John Carroll (8 January 1735 – 3 December 1815) was the Bishop and Archbishop of Baltimore from 1784 to 1815, preceding Leonard Neale. Carroll was the first Catholic bishop and archbishop in the United States, and he founded Georgetown University in 1789.
Biography[]
John Carroll was born in Marlborough Town, Maryland on 8 January 1735, the brother of congressman Daniel Carroll cousin of Senator Charles Carroll, and he was educated at the College of St. Omer in Flanders, France. He became a postulant of the Society of Jesus in 1753, and he became a Catholic priest in 1769. After Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Jesuits in 1773, Carroll returned to Maryland, and he became Superior of the Missions in the United States in 1784. Carroll fought notions that Protestantism was the state religion of the United States, and he defended American Catholics from anti-Catholic sentiment. In 1784, he became the first Catholic bishop in the United States; the year before, Samuel Seabury had become the first Anglican bishop in the country. In 1789, he founded Georgetown University in Georgetown, Maryland (now a part of Washington DC), and instruction began in 1791. Carroll became archbishop in 1808 after Pope Pius VII made Baltimore the first archbishopric in the United States, and he died in 1815.