Plep makes a habit of finding treasures. Here's one from Georgetown University.



The American Mission: Maryland Jesuits From Andrew White to John Carroll



In the fall of 1976, the Special Collections Division produced this major exhibition as a feature of the University's celebration of the bicentenary of the American Revolution. The emergence of the internet now permits us to share again the riches of our origins.



The story of the Jesuits of English-speaking America is largely forgotten. They came to Maryland only shortly after their better-known brothers reached Canada and more than fifty years before Eusebio Kino travelled north to California. But they had no romance. The dreams of a new Christian empire, of a European system translated whole onto the American wilderness, were not theirs, nor did they find the heroic martyrdoms of an Isaac Jogues or a Jean de Brébeuf. In their day they published no annual letters, and no historian since has imparted to their story the epic vigor with which Francis Parkman chronicled the Canadian Jesuits.



Yet this small group of men laid stronger foundations for Catholicism in America than did the Spanish in California or the French in Canada. This exhibit, by recapturing some of that forgotten history, offers a glimpse of the world of those gentlemen of Maryland who, but for a few Franciscans, were the whole of the Catholic Church in British North America. British in culture themselves, they made it possible for the Irish and later Catholic immigrants to adopt the Anglo-American culture without leaving their faith. John Carroll, the first national leader of the Church in America, emerged from this group and helped shape its evolution in the early national period.