the carroll family

The Roman Catholic Carroll Family Daniel Carroll provided the land for the Washington D.C. Brother Charles Carroll was War Commissioner, controlling all the executive duties of the military department, with its ammunition supplies of cannon balls, shot, kettles, spikes and nails to the army. John Carroll, an intimate friend of Benjamin Franklin, even living in Franklin’s house, founded Georgetown University just 6 months before Washington D.C. was founded. He was also the first Catholic Bishop. Jesuit Georgetown University’s emblematic seal proclaims a Roman eagle grasping the world and the cross, State and Roman Catholic Church with a banner in its beak, “Utraque Unum,”-“Both Together”. Excerpt from ~ “The Grand Design Exposed” by John Daniel “The Catholic Carroll family was one of the wealthiest American families alive. They all had been trained in Jesuit warfare at the Jesuit St. Omer’s College in France. John, the Jesuit, became a teacher there. Charles studied law at the Jesuit College Louis-le-Grand in Paris, and was sent to study further at London’s Inner Temple. The mother of Daniel and John, Eleanor Darnall, claimed direct descent from the Calverts (Calvert was Lord Baltimore), the owning family of original Maryland. She had come into possession of much of the land that Daniel would transfer to the District of Columbia. Charles Carroll stood to inherit America’s largest private estate; later, John Adams would label him America’s richest citizen. Charles Carroll was named by the Annapolis Committee of Correspondence to be a delegate to the First Continental Congress. Charles declined because he felt that his usefulness might be restricted by anti-Catholic sentiment engendered by the Quebec Act, however, he attended as an ‘unofficial consultant’ to the Marylanders. Charles Thompson and Charles, Daniel and John Carroll spent “the critical preliminary days to the congress lobbying for the inevitability of war. Thompson was already heavily invested in New Jersey’s Batso Furnace. Batso would furnish cannon balls, shot, kettles, spikes and nails to the army through the War Commissioner, who controlled all the executive duties of the military department. The War Commissioner was…Charles Carroll.” Charles Carroll of Carrollton (1737-1832) was the most illustrious and best-known of the Carroll’s. He was the only signer whose property — Carrollton — was mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. Carrollton was the 10,000-acre estate in Frederick County, Maryland, that Charles Carroll’s father had given him on his return to America from his education in Europe. Charles Carroll first became known in colonial politics through his defense of freedom of conscience and his belief that the power to govern derived from the consent of the governed. He was a staunch supporter of Washington, and when the war was going badly at Valley Forge, he was instrumental in persuading the Revolution’s Board of War not to replace Washington with General Horatio Gates. Carroll supported the war with his own private funds; he was widely regarded as the wealthiest of all the colonists, with the most to lose were the fight for independence to fail. At the time he signed the Declaration, it was against the law for a Catholic to hold public office or to vote. Although Maryland was founded by and for Catholics in 1634, in 1649 and, later, in 1689 after the Glorious Revolution placed severe restrictions on Catholics in England, the laws were changed in Maryland, and Catholicism was repressed. Catholics could no longer hold office, exercise the franchise, educate their children in their faith, or worship in public. With the Declaration of Independence, all this bias and restriction ended. Daniel Carroll of Rock Creek (1730-1796) was a member of the Continental Congress (1781-1783), and a signer of the Articles of Confederation. He was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and one of only two Catholic signers of the United States Constitution. (The other Catholic signer was Thomas Fitzsimons of Pennsylvania.) At the Constitutional Convention, Daniel Carroll played an essential role in formulating the limitation of the powers of the federal government. He was the author of the presumption — enshrined in the Constitution — that powers not specifically delegated to the federal government were reserved to the states or to the people. Daniel Carroll later became a member of the first United States Congress (1789-1791). He was also a member of the first Senate of Maryland, where he served up to the time of his death. He was appointed by Washington as one of the first three commissioners of the new federal city that is now known as the District of Columbia. In today’s terminology, he would have been considered the mayor of Washington, D.C. After the ‘Great Work’ of separating themselves, and gaining independence from British rule was accomplished, it was now necessary to form a suitable government for the new nation that would provide its citizens the guarantee of civil and religious liberties; which had been the real purpose of the Revolution from the start. The “Confederation of the United States” had served its purpose during the war, but all agreed, it had numerous shortcomings. So on 25 May 1787, the Federal Constitutional Convention was held at Independence Hall in Philadelphia to draft a new constitution, with George Washington chosen to serve as its President. It was recorded, “This began the meeting of one of the greatest sessions of wise men in the history of the world”. And two men, Thomas FitzSimons of Pennsylvania and Daniel Carroll of Maryland, were among those ‘wise men’ representing their Roman Catholic constituencies. John Carroll (1735-1815), Daniel Carroll’s younger brother, was educated in Europe, joined the Jesuit order, and was ordained a priest. He founded a private school for boys and named it after the town where it was located, Georgetown, a port on the Potomac River that later became part of Washington, D.C. He went on to be elected, by all the Catholic priests in America, to become America’s first Catholic bishop. He later became archbishop of Baltimore that was consecrated n the day of the feast of the Assumption (The feast day of the Assumption of Mary celebrates the Christian belief that God assumed the Virgin Mary into Heaven following her death). In any procession of American bishops, the archbishop of Baltimore always goes last in recognition of its role as America’s oldest diocese. In 1789, John Carroll founded the college in Georgetown that later became known as Georgetown University. During a period when the Revolutionary War was going badly, Washington asked John Carroll to join a mission to Canada to seek the support of the French for the colonies. Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Chase, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton were the others on the four-man mission. While it failed, it established a relationship with the French, much influenced by the Catholic faith they held in common with the Carroll’s. The expedition by the four Catholics bore fruit years later at Yorktown, where the largely Catholic-financed French fleet cut off supplies to British general Charles Cornwallis, and Washington was able to force Cornwallis to surrender and bring the war to an end. John Carroll was an intimate of Washington. He wrote a prayer at the time of Washington’s inauguration asking God’s blessing on the president, Congress, and government of the United States, a prayer still very much in use today. Out of gratitude for John Carroll’s support during the war, Washington gave a modified version of the seal of the United States to the institution that is now Georgetown University, and that seal is still in use. Despite their enormous contributions to the American founding, the three Carrol’ls somehow fell below the radar screen of recognition as full-fledged founding fathers. Perhaps that was because they were Catholics in a country and a culture that for many years was overwhelmingly Protestant. But one name, surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, stands out. In spite of, and regardless of the pope’s anathemas and fearful excommunication that sends one to hell for being a Freemason, we find Roman Catholic, Jesuit educated, Daniel Carroll’s name among those who are the most prominent of Freemasons. How is it possible that Daniel Carroll, who represented the top echelons of the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in America, whose cousin Charles, was the most vocal political spokesman for that Church, and his brother John, a Jesuit, who founded the new American Roman Catholic Church can be a Freemason? The answer to that question, solves a deeply hidden mystery. However, it was not until August that the matter of religious liberty was brought up for consideration. Charles and Daniel Carroll both were members of the new congress. Charles Carroll was elected to the senate and Daniel Carroll to the house. Wherever the contest was to be, whether in the senate or the house, one of the two Carroll’s was sure to be in the arena of action. The end result gave us as the first amendment to the Constitution, which reads: “Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This was a day of great glory for the Carrolls and the Roman Church they represented. As another phase of the ‘Great Work’ was accomplished, it firmly established by Federal law “Liberty” for the Church of Rome to function and flourish in English America. And that opened wide the door for good things yet to come. In a letter written some years later to George Washington Custis, the son of George Washington’s wife Martha, that he adopted, Charles Carroll said: “When I signed the Declaration of Independence, I had in view not only our independence from England but the toleration of all sects professing the Christian religion and communicating to them all full rights. Happily this wise and salutary measure has taken place for eradicating religious feuds and persecutions and become a useful lesson to all governments. Reflecting as you must on the disabilities, I may truly say, on the proscription of the Roman Catholics in Maryland, you will not be surprised that I had much at heart this ‘grand design’ founded on mutual charity, the basis of our holy religion.” (“National Gazette,” Philadelphia, Feb. 26, 1829.) In 1827 in a letter to a Protestant minister, Charles Carroll wrote: “Your sentiments on religious liberty coincide with mine. To obtain religious as well as civil liberty I entered zealously into the Revolution” As the Carrolls and Freemasonry were influencing the forming of the new American government that was brought into existence in year 1789, precisely 13 years after independence was declared in 1776, we find also a very conspicuous correlation between the launching of the American government and the founding of the American Catholic Church hierarchy. For in that year 1789, John Carroll founded and laid the cornerstone for the first Jesuit college in America at Georgetown: in what was afterwards to be the District of Columbia, and the college that George Washington’s two nephews, Bushrod and Augustine, attended. And as George Washington was inaugurated the first President of the United States in 1789, so also was John Carroll elected the first Bishop of the Catholic Church in the United States in the same year. And as the jurisdiction of the first President of the United States was from Georgia to Canada in the north and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, so too was the jurisdiction of John Carroll’s diocese. Be assured, it is no coincidence that the American government, the American Roman Catholic Church hierarchy, and the Jesuit Georgetown College all mark their beginning from year 1789. But on top of that, it will be shown how a business venture put into operation also in 1789, with George Washington becoming their front man, enabled the Carroll’s to have the American seat of government placed in their own front yard. Jesuit Charles Plowden, who preached on that memorable day, when commenting on the American Revolution, said: “Although this great event may appear to us to have been the work, the sport, of human passion, yet the earliest and most precious fruit of it has been the extension of the kingdom of Christ, the propagation of the Catholic religion,which heretofore fettered by restraining laws, is now enlarged from bondage and is left at liberty to exert the full energy of divine truth. Glorious is this day, my brethren, for the Church of God which sees new nations crowding her bosom.” The majority of Christians, particularly Protestants, hold to doctrines planted by Jesuits during the counter-reformation. This was for the purpose of undermining the reformation and for bringing nations and men back under papal yoke by altering their view of salvation and of the pope. America’s national motto “Annuit Coeptis” came from a prayer to Jupiter. It appears in Book IX of Virgil’s epic propaganda, the Aeneid, a poem commissioned just before the birth of Christ by Caius Maecenas, the mult-billionaire power behind Augustus Caesar. The poem’s objective was to fashion Rome into an imperial monarchy for which its citizens would gladly sacrifice their lives, War of Independence ?!? America’s first Catholic bishop (was) a strong supporter of the American Revolution, Carroll firmly believed that a Catholic institution could make a major contribution to the political, cultural, and educational life of the fledgling nation. Once the War began, in order to dispel the deep-seated suspicion of the Protestants-that the Catholic Church in America was no more than a tool of the Holy See-Bishop Carroll encouraged Catholics to fight in the 1776 war for America’s independence from Britain. This proved to be the major turning point in Catholic-Protestant relations. Anti-Catholic sentiment greatly abated, especially when, according to Dr. John J. Pilch of Georgetown University, Americans noticed the “wholehearted participation of Catholics in the common struggle and war for independence.” And John Carroll wrote to John Fenno of the Gazette (June 10, 1789): “Their blood flowed as freely (in proportion to their numbers) to cement the fabric of independence as that of any of their fellow citizens.”