Bishop Fenwick was averse to the crowding of Catholics in the large cities, and to segregate them he established the exclusively Catholic colony of Benedicta, but this scheme of a Paraguay in the woods of Maine had only a limited success. Prompted by the same motive of love of the Society he visited the place which Father Rasle had sanctified with his blood when the fanatical Puritans of Massachusetts put him to death in 1724. Father Rasle was the apostle of the Abenakis and had established himself at what is now Norridgewock on the Kennebec. Fenwick went there to pray. Although it was in the wilderness, he determined to make it a notable place for the future Catholics of America; and over the mouldering remains of Rasle and his brave Indian defenders, he erected a monument, a shaft of granite, on which an inscription was cut to record the tragedy. It was too much for the bigotry that then reigned in those parts, and the monument was thrown down; but Fenwick put it in its place again; at a later date when, in the course of time, it had fallen out of perpendicular, Bishop Walsh of Portland corrected the defect and amid a great throng of people solemnly reconsecrated it.
While he was Bishop of Boston, Fenwick made a pious pilgrimage to Quebec; the city from which the Jesuits of the old Society had started on their perilous journeys to evangelize the Indians of the continent. He saw there an immense building on whose façade were cut the letters I. H. S. "What is that?" he asked. "It is the old Jesuit College, now a soldiers' barracks," was the reply. His soul was filled with indignation and he exclaimed in anger, "The outrage that these men of blood should occupy the house sanctified by the martyrs Jogues, Brébeuf, Lalemant and the others." The good bishop was unaware that the martyrs had never seen the building. It was built after they had gone to claim their crowns in heaven.
During his episcopacy Knownothingism reigned, and in one of the outbreaks the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown was attacked at midnight. The sisters were shot at, the house was pillaged, the chapel desecrated and the whole edifice given over to the flames. The blackened ruins remained for fifty years to remind the Commonwealth of its disgrace, until finally the remnants of the building, which it had cost so much to erect, had to be removed to escape taxation. It was Fenwick who founded Holy Cross College, in Worcester, Massachusetts, an establishment which is the Alma Mater of most of the subsequent bishops of New England. It has also the singular distinction of being the only Catholic College exempted by law from receiving any but Catholic students. Fenwick is buried there. He died on August 11, 1846, after an episcopacy of twenty-one years.
Strange to say the Bull resurrecting the Society was not sent to America until October 8, 1814, and on January 5, 1815, Bishop Carroll wrote to Father Marmaduke Stone, in England, as follows: "Your precious and grateful favor accompanied by the Bull of Restoration was received early in December and diffused the greatest sensation of joy and thanksgiving, not only among the surviving and new members of the Society, but also all good Christians who have any remembrances of their services or heard of their unjust and cruel treatment, and have witnessed the consequences of their suppression. You may conceive my sensations when I read the account of the celebration of Mass by His Holiness himself at the superb altar of St. Ignatius at the Gesù; the assemblage of the surviving Jesuits in the chapel to hear the proclamation of their resurrection, etc."
On returning to America after the suppression of the Society in Belgium, Father Carroll had gone to live at his mother's house in Rock Creek, Maryland, for he no longer considered himself entitled to support from the funds of the Jesuits who still maintained their existence in the colonies. They had never been suppressed, whereas he had belonged to a community in the Netherlands which had been canonically put out of existence by the Brief. He spent two years in the rough country missions of Maryland and then went with Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Chase and his cousin Charles Carroll to Canada to induce the Frenchmen there to make common cause with the Americans against Great Britain. The Continental Congress had especially requested him to form a part of the embassy. The mission was a failure and the Colonies had themselves to blame for it; because two years previously they had issued an "Address to the English People" denouncing the government for not only attempting to establish an Anglican episcopacy in the English possessions, but for maintaining a papistical one on the banks of the St. Lawrence. Clearly it would have been impossible for the French Catholics who had been guaranteed the free exercise of their religion to transfer their allegiance to a country which considered that concession to be one of the reasons justifying a revolution.
