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Ambrose Marèchal, The Jesuits, and the Demise of Ecclesial Republicanism in Maryland, 1818–1838 Robert Emmett Curran T he letter from the Archbishop of Baltimore to the Trustees of the Corporation of the Roman Catholic Clergymen of Maryland began innocently enough. “If Almighty God had listened to my prayers and granted me the grace of spending my days in the humble state of life I embraced from my youth,” Ambrose Marèchal assured them, “I should never have troubled you with this letter.” What followed touched off a conflict between the prelate and the Society of Jesus that would last more than a decade, reach into the highest quarters of ecclesiastical and secular government in Italy and the United States, and, in the process, emasculate the republican institution—the Corporation—that lay at the heart of the dispute. The archbishop went on to inform them that, since he found himself “by a disposition of Divine Providence,” to be the Archbishop of Baltimore, “charged with the administration of a vast diocese” that necessitated “considerable expenses” that he did not have the means to meet, he was consequently seeking the renewal of the $1,200 annual stipend that the Corporation had granted to his predecessors for nearly the past twenty years.1 The Corporation of the Roman Catholic Clergymen of Maryland had been established in 1792 to secure the extensive property held by individuals for the Society of Jesus, now suppressed by the papacy since 1773. Throughout the colonial period, except for a handful of Franciscans in the late seventeenth century, the Jesuits had been the ministerial church in British America. Since there was originally no state support for religion under the rule of the Calverts, the Jesuits had to support themselves as everyone else did—through working plantations. Over the course of its first century in Maryland, the Society acquired land in various ways: through the headright system that Lord Baltimore established to award property to those who brought 97 1. Marèchal to the Trustees and Representatives of the Corporation of the Clergy of Maryland, Baltimore, 6 June 1818, in Thomas Hughes, S.J., History of the Society of Jesus in North America, Documents, Vol. I, Part II (New York, 1910), 892. persons into the colony, through purchase, and through donations, such as the one of the huge plantation of White Marsh that John Carroll’s uncle made to the Society in 1729. Because Maryland law forbade ecclesiastical entities from holding property, all the Jesuit lands were held by individual Jesuits or laymen in trust for the Society. When Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Society of Jesus in 1773, Rome instructed bishops throughout the Catholic world to take possession of all the property that had belonged to the Society. Since there was no bishop in British America south of Quebec, the “Jesuit” property in Maryland remained in the hands of former Jesuits or lay friends. Still there was fear that Rome, through its Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, under whose jurisdiction mission countries, such as the United States (after 1776), fell, would take some action to seize the property. This was part of a larger concern that, with the Society no longer in existence, the lands would fall into the wrong hands or that the new state would confiscate them. The securing of the estates was a principal reason for John Carroll’s leadership in establishing, in 1783, the “Select Body of the Clergy,” organized into three districts encompassing Maryland and Pennsylvania, each of which would send two representatives to the appointed meetings of the group. The Select Body was the embodiment of Carroll’s plan whereby all the priests in America would organize themselves as a republican body that would choose representatives to adopt “some system of administration” to provide a foundation for the support of the present clergy and for “the good of Religion.”2 The main function of the Select Body was the management of the estates that were to be the principal means of providing that support. Inherent in the rationale of the Select Body of the Clergy, out of which the Corporation grew, was the affirmation of a clear cut separation of...

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