"Mission Territory" - Andrew White to John Carroll

The beginning of the Maryland Province is the story of the beginning of Catholicism in the United States. On March 25, 1634 Fr. Andrew White, SJ and two colleagues landed on St. Clement Island, Maryland with a group of Catholic and Protestant settlers for the new colony of Maryland. There, Fr. White celebrated Mass for the first time in Maryland, beginning a chain of events common to both the history of American Catholicism and the history of the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus.

In terms of Jesuit history, Fr. White and the Jesuits who accompanied, and later, followed him were "missionaries" from the English province. They set out with several goals: to establish an outpost in the colonies, to evangelize the native inhabitants, and to experience the freedom of practicing their faith in a land far from the Penal Laws of England which so constrained and endangered their brothers back home.

In due time, each of these hopes were tested and modified. With the growing influence of Protestant leaders and the foundation of cities and territories in the new land, the native Americans were soon pushed further out of the local picture (although Fr. White did author an entire catechism in the native language of the Piscataway tribe). This left the Jesuits with a ministry primarily directed at the English colonists. With the overthrow of the Catholic English leaders, the new colonial government enacted the very same anti-Catholic Penal Laws which prompted the journey to America in the first place. Soon Fr. White would be sent home to England in chains.

During Suppression and Restoration

But others followed, and with quiet care, the mission grew. The most prominent figure in this part of the story is John Carroll, a native Marylander educated in Europe who would return to Maryland as a Jesuit and begin a career of leadership in the local clergy that ended with his appointment as the first bishop in the United States. However, political troubles (which were never fully ended until the birth of the new nation and the constitutional guarantees o n freedom to worship that followed) soon gave way to ecclesiastical troubles -- the 1773 suppression of the Society of Jesus left John Carroll and his brothers to continue their ministries apart from their "formal" Jesuit identity. It is interesting to note that within this period of suppression, the first Jesuit college in America, Georgetown University was founded by John Carroll. It is also in this period that Carroll himself was ordained to the episcopacy and the first diocese of the new nation was established in Baltimore.

Returning again to the Jesuit history, the restoration of the Society in 1814 established the nineteen members of the restored order as the "Mission of the United States." These mission seeds in Maryland soon grew to recognition as the full-fledged Province of Maryland in 1833. And from this territory extended men and ministries that would become landmarks in the American Catholic landscape -- appointments as bishops in Boston and Cincinnati, the founding of Boston and Holy Cross Colleges and missions westward that eventually became the Missouri province.

The other great mission experience of the new world was happening in Canada which, itself, sent men out into the new United States -- working especially in New York and northern New Jersey. In 1879, this New York mission was separated from the Canadian mission and joined to the Maryland Province, to be renamed in 1880 "the Maryland-New York Province." This created a territory that extended from Maine to North Carolina. (To the south, Peruvian Jesuits had worked since the 1500s in Florida and the Gulf Coast. These areas would eventually form the New Orleans province which extends from the Gulf of Mexico to meet the Missouri and Maryland Provinces to the north).

Creating the Present-Day Maryland Province

In 1926, the New England Province was carved out of the Maryland-New York Province and in 1943, the territory was again divided with the establishment of the New York Province in the entirety of New York state and northern New Jersey. This results in the present geography of the Maryland Province: the states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, the southern portion of New Jersey, and the District of Columbia.

Today, the old ties with the New York Jesuits remain as the provinces cooperate in a shared formation and novitiate program and a combined vocations effort to serve the two provinces.