, and Scottish Catholics built schools and colleges for the boys, convent schools for the girls, and seminaries for the training of clerics. The story of this Foundation-Movement is one of the most inspiring pages in the history of education... The list of these exiled Catholic educational institutions is a long one. Lisbon contained five such houses; Madrid, three; Paris, eight; Douay, five; Belgium, thirteen; France, outside Paris, seven; and Rome, two. —

Of all the continental English Catholic schools St. Omer’s was best loved by the boys of Maryland. It was founded in 1592 by the celebrated English Jesuit, Father Robert Persons, the companion of Blessed Edmund Campion, the choicest flower of the University of Cambridge. St. Omer’s received mostly lay students and next to Douay quickly became the best-known

1 The latest addition to the literature on the English Diaspora is CarDINAL Gasquet, A History of the Venerable English College, Rome. London, 1920. For various lists of these exiled establishments, see GuILDAY, op. cit., pp. 30-49.

English college abroad. In 1616, James I issued a royal edict against the College, ordering the immediate return of all the boys therein under penalty of the confiscation of their parents’ property. English spies kept the collegians under constant surveillance, and more than one boy was obliged to return home to prevent his parents from losing all they possessed. Before the Thirty Years’ War the number of scholars had increased to two hundred. In 1684, the old College was burnt, but a larger College was quickly erected. In 1697-08, as we learn from a document in Propaganda Archives, the Seminary or College of St. Omer contained more students than any of the English houses abroad.? It was accepted as the best school for the noble and wealthy Catholic families of England during the penal period, and it was also the House of Studies for the formation of the Jesuits who were sent to the English and American missions. Maryland, indeed, can be looked upon to a great extent as a St. Omer’s mission.*? In 1725, a second fire destroyed the College, and it was to the third and more commodious building erected within the next few years that John Carroll came in 1747-48. Unfortunately we have no record of any kind telling us of John Carroll’s voyage across the Atlantic. The Extracts from the Carroll Papers, containing Charles Carroll of Carrollton’s letters to his father, and the Unpublished Letters of Charles Carroll of Carrollton® give us hardly a word of those adventurous days aboard the good ship that carried them to London, which was the first stop in the journey. But there is little doubt that the richest heir in America at that time lost no chance of making the journey a memorable one for his companion. Father Hughes has given us a racy and delightful sidelight upon one of these “educational convoys.’® But the disappointing side to the correspondence which is extant for these years of Carroll’s life is the meagre insight we are given into his daily round of duties

2 Stato del Seminario inglese di St. Omer, Propaganda Archives, Visite e Collegi, t. 36 (1697-1698), fol. 735.

3 Cf. WittaEert, A Catholic College in the Seventeenth Century [St. Omer’s] in the American Catholic Quarterly Review, vol. xxx (1905), pp. 745-748.

4 In the Maryland Historical Magazine (Baltimore, since 1905).

5 In the Monograph Series, No. 1, of the United States Catholic Historical Society (New York), 1902.

© Hucues, Educational Convoys to Europe in the Olden Times, in the American Ecclesiastical Review, vol. xxix (1903), pp. 24-39.

and pleasures. John Carroll’s letters from home would no doubt have given us his mother’s reflections on his musings as a student, but they were lost in the confiscation of Bruges College in 1773. On several occasions the writer has searched the archival depots of Belgium and Northern France for these papers, but without success. John’s letters to his parents—his father, Daniel Carroll, died in 1750—have also disappeared. There is no trace cf John’s correspondence in the Baltimore Cathedral Archives or in the Georgetown collection. For reasons alluded to already the correspondence of Charles Carroll of Carrollton with his parents has scarcely more than a passing reference to John. Carrollton’s is the stilted letter-writing of the day and politics are the main staple. A visit of Charles Carroll, Sr., to Paris in 1757, gave John a chance to talk over home affairs, but there is nothing in the existing correspondence to show more than a cold interest on the part of the two families for each other. The French and Indian War (1754-1763) takes up a major space in the letters. There are constant fatherly injunctions. On August 30, 1758, we find Charles Carroll of Annapolis writing to “Dear Charley,” his son—‘‘Chuse your Company with ye greatest Circumspection, for Evil Communications corrupt good manners. Avoid any intimacy or familiarity with ye Fair Sex. But I should chuse that Women should allmost always make part of your Company, they will contribute to soften and polish yr. manners.” * The next year he writes: “I challenge six Letters a year as a Debt by promise; if ye will generously fling in a few more, ye will give your Mama and me great pleasure.”’® In this same letter we are given a hint of troubles at home. “I find you begin to think that neither Maryland or any of ye British Dominions are a desirable Residence for a Roman Catholic; without a change in ye Scene, they certainly are not so.’ As is well known in Maryland annals, Charles Carroll of Annapolis had at one time contemplated selling all his property in Maryland to take up an estate in Louisiana, which was then in the possession of France; but his son dissuaded him, and fortunate it was for the future of the American Republic that Charles Carroll of Carollton decided to remain. After Carrollton’s return to Maryland in 1765, we lose all chance of

