prominent part in the petition to Rome to take the control of the
American church away from London; and on Franklin's recommendation,
Carroll was named prefect apostolic, the American church being
recognized as a distinct body in a decree issued by Cardinal Antonelli
on the 9th of June 1784. In the summer of 1785 he began his visitations;
in 1786 he induced the general chapter to authorize a Catholic seminary
(now Georgetown University); and at the same session it was voted that
the condition of the church required a bishop, accountable directly to
the pope (and not to the Congregation of the Propaganda) and chosen by
the American clergy. Consent to this course was given by Antonelli in a
letter of the 12th of July 1788. The clergy met at Whitemarsh, Maryland,
and Baltimore was adopted as the episcopal seat, Carroll being chosen as
bishop; and on the 6th of November 1789 Pius VI. issued a bull to that
effect, Carroll being consecrated at Lulworth Castle, England, on the
15th of August 1790.

On his return from England the bishop saw Georgetown College completed
(1791), thanks to moneys he had received from English Catholics. His
first synod met on the 7th of November 1791; and on the 16th he issued
the "Circular on Christian Marriage," which attacked marriage by any
save "lawful pastors of our church." In 1795 the Rev. Leonard Neale
(1746-1817) was appointed his coadjutor. In 1799, after the death of
Washington, Bishop Carroll bade his clergy hold the 22nd of February
1800 as a day of mourning, and on that day delivered in his
pro-cathedral a memorial discourse which attracted much attention.
Already in 1802 he was pressing for the creation of new sees in his
diocese, and the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 gave added weight to this
request; in September 1805 the Propaganda made him administrator
apostolic of the diocese of New Orleans, to which he appointed John
Olivier as vicar general; and in 1808 Pius VII. divided Carroll's great
diocese into four sees, Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Bardstown
(Kentucky), suffragan to the metropolitanate of Baltimore, of which
Carroll actually became archbishop by the assumption of the long delayed
_pallium_ on the 18th of August 1811, having consecrated three
suffragans in the autumn of 1810. In 1811 ecclesiastical jurisdiction
over the Danish and Dutch West Indies was bestowed upon him. Carroll was
now an old man, and the shock of the war of 1812, which as a staunch
Federalist he h