GOOD OF THE ORDER - 07/02/25
- webmaster3002
- Jul 5
- 3 min read
Lecturer PGK Bill McCarthy presented the following patriotic article at the July business meeting.
Charles Carroll, Catholic Patriot
“I have lived to my ninety-sixth year; I have enjoyed continued health, I have been blessed with great wealth, prosperity, and most of the good things which the world can bestow—public approbation, esteem, applause; but what I now look back on with the greatest satisfaction to myself is, that I have practiced the duties of my religion.”
So wrote Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the last surviving Signer of the Declaration of Independence, of his Roman Catholic faith just before his death in November 1832. These last words, recorded by Carroll’s friend and confessor, Father Constantine Pise, were not the pious hyperbole of an old man. For the last Founding Father, who, next to his Bible, cherished Thomas a Kempis’s Imitation of Christ as the greatest of books, was a courageous witness to the Roman Catholic Church throughout his life and strove, like Thomas, to find union with God in humility and self-denial, and especially in frequent reception of the Blessed Sacrament.
In 1692, the so-called royal government of Maryland passed an “Act of Religion” which imposed upon Maryland Catholics the same penal laws that were in force in England. The Church of England was established as the religion of all Marylanders, the majority of whom were not Anglican. Priests were forbidden to celebrate Mass, or to teach the Faith. Parents were threatened with criminal action simply for teaching their children the doctrines of the Church in the privacy of their homes. Children were encouraged to disobey their Catholic parents and abandon the Catholic Faith; a law of 1715 required that Catholic children should be taken from their parents whenever possible and educated in the Protestant religion.
The prominent Catholic families, of whom the Carrolls were one, attained a remarkable degree of unity in their passive and sometimes active resistance. The key to Catholic survival in Maryland in these pre-Revolutionary years was the existence of a superiorly educated and wealthy Catholic elite who could plan and lead the resistance against the state. This was achieved in what was called a “Catholic counter-revolutionary society,” which included the Carrolls and several other influential families. They intermarried, lent money to one another, educated their children in common, opened and maintained lines of communications with their brethren in England, and even occasionally deemed it necessary openly to violate the pseudeo-laws of Maryland and go to prison, like Carroll’s grandfather, to bear witness to their Catholic Faith.
Carroll put the lie to accusations that he could not be a patriot and a Catholic. In a public exchange of letters in the Maryland Gazette, his lifelong adversary Daniel Dulany wrote that Carroll could not possibly support liberty and patriotism while at the same time profess Roman Catholicism, for to do so would be like “holding one candle to St. Michael and another to the dragon.” It was precisely this prominent exchange of newspaper editorials that built Carroll’s reputation so that, his Roman Catholicism notwithstanding, he was recognized as a patriot and public intellectual of the first order.
The First Continental Congress, convened in Philadelphia in 1774, described Catholicism as a religion liable to “deluge” a country “with blood,” and disperse “impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder and rebellion through every part of the world.” It was only two years later that the Second Continental Congress—with Carroll in attendance—issued the Declaration of Independence. Such inconsistency could only mean that Carroll was deeply respected.
Carroll not only put his “John Hancock” on the Declaration of Independence; even more remarkable, he outlived every other signatory, dying at the age of ninety-five. The story has it that Carroll added the phrase “of Carrollton” after his name when one of the Protestant co-signers observed that there were so many other Carrolls in Maryland that King George would not know whom to hang. More reliable is the anecdote about John Hancock’s asking Carroll if he cared to sign it. “`Most willingly’, was the prompt reply, and as he made his signature, a member standing near observed, `There go a few millions,’ and all admitted that few risked as much in a material sense, as the wealthy Marylander.” Indeed, Charles Carroll was at the time the wealthiest person in the colonies, the equivalent of a modern millionaire, for his grandfather and father had left him a great fortune which he committed wholly to the cause of the Catholic counter-revolutionary movement in America.
Information for this article was extracted from the following sources:
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