7 Monograph Series, p. 28, as cited in note 5. 8 Ibid., p. 41.

reading between the lines of his letters the incidents that made up their college life at St. Omer’s. Charles Carroll of Carrollton, after finishing his studies at St. Omer’s, went to the College at Rheims, while John entered the Jesuit Novitiate at Watten.

St. Omer’s College was a mixed school, made up of young men preparing for life in the world and of others preparing for the secular priesthood or for the religious life in one of the Orders or Congregations. It was similar to the system in vogue in France or Belgium, and its counterpart can be seen to a certain extent to-day in the system carried out at Mount St. Mary’s College, Emmitsburg, where side-by-side with the collegiate course is a philosophical and theological school for training young aspirants to the priesthood.

What was probably the original copy of the Rules and Regulations of St. Omer’s perished in the Sack of Louvain in August, 1914. A transcript, now in the Archives at Stonyhurst College, England, the successor to St. Omer’s, enables us to form a very fair judgment on student life during the time of John Carroll’s residence there.° The college compared more than favourably with the best European schools of the day. “Their annual exhibitions were attended by the English nobility, with the Bishop and clergy, secular and regular, and other scientific and learned men, who expressed their astonishment at the easy and fluent manner in which the scholars were accustomed to dispute and discourse in Greek and Latin, especially in the former.”1° The young men who made up the student-body were of exceptional character. “During the whole of my visit,’ wrote Cardinal Bentivoglio in

® Cf. the description of the Seminaries of Douay and St. Omer given by Cardinal d’Ossat in a letter to Henry IV, November 26, 1601, in Lettres du Cardinal d’Ossat, p. 757. Meyer has also described the student-life in his England and the Catholic Church under Queen Elizabeth, translated by McKee (London, 1916), pp. 92,121, 189-214. Cf. GuiLpay, op. cit., pp. 138-145. Many references will be found in Forzy, Records S. J., as, for example, vol. i, p. 435; vol. ili, pp. 36, 99, 129, 161, 542, 723, 778; vol. iv, pp. 336, 552, 687; vol. v, pp. 12, 50, 70, 87, 88, 167, 707, especially pp. 168-173. RowLanp, op. cit., has given a glimpse into the student-life at St. Omer’s in her chapter, Student Life Abroad (1758-1764), vol. i, pp. 37-69. ‘‘The pupils of St. Omer’s,”’ she says (vol. i, p. 113), ‘“‘certainly had the advantage over the graduates of Cambridge in the use of clear and forcible English.”’ A complete history of St. Omer’s is in Foiry, op. cit., vol. vii, part i, pp. 36-42. The best account of student-life at St. Omer’s will be found in Gerarp, History of Stonyhurst College (1592-1894). Belfast, 1894.

10 FoLey, op. cit., vol. i, p. 435, note. One favourite exhibition with the students was the annual Passion Play.

1609, “I truly seemed to be in Paradise and among angels. I was greatly edified, and moved even to sorrow, at seeing for the first and perhaps the last time so many choice plants in the Catholic Church destined to persecution, afflictions, and martyrdoms, as now I beheld springing up and growing around me.’1! The Memoirs of Edmund Mathew, written in 1667, is the best boy’s account we possess of the inner life of the college, and while numerous changes must have taken place within the-century that passed before John Carroll entered St. Omer’s, the persistence of many of the customs today at Stonyhurst would argue for their existence in 1748, when he entered. The discipline was spartan in those days. Correction with the ferule was the ordinary mode of punishment. The students retired at nine and rose at five. Trap-ball was the favourite game. It is hardly likely that the young American measured up to the ideal described by the anonymous biographer of Edmund Mathew: “It happened once that as he was playing at trap-ball in the Guarden, one of his companions much against his will struck the ball full vppon his ey, the pain was certainly most intense, and woold haue drawn some word of indignation, or impatience from a vnmortified and impatient man. But this sweet Lamb immediately pronounces Jesus, Deo Gratias, and for to show that he was not in the least offended at him, by whose hand the sad chance happened; looked vppon him presently with a most lovely and gracious ey, knowing that he stood more in need of comfort than him selfe.’?? John’ Carroll certainly never took for his motto the one from “Doleful Jeremie,” that seems to have directed Mathew’s life—non sedi in conciliis ludentium, solus sedebam.

