History
The Archdiocese of Washington often prides itself in sharing the fact that the Society of Jesus celebrated the first Mass in British North America on its shores in 1634. During the colonial era however, Catholics would remain a persecuted people suffering the wrath of oppression allowed by local penal laws.
Upon the establishment of the United States by its founding fathers, the Jesuit, John Carroll, was elected the first bishop of the newly created diocese which would later become the Archdiocese of Baltimore. The Prefecture Apostolic of the United States, as the entity was known then, had jurisdiction over all American Catholics, including present-day City of Washington.
In 1858, Mount Olivet Cemetery was established in Washington, D.C., the first Catholic cemetery to serve all the parishes in the area.
In 1939, Pope Pius XII separated the City of Washington from the Archdiocese of Baltimore and created two Archdioceses (Baltimore and Washington) under the oversight of one archbishop. The process of separation was officially concluded on November 15, 1947. The Archdiocese of Washington became a metropolitan see on October 12, 1965, when the Diocese of Saint Thomas became its suffragen see.
To manage Mount Olivet and three other cemeteries, in 1978 the archdiocese created and incorporated Catholic Cemeteries of the Archdiocese of Washington; 25 years later, All Souls Cemetery in Germantown, Maryland became its fifth archdiosesan cemetery.
Read more about this topic: Roman Catholic Archdiocese Of Washington
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)