When the war was over, Carroll and five other Jesuits met at Whitemarsh to devise means to keep their property intact in order to carry on their missionary work. They had no other resources than the produce of their farms, for their personal support. The faithful gave them nothing. At this conference they decided to ask Rome to empower some one of their number to confirm, grant faculties and dispensations, bless oils, etc. They added that, for the moment, a bishop was unnecessary. The petition was sent on November 6, 1783, and on June 7, 1784, Carroll was appointed superior of the missions in the thirteen states, and was given power to confirm. There were at that time about nineteen priests in the country and fifteen thousand Catholics, of whom three thousand were negro slaves. In 1786 Carroll took up his residence in Baltimore and was conspicuously active in municipal affairs, establishing schools, libraries and charities. Possibly it was due to him that Article 6 was inserted in the Constitution of the United States which declares that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States;" and probably also the amendment that "this Congress shall make no laws respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Its actual sponsor in the Convention was C. C. Pinckney of South Carolina.
Carroll was made Bishop of Baltimore by Pius VI on November 6, 1789, twenty-four out of the twenty-five priests in the country voting for him. He was consecrated on August 15, 1790, at Lulworth Castle, England by the senior vicar Apostolic of England, Bishop Walmesly. On the election of Washington to the presidency, he represented the clergy in a congratulatory address to which Washington answered; "I hope your fellow-countrymen will not forget the patriotic part in the accomplishment of the Revolution and the establishment of the government or the important assistance which they received from a nation in which the Roman Catholic Faith is professed."
He convoked the first Synod of Baltimore in 1791. There were twenty-two priests of five nationalities in attendance. He called the Sulpicians to Baltimore in 1791; the first priest he ordained was Stephen Badin, the beloved pioneer of Kentucky, and four years later the famous Russian prince, Demetrius Gallitzin. He also succeeded in having a missionary for the Indians appointed by the government. He had intended to have as his coadjutor and successor in the see, Father Lawrence Grässel, who had been a novice in the old Society and who at Carroll's urgent request, had come out to America as a missionary. Grässel, however, died before the arrival of the Bulls. Father Leonard Neale, a Maryland Jesuit, was then chosen and was consecrated in 1800. A year and two months after the re-establishment of the Society, namely on December 3, 1815, Carroll died. It was fitting that this son of Saint Ignatius should be called to heaven on the feast of the great friend and companion of Saint Ignatius, Saint Francis Xavier.
Apropos of this, a note has been quoted by Father Hughes (op. cit., Doc., I, 424) which is often cited as revealing a change in Carroll's attitude toward the Society after he became archbishop. Fr. Charles Neale had written to him as follows, "It is equally certain that I have no authority to give up any right that would put the subject out of the power of his superior, who must and ought to be the best judge of what is most beneficial to the universal or individual good of the members, of the Congregation." On the back of the letter appear the words "Inadmissible Pretensions," said by Bishop Maréchal to have been written by Carroll.
Archbishop Carroll's attitude to the Society is clearly manifested in his letter of December 10, 1814, addressed to Father Grassi, which says: "Having contributed to your greatest happiness on earth by sending the miraculous bull of general restoration, even before I could nearly finish the reading of it, I fully expect it back this evening with Mr. Plowden's letter." It should not be forgotten that Carroll was heartbroken when the Society was suppressed and that he longed for death because of the grief it caused him. The words "Inadmissible Pretensions" noted on Neale's letter referred to a formal protest made by Father Charles Neale against a synodial statute of the bishops convened at Baltimore. Neale, indeed, desired to exercise the special privileges of the Society and to govern as was done in the old Society or as in Russia, a procedure which incurred the disapproval of the General. Grassi writing to Plowden, in England, says: "He (Archbishop Carroll) considers Mr. Chas. Neale as a wrongheaded man, and persons who knew him at Liège and Antwerp are nearly of the same opinion." In brief, Neale's administration both as president of Georgetown and as superior of the mission was most disastrous (cf. Hughes, I, ii, passim).