The college was well known in the colonies, and the Assemblies of Virginia and Maryland both sent petitions at odd times to the Home Government, representing the danger which St. Omer’s was to Protestant ascendancy in the provinces. John Gilmary Shea makes the following reflection regarding the re-

11 Vatican Archives, Archivio Borghese, vol. i, 190ss. Part of this Relazione d’Inghilterra is printed in the original in Guinpay, op. cit., DP. 425-429. Cf. Forzy, Records S. J., vol. vii, part ii, pp. 1152-1155; Taunton, History of the Jesuits in England, p. 401. London, root.

19 Memoir of Edmund Mathew, in the Catholic Record Society Publications, vol. ili, p. 66.

sults of this European training upon the young Americans who went to St. Omer’s:

The effect of this continental education on the young Catholic gentlemen was clearly seen. As a class they were far superior to their Protestant neighbours, who, educated at home, were narrow and insular in their ideas, ignorant of modern languages and of all that was going on beyond their county limits and its fox hunts and races. The Catholic, on the contrary, was conversant with several languages, with the current literature of Europe, the science of the day, with art and the great galleries where the masterpieces of painting and sculpture could be seen. He returned to England or his coloniaf home after forming acquaintance with persons of distinction and influence, whose correspondence retained and enlarged the knowledge he had acquired.”

John Carroll finished his humanities in 1753; and on September eighth of that year, he was sent to the Jesuit Novitiate at Watten, a town about seven miles from St. Omer’s. The house was an old abbey and was the gift of Bishop Blaise of St. Omer in 1603, but owing to the intrigues of Edmondes, the English agent at Brussels, it was not occupied until after the death of the Archduke Albert in 1622. It became the recognized novitiate for the English Province in 1625, and remained such until 1768, when a transfer was made to Ghent. Here it was that the “generation of vipers’, as the English Agents Edmondes and Turnbull generally called the English Jesuits, was ptepared for the spiritual work to come. With Carroll at Watten, Shea tells us, there were as fellow-novices: Joseph Hathersty, who died at Philadelphia on May 8, 1771; William Horne, Peter Jenkins, George Knight, Joseph Emmott, and Joseph Tryer. A fellow-countryman, Robert Cole, who did not return to Maryland after the Suppression, was in the novitiate at the time, as was also Joseph Reeve, the future ecclesiastical historian.14 The novice-master was Father Henry Corbie, who was in charge at Watten from 1745 to 1756, provincial of the English Jesuits from 1756 to 1762, and again novice-master from 1764 to 1765, the year of his death.?® emcee Ra en een

14 Op. ctt., vol. ii, p. 31, FoLey’s Collectanea contains biographies of these fellow-novices of Carroll, with the exception of Tryer. Father Joseph Hathersty, the only one who came to America, is not mentioned in Krriin, Catholicity in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1909). Cf. Hucues, op. cit., Text, vol. ii, p. 695.

415 Records S. J., vol. vii, part i, p. 168.

With the exception of Henry More’s celebrated essay, no complete history of the rise of the English Province of the Society of Jesus has yet been written..° England was to feel the full power of the Counter-Reformation from the moment that the two Jesuits, Blessed Edmund Campion and Robert Persons, reached London in 1580, and the frequency of Jesuit vocations among English Catholic youths was not only remarkable, but so pronounced that practically all the “stirs” which separated the secular and the regular clergy in English Catholic life during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be traced to the fact that a large majority of young men sought entrance into the Society. “During the persecution period,” says Foley, “the number of Englishmen who became Jesuits sometimes rose to nearly one-half of all those who embraced the ecclesiastical state, and they began to join from the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, even before Douay College was founded (1569).’*7 From 1580 down to £619, the English Jesuits conducted in England what is known as a Mission. In 1619, the Mission was raised to a Vice-Province, and on January 21, 1623, the Vice-Province became a regular Province of the Society. The whole of England was divided, as is the Jesuit system, into districts, and these were subdivided into residences or quasi-colleges. Over each residence or college a rector or superior was placed. This arrangement was duplicated in the English Colonies of America, and lasted down to the Suppression of the Society in 1773.

