Artist Provides Glimpse into Early American Catholicism

Near the end of the "Gilbert Stuart" exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, an engaging portrait catches the visitor’s eye. It is a Catholic bishop wearing formal ecclesiastical garb: a gown with gold-embroidered cuffs, dark blue chasuble with crimson trim, and a large golden cross. In his left hand he holds a Bible, while the right hand is poised in the act of benediction. His friendly blue eyes look straight out.

Depicted is Jean-Louis Anne Magdalene Lefebvre de Cheverus, the first Catholic bishop of Boston, who built Holy Cross Cathedral, doubled the population of Catholics in that city, and quietly disseminated his faith without ever losing sight of the hatred that many New England Protestants felt for his Church. When he was called back to France in 1823, a group of Episcopalians in Boston petitioned the highest prelate in France to retract the new assignment, holding Cheverus to be a "blessing and treasure to our social community" who could "never be replaced."

In the exhibition catalogue, curator Carrie Barratt writes, "Cheverus spent 27 years inviting, but not pressing, Bostonian believers to join him in his faith, to explore their fascination with Catholicism. By Stuart’s facile brush, he is an evangelist."

The Cheverus picture is one of two in the show that give insights into the history of Catholicism in the new American republic.

Stuart is the most renowned of the portrait painters who thrived in the first decades of the United States. Born in Rhode Island, he was painting portraits at the age of 18. After 1775, Stuart perfected his art in London and Dublin, then returned during the first Washington presidency in 1793.

He worked in New York, Philadelphia and the new capital, Washington. His iconic portraits of the first five presidents, including the one of George Washington that appears on the dollar bill, are the central feature of the exhibition, a joint project of the National Gallery of Art and the National Portrait Gallery that will be on view until July 31.

After 1805, Stuart returned to New England, where he painted his most personal and penetrating portraits of the powerful.

One of these was Bishop John Carroll, the son of Maryland colonial merchant Daniel Carroll, who studied abroad at the Jesuit College in Flanders and was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1761. He played a key role in establishing the Roman Catholic Church in North America. His cousin Charles Carroll was the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence.

John Carroll was named the first Catholic bishop in the United States in 1790 for the new diocese of Baltimore, helped to found Georgetown University and St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, and was named the country’s first archbishop in 1808. Stuart painted Carroll in 1804 when he was bishop of Baltimore.

Nearly 70, he holds a breviary and looks at the viewer as if about to speak. The portrait was commissioned by an Irish-born merchant, Robert Barry, who was prominent in the early history of the nation’s capital and helped to found St. Mary’s Chapel, one of the first Catholic churches in Washington.

These two bishops’ portraits offer a glimpse into the changing status of American Catholics with the coming of the Revolution, pointing to the first stage in a process which culminated on April 8, 2005, when three American presidents attended the funeral of a pope.

Even Maryland, founded to give religious freedom to Catholics, did not tolerate Catholic Masses in public, and the Puritans who founded New England were deeply opposed to any sign of "papism." But the struggle for independence of 1776-83 ushered in a new era of toleration, later enshrined in the first amendment to the Constitution.

Besides the Stuart portraits, the new spirit is witnessed by an event recounted in David McCullough’s biography of John Adams. Adams, a delegate from Massachusetts to the Continental Congress in 1776, had been raised a Congregationalist. While in Philadelphia, Adams and his fellow delegates visited many different churches, even the "Romish" Church that had been abhorred by his ancestors.

One Sunday, "led by curiosity and good company" that included George Washington, Adams attended an afternoon Mass at St. Mary’s Catholic Church on Fifth Street and was so struck by the experience that he described it at length in a letter to his wife, Abigail. According to McCullough, Adams found himself "both distressed and strangely moved." While appalled by the display of gold, silver, and an image of the suffering Christ, Adams praised the chanting and music and especially appreciated the priest’s homily on the moral duty of parents to see to their children’s temporal and spiritual interests, which he praised as good and short. The future second president of the United States left with a feeling of reverent awe.

Hamerman is a freelance writer from Leesburg.

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