The American Jesuits: A History

2 The Maryland Tradition

2 The Maryland Tradition The First Mass Drive two hours south of Washington, D.C., through the lush, green farmlands of St. Mary’s County to the southern Maryland peninsula, where the Potomac River empties into the Chesapeake Bay on the west, the bay reaches up past Annapolis and Baltimore on the east, and Maryland’s Eastern Shore dangles down between the Chesapeake and the Atlantic Ocean. A few miles into the Potomac sits St. Mary’s City, the first permanent settlement in Maryland, now a mini theme park, with reproductions, a gift shop, and skeleton replicas of original buildings, including a 17th-century chapel. Then descend a few miles to St. Inigoes, where the first Jesuits, who had received from Lord Baltimore 2,000 acres for every five men recruited for the voyage, farmed about a sixth of the total 24,500 acres the Jesuits owned, not as formal chaplains but as participant “adventurers ” in the founding of the colony. Then turn north along the west coast into Charles County and to Chapel Point and Port Tobacco and St. Ignatius Church, St. Thomas Manor, possibly the oldest foundation in the world in continuous Jesuit possession. In the ancient graveyard, fresh small Confederate flags stand by the graves of two Confederate spies. Some Union soldiers lie buried in the woods. This is the neighborhood into which John Wilkes Booth fled after Lincoln’s assassination, and a new-looking gravestone is marked MUDD, descendant of the Catholic doctor, jailed as a conspirator , who treated Booth in flight. A few miles away, on tiny St. Clement’s Island at the mouth of the Potomac, on March 25, 1634, roughly 150 men, women, and children waded ashore from two British ships, the big 400-ton Ark and its pinnacle , the 40-ton Dove, and the Catholics in the expedition, a minority, gathered around a makeshift altar. There, Fr. Andrew White, age 54, of 21 the Society of Jesus offered the first Mass as he said, “in this part of the world.” Then assisted by the appointed governor, Leonard Calvert, the 23-year-old half-brother of the second Lord Baltimore, Cecil Calvert , they hewed a huge cross from a tree and erected it, reciting a litany “with great devotion.” White’s Jesuit piety enabled him to interpret every event, particularly favorable ones, as if God’s providential hand directly intervened day by day guiding His servants to their destiny. We do not know who named the ships; but the Ark was clearly Noah’s ark, saving a chosen minority and bearing them into a new covenant; the Dove was Noah’s dove sent out ahead to come back with the olive branch in its beak. Both ships had sailed from Gravesend, England, in the fall of 1633; but the three Jesuit passengers—White, a priest, John Altham, also a priest (alias Gravenor), and a coadjutor brother, Thomas Gervase —did not board until November 22 on the Isle of Wight in order to avoid the antipapist oath which colonists were obliged to take. The next day it seemed to White that the sailors were conspiring to delay their voyage, but a combination of circumstances—a favorable wind and a near crash between the Dove and a French cutter— forced the party to set sail. It happened to be St. Clement’s Day. St. Clement, a martyr, had been tied to an anchor and thrown into the sea. Thus, during their three-month voyage, St. Clement had guided the Ark and Dove to the island that today bears his name. Andrew White is, in the judgment of one historian, a “mysterious ” character. We have several writings and letters, especially one describing the voyage to America, but the drawings and idealized paintings that depict him saying mass and baptizing Indians give no consistent portrait. Born in London in 1579, he entered the English seminary at Valladolid, Spain, was ordained, and returned to England, only to be expelled in 1605 with 45 priests for some association with the Gunpowder Plot. He joined the Jesuits in Louvain, returned to England for a while, and then taught a rigid version of Thomistic theology at Louvain and Liège, where he several times complained to Rome that his colleagues, followers of Suarez, were not sticking to the Ratio Studiorum. So he lost his job at Liège and became eligible to be sent to the missions just when Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, whose family had failed to establish its colony...