16 Historia missionis anglicane Societatis Jesu, ab anno salutis MDLXXX ad MDCXIX, et vice-provincie primum, tum provincie ad ejusdem seculi annum XXXV. St. Omer. 1660. Cf. RIBADENEIRA, Historia ecclesiastica del Scisma del Reyno del Iw glaterra. Madrid, 1588. Potten, English Cathotics in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1580), London, 1920, while not ex professo a history of the Jesuits in England, will, when completed, be an introduction to his history of the English Province of the Society; Taunton, History of the Jesuits in England (London, 1901) is an important volume in this connection, but it is mainly given over to an attack on Father Robert Persons, S.J.; BRIDGEWATER, Concertatio Ecclesie Catholice in Anglia, etc. (Trier, 1588), is valuable for the same purpose.

7 Records S.J., vol. vii, part ii, p. 1240. Foley gives a catalogue of these Jesuits, ibid., part i, p. 568. His Collectanea which make up the two parts of volume seven give an alphabetical list of names with short biographical and genealogical notices of th» members of the English province from the beginning down to the suppression in 1773. Cf. Dopp, Church History of England, vol. ii, p. 403, who gives a list of sixty-nine British subjects who became Jesuits between 1556 and 1580; and OLIVER, Collections towards illustrating the Biography of the Scottish, English and Irish Members of the Society of Jesus. London, 1881.

There were three classes of priests in the province: those who lived privately in the families of noble or wealthy Catholics, as chaplains and tutors, as for example, Father Charles Plowden, — the chaplain at Lulworth Castle, the friend and correspondent of John Carroll during the greater part of the latter’s life; those who travelled about the country in disguise, running grave danger of capture, and ministered to the Catholics; and those who were able to live in their own homes and receive the Catholics who came to them.?%

To train missionaries for this dangerous field of spiritual endeavour was no easy task. A very thorough course in the humanities was necessary before the young student was allowed to enter the schools of philosophy and theology. Between the collegiate studies and philosophy there intervened for those who had entered the Society of Jesus a two years’ novitiate.

We should deprive ourselves of one of the keys to John Carroll’s character and to the events of his later life if we were to pass lightly over the two years of his novitiate at Watten, for those two years were spent almost exclusively in the formation of the religious spirit. It is the novitiate which gives the Jesuit that indefinable quality which distinguishes him from the members of all other religious Orders. It is erroneous to judge the Society of Jesus as a foundation with the avowed purpose of opposing Protestantism. Father John Hungerford Pollen, the eminent English Jesuit historian, says that when St. Ignatius began to devote himself to the service of the Church, he had probably not heard even the names of the Protestant Reformers.’® During the earliest period of the Society’s history, the Jesuits directed their steps to pagan lands; but, the object of the Society being to spread the faith, they naturally saw in the reclamation of lands lost to the Church through the Reformation another important field of endeavour. The Constitutions upon which the Society was based were composed by St. Ignatius and have never been altered in the passing of the centuries since their approval by the first congregation of the Jesuits, held in 1558.

The members of the Society of Jesus fall into four classes: novices, intended either for lay duties or for the priesthood. The

18 Cf. Morris, Condition of Catholics under James I, pp. 32988 London, 1872. 1% Article Society of Jesus, in the Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. xiv, p. 81.

latter novices, at the end of two years, make simple but perpetual vows and become formed scholastics, who in turn spend a certain number of years, usually ten to fifteen, in teaching and in studying for the priesthood. After a thorough review of the Constitutions of the Society and examinations in all the branches of philosophical, scriptural, and theological studies, the scholastics having been ordained become spiritual formed coadjutors with simple vows, or professed with solemn vows; the latter besides the three vows of religion, make a fourth vow of obedience to the Holy See in the matter of missionary work. The lay brothers after a number of years’ probation become temporal formed coadjutors with simple perpetual vows.

The novices usually enter, as John Carroll did, on a fixed day; in his case, the eighth of September. The first ten days are spent in acquainting themselves with the rule of the novitiate. Then follows a brief spiritual retreat, after which, if they are acceptable, they become novices and assume the clerical habit or soutane. The day is spent in meditation, prayer, spiritual reading, study, and manual labour. There is a daily conference by the Master of Novices on the Institute, and all are examined on the Rule at certain periods. The thirty days’ retreat, based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, is the chief test of the novice’s character, and this comes sometime within the first year.

