In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Catholic Historical Review 88.1 (2002) 153-154



[Access article in PDF]

Book Review

John Carroll Recovered:
Abstracts of Letters and Other Documents Not Found in the John Carroll Papers


John Carroll Recovered: Abstracts of Letters and Other Documents Not Found in the John Carroll Papers. By Thomas W. Spalding with assistance of Paul K. Thomas. (Baltimore: Cathedral Foundation Press. 2000. Pp. xxxvi, 264. $35.00.)

This book, which will serve henceforth as an indispensable supplement to three-volume edition of The John Carroll Papers (JCP) published in 1976, owes its existence to Thomas Spalding's "unbounded admiration for John Carroll" (p. xxxi). Clearly a labor of love, it is at the same time an impressive monument to the scholarly energy and insight of collector-abstractor-editor Spalding, who gives us careful digests of 198 Carroll documents, none of which are included in JCP. Roughly four-fifths of them date from 1800 to 1815 (the year of Carroll's death), the main source being a letterbook covering that period which is inadequately represented in JCP because the editor apparently relied on extracts made many years earlier by John Gilmary Shea. Spalding also located thirty new letters in the Propaganda Fide archives in Rome, ten in the Jesuits' Maryland Province archives, a dozen or so to Mother Seton in the archives of the Sisters of Charity of Mt. St. Vincent on the Hudson, and other letters, notations, and related documents in sources as diverse as the Cincinnati Catholic Telegraph and Advocate for March 19, 1853, and Ronald Hoffman's recently published study of the Carroll family, Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland.

Although most of the entries are brief, the abstract of a 1789 chronology drawn up by Carroll of events leading up to the establishment of the diocese of Baltimore takes up two printed pages. Even lengthier are digests of two letters to the Sulpician superior in Paris on the possibility that he might recall all his subjects in the United States, and abstracts of four letters to Rome dealing primarily with the erection of new dioceses and priests who might serve as their bishops. The latter are of particular interest in that they reveal the care with [End Page 153] which Carroll approached these matters, and the anguish it cost him to make judgments about which of his fellow priests to recommend as bishops at a time when effective episcopal leadership was so crucial to the infant church.

The book also includes thirty plates, ten of which are Carroll portraits, a detailed chronology of his life, a genealogical chart, a bibliography, an extensive index, and six appendices exploring various aspects of Carroll's life hitherto neglected by his biographers. Perhaps the most interesting of the appendices are those detailing Carroll's relationship to slave-holding--a subject concerning which the bishop was quite sensitive--and his role as a very active founder of, and participant in, civic organizations like the Library Company of Baltimore. Others deal with his pastoral ministry (e.g., some 230 marriages performed between 1793 and 1815), his ordinations, his ownership of land, and his management of property and money held in trust for others.

In his thoughtful and informative "Introduction," Spalding attests that his work on this volume changed his perception of Carroll appreciably, not least in deepening his admiration for Carroll's patience and forbearance in dealing with troublesome priests and congregations. Those qualities are particularly evident in twenty-one new letters to or about Simon Felix Gallagher, which require a considerable modification in our understanding of Carroll's relationship to that alcoholic clergyman and the persistent difficulties he provoked in the Catholic community in Charleston, South Carolina. There is no question that the materials collected here do enrich our appreciation of Carroll. They, along with the three-volume JCP, likewise justify Spalding's assertion that the first Catholic bishop "laid as solid a foundation for his church as [George] Washington had for the nation" (p. xv).

 



Philip Gleason
University of Notre Dame (Emeritus)

...

pdf

Share