Leonard Neale
Leonard Neale was an American Catholic prelate and Jesuit who became the second archbishop of Baltimore and the first Catholic bishop to be ordained in the United States. While president of Georgetown College, Neale became the coadjutor bishop to Bishop John Carroll and founded the Georgetown Visitation Monastery and Academy.
Neale was born in the British Province of Maryland to a prominent family that produced many Catholic leaders, including his brothers, Francis and Charles. He was educated in Europe, where he entered the Society of Jesus in 1767. Neale then volunteered to become a missionary in a Dutch colony in South America in 1779. He spent four years there, before becoming discouraged by the resistance from both the European colonists and indigenous people to his proselytism. He returned to Maryland, where he rejoined his former Jesuit colleagues from Europe at St. Thomas Manor.
In 1793, Neale was appointed pastor of Old St. Joseph's and Old St. Mary's Churches in Philadelphia. Bishop Carroll also made him vicar general for Philadelphia and the northern states. During the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, Neale established the first Catholic orphanage there to care for the many orphaned children.
Neale served as president of Georgetown College in Washington from 1799 to 1806, where his imposition of strict discipline helped cause declining student enrollment. Though he was appointed coadjutor bishop in 1795, Neale was not consecrated until 1800. Neale supported the restoration of the Jesuits in the United States, which occurred in 1805. Neale became the Archbishop of Baltimore in 1815. He faced several conflicts with lay trustees, one resulting in a temporary schism at a parish in Charleston, South Carolina.
Early life
Leonard Neale was born on October 15, 1746, at Chandler's Hope, the Neale family estate near Port Tobacco Village in the British Province of Maryland. His ancestors included Captain James Neale, who arrived from England in 1637 after receiving a royal grant of in the future Port Tobacco.Neale's parents, William Neale and Anne Neal née Brooke, had thirteen children. Two of Neale's brothers died early, while the four surviving brothers became Catholic priests. Reverend Charles Neale served as superior of the American Jesuit community. Another brother, Reverend Francis Neale, became president of Georgetown College. A sister, Anne Neale, served in the Order of Poor Clares in Aire-sur-la-Lys, France Another sister, Mary Neale Williams, was the mother of Reverend William Matthews, another president of Georgetown College.
As a young boy, Neale attended the Bohemia Manor School in Bohemia Manor, Maryland. Anne Neale wanted to further her sons' education in a Catholic college in Maryland, but the provincial government had banned them. She was forced to send them all to the College of English Jesuits at Saint-Omer in France.
Leonard Neale left for Saint-Omer in 1758 at age 12, where he achieved a good academic record. As a child, Neale had decided to become a priest and now decided to fulfill that ambition. He moved to Bruges in Flanders in the Austrian Netherlands to continue his studies when the college relocated there in 1762. Neale entered the Society of Jesus on September 7, 1767. When the college relocated a second time to Liège in the Austrian Netherlands, Neale completed his study of philosophy and theology in that city.
Priest in Europe
Neale was ordained a priest for the Society of Jesus in Liège on June 5, 1773, by Bishop Franz Karl von Velbrück. Immediately after his ordination, Neale returned to the College of Liège to join the faculty there. However, his tenure at the college was very short lived.On July 7, 1773, Pope Clement XIV published Dominus ac Redemptor, which ordered the worldwide suppression of the Jesuits. In response, the Austrian Empire seized the College of Liège and expelled all the Jesuits priests from the Austrian Netherlands. Neale then moved to England, along with the rest of the English Jesuits. He spent the next four years ministering to a small Catholic congregation in Hardwick, County Durham.
Neale was later able to return to Liège, where he spent two years, then to Brussels. Neale spent his final time in Europe working as a chaplain at the convent of the Canonesses Regular of the Holy Sepulchre in Bruges.