In accordance with the ideals set forth in these exercises, of disinterested conformity with God’s will, and of personal love of Jesus Christ, the novice is trained diligently in a meditative study of the truths of religion, in the habit of self-knowledge, in a constant scrutiny of his motives, and of the actions inspired by them, in the correction of every form of self-deceit, illusion, plausible pretext, and in the education of the will, particularly in making choice of what seems best after careful deliberation and without self-seeking. Deeds, not words, are insisted upon as proof of genuine service, and a mechanical, emotional, or fanciful piety is not tolerated. As the novice gradually thus becomes master of his judgment and will, he grows more and more capable of offering to God the reasonable service enjoined by St. Paul, and seeks to follow the Divine Will, as manifested by Jesus Christ, by His Vicar on earth, by the bishops appointed to rule His church, by his more immediate or religious superiors, and by the civil powers rightfully exercising authority.”

2% POLLEN, ut supra,

The noviceship lasts two full years and at its conclusion simple vows are taken, the novices being then promoted to the degree of scholastics. If their college studies are not finished, they then follow a special course, usually lasting two years. When these studies have been completed, the scholastics go to another house, usually called the scholasticate, where they spend three years studying philosophy and science. After this, from three to seven years are devoted to teaching in one of the public colleges of the Society. Then begins the study of theology, which is generally of four years’ duration. At the end of the third year of theology, the priesthood is conferred, and at the completion of the entire preparation of fifteen or seventeen years, another year is devoted to the second novitiate, the tertianship, in which the recently ordained Jesuit renews the spirit of piety acquired at the beginning of his career and is enabled to reorganize all his studies upon the basis of their practical utility for his own spiritual and academic life.?*

At the age of eighteen, when he had finished the novitiate, John Carroll had reached the most impressionable period of his life, and it would be of untold value to us if we could discover the hidden springs from which he drew those remarkable qualities which gave him leadership in the days when leadership was badly needed in the American Church. We know that as a novice his life was one of entire self-sacrifice, childlike obedience, perfect poverty, and self-denial. Indoors, much of the housework and menial employment fell to his share; if he went out he was occupied in visiting hospitals and in catechising poor children in and around the city. In the old days the novice was sent, once during the novitiate, on a pilgrimage, which generally lasted a month. This was performed with one companion, always on toot, both begging their bread the whole way. No doubt this part of the training had fallen into disuse at this time. Even a very hazy knowledge of the religious life would permit one to realize the resultant effect of these two years on the young

21 Brucker, La Compagnie de Jésus: esquisse de son Institut et de son Histoire (1521-1733), pp. 20-46. Paris, 1920; The Jesuits, Their Foundation and History, p. 34. (By B. N.), London, 1879; Rules of the Society of Jesus, Washington, 1839; RossETTI, De Spiritu Societatis Jesu, pp. 15388, Freiburg, 1888; Mrscuuer, La Compagnie de Jésus: ses Statuts et ses Résultats, trans. Mazoyer, Paris, 1921. The latest contribution to the subject, and the first history of the Society, written by an American, is CAMPBELL, The Jesuits (2 vols., New York, 1921).

American. At this time he was at the most malleable stage in the soul’s life, and it is hardly an over-estimate to state that in these two years of solid piety and of practical spirituality in the Jesuit novitiate the secret of John Carroll’s religious fervour, apostolic zeal, and high-minded independence of thought is to be found.

CHAP TER LIL

THE LIEGE SCHOLASTICATE; ORDINATION TO THE . PRIESTHOOD; TERTIANSHIP

(1755-1773)

Joun Carroii completed his novitiate on September 8, 1755, and the next step was the study of philosophy at Liége, where the scholasticate was situated. The English College at Liege was begun as early as 1614, when Father John Gerard, of Gunpowder Plot fame, bought a house and some ten acres of land there for the purpose of founding the scholasticate. The province of Liége, though part of the Holy Roman Empire, was at the time a sovereign principality, with the bishop as sovereignprince, a status which had lasted from the time of Bishop Notger (1008) and continued until the French Revolution. As a bufferstate between Germany, France, and the Low Countries, its history is written large on the pages of medieval and modern times. Its schools were famous long before the University of Paris opened its doors, and this fact, together with its neutral position in matters touching France and England, made it a haven of refuge for the persecuted English Catholics.1 The scholasticate combined a continuance of the religious life of the novitiate with a rigid course of study in philosophy, rhetoric, literature, the natural sciences and higher mathematics.