In our own beloved country we have every reason to be thankful that
the liberty to worship God according to the dictates of conscience
is guaranteed by the Constitution, and has entered deeply into the
convictions of our fellow-citizens. The Catholic Church, by her own
constitution, is deeply sympathetic with our national life and all
that it stands for. She has thrived in the atmosphere of liberty,
and seeks only the protection of the common law, that equal justice
which is dealt out to all. She is the oldest historical and continuous
government on the earth, and it is no small index of the value of our
institutions and their durability that they make provision for the life
and the work of so vast and so aged a society. It would also seem to
show that, through a long course of centuries, Catholicism held as its
own genuine political teachings only such as were finally compatible
with the most perfect and universal citizenship known to history.
When this nation was forming, the first Catholic bishop in the United
States, and my first predecessor in the see of Baltimore, John
Carroll, accepted and performed satisfactorily the gravest public duty
of a citizen, an embassy to another people for the benefit of his own
country. Thereby he left to us all an example and a teaching that we
shall ever cherish, the example of self-sacrifice as the prime duty of
every citizen, and the teaching that patriotism is a holy conviction
to which no Catholic, priest or layman, can hold himself foreign or
apathetic.
A Catholic layman of the same distinguished family, Charles Carroll
of Carrollton, threw in his lot with the patriots from the beginning,
and by word and deed served the cause of American liberty, while he
lived to see it flourish and inform more and more the minds and hearts
of the first generation of American citizens. In future centuries, as
in this, his name will be held in honor and benediction as a signer
of the Declaration of Independence. His Catholic belief and conduct
will forever be a potent encouragement to the children of his own
faith. He was the first layman to contribute notably to the cause of
Catholic education, and the native formation of the priesthood, by the
establishment of a college for that purpose.