Abstract

John Carroll sought to achieve a visible presence for the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. He was extraordinarily successful in this, not least through the building of the Baltimore Cathedral. In writing about this project, he consistently used language drawn from the amplitude apologetic, a defense of the truth of the Catholic Church that emphasized the church’s worldwide diffusion and magnitude. Carroll believed that the church in Europe had been in decline and he hoped to be able to offset the losses there with gains in the United States, an achievement that would provide evidence for the truth of the Catholic Church. Although some architectural and church historians have argued that the neoclassical style of the Cathedral symbolized Catholic commitment to the new American republic or to the values of the Enlightenment, the style of the Cathedral was of subsidiary importance to Carroll. His intention in building the Cathedral was not to integrate the Catholic Church into American political culture but to remedy symbolically the disordered state of a country in which heresy usurped the position of superiority that ought to belong to the Catholic Church. The Cathedral enabled Carroll to position what was from a social point of view a weak and marginal church as the rightful true church among the contending sects of the United States. Although the Cathedral and its associated apologetic were intended to contribute to the conversion of the United States to Roman Catholicism, they more effectively contributed to an image of magnitude for the Catholic Church in the United States..

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