Missionary in South America
In 1779, at Neale's request, the Jesuit Order sent him to Demerara, a Dutch West India Company colony that is part of present-day Guyana, to serve as a missionary. Neale initially worked on evangelizing the European colonists, but they rejected his attempts and barred him from building a chapel in the colony. Neale then turned his attention to the conversion of the indigenous people who lived in the forests.Neale found that proselytizing the indigenous people was equally difficult. On one occasion, Neale was passing through a tribal village when he saw a small child who was dying. His father, a tribal chief implored Neale to cure him. Neale baptized the boy, who then miraculously recovered from his illness. The chief and his family all converted to Catholicism along with a few other villagers. However, the indigenous people generally resisted Neale's efforts and also refused to permit construction of a chapel on their lands. Discouraged and weakened from malaria, Neale left Demerara in January 1783, setting sail for Maryland. His voyage was delayed briefly when the Royal Navy seized his ship near Demerara during the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War. Neale arrived in Maryland in April 1783 after 25 years in Europe and South America.
Priest in Maryland
Once back in Maryland, Neale started serving at St. Thomas Manor near Chandler's Hope, the family estate. With the end of the American Revolution, Reverend John Carroll, a Jesuit colleague from Europe, started meeting with the few priests in the area to lay the foundations for the new American Catholic Church. Neale attended the first meeting of the Corporation of Roman Catholic Clergymen of Maryland at White Marsh Manor in Bowie, Maryland, in 1783. He remained an active member of this group in the succeeding years.In 1793, Carroll and a group of supporters started raising money to fund the establishment of the Academy of Georgetown in present-day Washington, D.C. Neale led a group of priests opposed to Carroll's selling corporation land owned to finance the new institution.
Vicar General of Philadelphia
In 1793, Neale volunteered to go to Philadelphia to help the church there during a yellow fever epidemic, despite his own weak health. The disease had killed ten percent of the city's population. At Old St. Joseph's Church, the pastor, Dominic Graessel, two assistant priests and hundreds of parishioners had died during the epidemic. Neale started serving as pastor of both Old St. Joseph's Church and Old St. Mary's Church. Carroll also named Neale as vicar general, responsible for supervising Catholics in Philadelphia and all the northern states. Neale himself contracted yellow fever at one point; he survived the illness, but never fully recovered his health.While serving in Philadelphia, Neale met Alice Lalor, a young woman who was a devout Catholic. Before coming to the United States, Lalor had promised to help her bishop in Ireland found a religious order in Kilkenny. However, her family insisted that she immigrate with them. Lalor vowed to return to Ireland in two years to set up the community. Neale convinced her to instead found a religious community in Philadelphia. Lalor and two other women, with Neale's assistance, established a small Catholic school for girls in Philadelphia. However, Lalor was soon forced to close the school after her two co-founders died of yellow fever.
In 1796, Neale faced a challenge of his authority from the lay board of trustees at one of Philadelphia's parishes. Used to their independence, the board believed that it, not the bishop, had the right to control parish property and the selection of priests. After yellow fever broke out again in Philadelphia in 1797 and 1798, Neale established the first Catholic orphanage in the city to care for children orphaned by the disease.
According to legend, Neale converted former US President George Washington to Catholicism while he was dying in 1799. Neale received a summons to come to Mount Vernon, the Washington estate in Virginia. Travelling down the Potomac River from St. Thomas Manor, Neale allegedly met with Washington. He heard his confession and then conditionally baptized him, receiving him into the Catholic Church. The story was passed along over time by other Jesuit priests and enslaved people at Mount Vernon. However, the Catholic historian Martin I. J. Griffin concluded that it was probably untrue. Written accounts by witnesses of Washington's final hours did not mention the presence of Neale or any other clergy.
Coadjutor Bishop of Baltimore
As the Diocese of Baltimore grew in size and population, Carroll requested that the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide appoint Neale as coadjutor bishop of Baltimore to assist him. On March 23, 1795, the Propaganda Fide selected Neale as coadjutor bishop and Pope Pius VI confirmed its selection on April 17. The pope also named Neale as the titular bishop of Gortyna. Neale's tenure as pastor of St. Joseph's and St. Mary's ended in March 1799 when he left Philadelphia to become president of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.Due to the ongoing turmoil in Europe resulting from the French Revolution, the bulls of appointment were twice lost in transit. Cardinal Stefano Borgia was finally able to forward them to Carroll in the summer of 1800. Neale was consecrated a bishop on December 7, 1800, at St. Peter's Pro-Cathedral in Baltimore by Carroll, with Reverends Francis Nagot and Francis Beeston serving as co-consecrators. With this ceremony, Neale became the first bishop to be consecrated in the United States. Despite his elevation to coadjutor bishop, Neale continued to reside in Washington.