In 1691 the Protestant settlers in Maryland having become more numerous than the Catholic, Lord Baltimore's act of toleration was revoked, the Anglican was made the established church, and then began for the Catholics of Maryland a period of legal proscriptions and persecutions like those of New England, that lasted until the War of the Revolution. In the War of Inde pendence, Catholics joined the army and the navy in numbers out of all proportion to their popu lation. Catholic officers from Catholic lands (Ire land, France and Poland) came to offer their services to the cause of liberty. France and Spain were the first to recognize our independence and send legations. Our first diplomatic circle was Catholic; this accounts for the solemn church services to which the federal authorities and mili tary officers were invited on great national oc casions. Then came to our shores French fleets and French regiments, with their chaplains and religious services. The spirit of intolerance gave way gradually before these Catholic manifesta tions and a new keynote was sounded in the fol lowing words of the Continental Congress, 1774: "As an opposition to the settled plan of the British administration to enslave America will be strengthened by a union of all ranks of men within this province, we do most earnestly rec ommend that all former differences about religion or politics from henceforth cease and be forever buried in oblivion." The Revolutionary War broke the connection of the Catholic communities in the colonies with the Vicar Apostolic of London. A decree making the church of the United States a body distinct from that of England, and appointing the V. Rev. John Carroll Prefect Apostolic of the church in the United States, was issued by the Propaganda, June 9, 1784. The following year Father Carroll sent to Rome a Relation of the State of Religion in the United States: In Mary land were 15,800 Catholics; in Pennsylvania, 70o; in Virginia, zoo; in New York, 1,5oo; in the territory bordering on the Mississippi, an unas certainable number destitute of priests; in Mary land there were 19 priests; in Pennsylvania, 5. In November, 1789, Father Carroll was appointed Bishop of Baltimore. When the news reached England, Thomas Weld of Lulworth Castle, a personal friend of Carroll, invited him to allow the ceremony of his consecration to take place in the chapel of the castle. Carroll accepted the invitation and was consecrated August 15, 1790. by the Rt. Rev. Charles \Valmesley, Senior Vicar Apostolic of England. The mission period of the church in the United States was closed, and the hierarchical period was opened by this event.
(4) The Hierarchical Period, 1790-1898. As it would take too much space to relate in detail the expansion of the church during this period. we present a single table showing the present con dition of the church in the United States.
Present Condition of the Catholic Church in the United States.
Archbishops 11 Bishops 77 Religious Clergy 2.774 Secular Clergy Churches 5,946 Missions Stations and Chapels 5,105 Universities 16 Secular Seminaries 25 Students in the above. 2,002 Religious Seminaries 72 Students in the above 1,871 Colleges for Boys 2t5 Academies for Girls 614 Parishes with Schools 3,636 Children in the above 819,575 Orphan Asylums 248 Orphans 33,039 Charitable Institutions 757 Catholic Population 9,856,622 It has been stated above what was the Catholic population in the thirteen colonies at the end of the last century. A small accession came with the annexation of Louisiana, Florida and the French possessions on the lakes and in the basins of the Mississippi and the Ohio. In 183o the Catholic population was 361,000. Since then the annexation of New Mexico and California have added a few thousand (say fifteen thousand); but the chief sources of growth were immigration, so abundant since 1829, and the natural increase of population, admittedly larger with Catholics than with Protestants. We have had some losses;
not, however, so extensive as has been claimed. Not only immigration, but conversions also have added to the number of Catholics and have offset, if not completely, at least in part, their past losses. On this point Leonard Woolsey Bacon, in "History of American Christianity," vol. 13 of "The American Church History Series," writes: "It has not been altogther a detriment to the Catholic Church in America that the social status and personal composition of its congregations, in its earlier years, have been such that the transi tion into it from any of the Protestant churches could be made only at the cost of a painful self denial. The number of accessions to it has been thereby lessened, but the quality of them has been severely sifted." Two memorable movements, one within and one without the church, Trusteeism and Know nothingism, were dangers through which the church passed with some loss, but with final tri umph. Trusteeism began in New York as early as 1785 and ended in Buffalo in 1852. Within that period it is to be met with in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Vir ginia. It consists in the following assumptions: Trustees, not content to hold and administer church property, furthermore asserted that the congregation, represented by its trustees, had the right to choose its pastor, to dismiss him at pleas ure and that the ecclesiastical superior or bishop had no right to interfere beyond confirming the action of the trustees. Such principles are sub versive of the constitution of the church and were fought until they were completely eliminated from the minds of the laity.
"One effect of the enormous immigration," writes Leonard Woolsey Bacon in the work quoted above, "was inevitably to impose upon this church, according to the popular apprehen sion, the character of a foreign association. It was in like manner inevitable, from the fact that the immigrant class are preponderantly poor and of low social rank, that it should for two or three generations be looked upon as a church for the illiterate and unskilled laboring class. An inci dent of the excessive torrent rush of the immi gration was that the Catholic Church became to a disproportionate extent an urban institution, mak ing no adequate provision for the dispersed in agricultural regions.
"Against these and other like disadvantages the hierarchy of the Catholic Church have struggled heroically, with some measure of success. The steadily rising character of the imported popu lation in its successive generations has aided them. If in the first generations the churches were con gregations of immigrants served by an imported clergy, the most strenuous exertions were made for the founding of institutions that should se cure to future congregations born upon the soil the services of an American-trained priesthood. One serious hindrance to the noble advances that have nevertheless been made in this direction has been the fanatical opposition levied against even the most beneficent enterprises of the church by a bigoted Native-Americanism. It is not a hope ful method of conciliating and naturalizing a foreign element in the community to treat them with suspicion and hostility as alien enemies. The shameful persecution which the mob was for a brief time permitted to inflict on Catholic churches and schools and convents had for its chief effect to confirm a foreigner in his adher ence to his Church and his antipathy to Protes tantism." The Know-nothing movement lasted from 1830 to 185o and showed its worst features in Boston, Philadelphia, New York and Louis ville.