John Carroll, soon to become the first Catholic bishop in the United States, obtained the charter for Georgetown Academy on this day, founding what would grow into Georgetown University. It marked a milestone for Catholic education in a young nation still wary of the faith, and it would become one of the world's leading centers of diplomacy and international affairs training.
Founded in the same year George Washington took his first presidential oath, Georgetown began as little more than an academy on a hill overlooking the Potomac, funded through subscriptions collected among Maryland's small Catholic gentry. John Carroll, a Jesuit-educated priest who would become the first Catholic bishop of the United States, envisioned an institution that could train future priests and educated Catholic laymen in a country whose Protestant majority often viewed Catholicism with suspicion.
The timing mattered enormously. The U.S. Constitution had only just been ratified, and religious liberty was still an untested experiment. Carroll wagered that a permanent, visible Catholic institution of higher learning would help normalize the faith's place in American civic life.
Georgetown's first students arrived in 1792, and the school survived early financial precariousness, the suppression and restoration of the Jesuit order, and the Civil War, during which its buildings served as a Union hospital and barracks. It eventually became the oldest Catholic university in the United States and a training ground for diplomats, senators, and presidents.
Key people: John Carroll