THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE UNITED STATES
In our own beloved country we have every reason to be thankful that the liberty to worship God according to the dictates of conscience is guaranteed by the Constitution, and has entered deeply into the convictions of our fellow-citizens. The Catholic Church, by her own constitution, is deeply sympathetic with our national life and all that it stands for. She has thrived in the atmosphere of liberty, and seeks only the protection of the common law, that equal justice which is dealt out to all. She is the oldest historical and continuous government on the earth, and it is no small index of the value of our institutions and their durability that they make provision for the life and the work of so vast and so aged a society. It would also seem to show that, through a long course of centuries, Catholicism held as its own genuine political teachings only such as were finally compatible with the most perfect and universal citizenship known to history.
When this nation was forming, the first Catholic bishop in the United States, and my first predecessor in the see of Baltimore, John Carroll, accepted and performed satisfactorily the gravest public duty of a citizen, an embassy to another people for the benefit of his own country. Thereby he left to us all an example and a teaching that we shall ever cherish, the example of self-sacrifice as the prime duty of every citizen, and the teaching that patriotism is a holy conviction to which no Catholic, priest or layman, can hold himself foreign or apathetic.
A Catholic layman of the same distinguished family, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, threw in his lot with the patriots from the beginning, and by word and deed served the cause of American liberty, while he lived to see it flourish and inform more and more the minds and hearts of the first generation of American citizens. In future centuries, as in this, his name will be held in honor and benediction as a signer of the Declaration of Independence. His Catholic belief and conduct will forever be a potent encouragement to the children of his own faith. He was the first layman to contribute notably to the cause of Catholic education, and the native formation of the priesthood, by the establishment of a college for that purpose.