Leonard Neale

Before long, Neale petitioned to be assigned as a foreign missionary, and in 1779, he left England for Demerara,[16] in British Guiana. His first task was to convert the British colonists living there. However, they rejected his attempts and barred him from building a chapel. As a result, he turned his attention to the conversion of the indigenous people.[17]

Neale found his work of proselytizing the indigenous people difficult.[16] However, on one occasion, the tribal chief, who previously resisted the efforts to convert to Christianity, implored Neale to spiritually intervene to save his dying son. Neale baptized the son, who was then restored to health, and the chief and his family converted to Christianity; others also followed.[18] Nonetheless, Neale was unsuccessful in obtaining many conversions, and the people were largely opposed to him. They too barred him from building a church. Discouraged by the resistance of the people to his efforts, and experiencing deteriorating health, Neale left the mission in January 1783, setting sail for Maryland.[19] His voyage was delayed when his ship was seized by the British Royal Navy, during the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War.[17] Neale eventually arrived in Maryland in April.[20]

Neale was stationed at St. Thomas Manor until volunteering to go to Philadelphia in 1793, following the outbreak of a yellow fever epidemic in the city.[24] The disease claimed 10% of Philadelphia's population, including the pastor, Dominic Lawrence Graessel, and two assistant priests at Old St. Joseph's Church, in addition to hundreds of its parishioners.[25] Despite the precarious state of his own health, Neale became pastor of both Old St. Joseph's and Old St. Mary's Church.[26] Neale himself eventually contracted yellow fever and recovered,[27] although never completely to his former health.[28] In addition to his two pastorates, he was made vicar general to Bishop John Carroll for Philadelphia and the northern states.[7]

When the epidemic returned in 1797 and 1798,[27] Neale established the first Catholic orphanage in Philadelphia to care for the children whose parents had died of the disease.[25] Though he found it difficult to raise sufficient funds to support the new institution, the orphanage would eventually be incorporated in 1807 as St. Joseph's Orphan Asylum. Neale's tenure as pastor of St. Joseph's and St. Mary's came to an end in March 1799, and he was succeeded by Matthew Carr.[26]

While serving in Philadelphia, Neale had become acquainted with Alice Lalor, an Irish immigrant to whom Neale became her confessor. She sought to return to Kilkenny to establish a religious community, but Neale convinced her to remain in the United States, where he would assist her in founding a community.[42] Along with two other women, they established a small school for girls. However, these two women would die of yellow fever,[30] and the school was disbanded.[1]

When Neale relocated to Georgetown, he called Lalor and two associates of hers to the city in 1799,[43] where they took up residence with a community of Poor Clares in Georgetown, so that they could discern which religious order they should enter.[44] Eventually, Neale determined that the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary would be most suited to their mission, and in light of the growing Catholic population in the District of Columbia that sought to have a Catholic school for their daughters. Neale drew up the rules for their enclosed community.[45] Though the new community faced financial strain, Neale purchased the monastery of the Poor Clares, who were returning to Europe, and transferred ownership of it to the nuns on June 29, 1808.[1] There, they began operating a school, Georgetown Visitation Academy, which would become Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School.[43] Neale received the nuns' simple vows in 1813,[1] and would remain their spiritual director for the remainder of his life.[46]

As bishop, Neale continued to reside near the Georgetown Visitation Monastery.

John Carroll, the Bishop of Baltimore, found it difficult to minister to his very large diocese, which encompassed the entire United States. Therefore, he requested that the Vatican appoint a coadjutor bishop to assist him.[47] Dominic Lawrence Graessel was selected by the Baltimore diocesan clergy to be the coadjutor, in 1795. However, before he could be installed as coadjutor, he died.[48] Therefore, Bishop Carroll requested that the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide appoint Neale as coadjutor. On March 23, 1795, the Propaganda Fide selected him and Pope Pius VI confirmed its selection on April 17.[21] Neale was also named as the Titular Bishop of Gortyna. However, due to the European political turmoil resulting from the French Revolution,[21] the bulls of appointment were twice lost before reaching Carroll; they were eventually forwarded in January 1800 by Cardinal Stefano Borgia via Venice, and reached Baltimore in the summer.[12] Neale was consecrated a bishop on December 7, 1800, at St. Peter's Pro-Cathedral in Baltimore,[49] with Bishop John Carroll serving as consecrator. With this ceremony, he became the first bishop to be consecrated inside the United States.[7] Neale continued to reside at Georgetown, where he was president.[50]

When Pope Pius VII issued a bull in 1801, at the request of Emperor Paul I of Russia, lifting the order of suppression of the Jesuits within the Russian Empire (where they had never ceased operating),[51] Neale and his brothers, Francis and Charles, were among the most ardent supporters of the American Jesuits affiliating with the Russian province so as to resume official operations in the United States. Though Carroll was initially resistant to such a precarious arrangement, he eventually consented, and he and Neale requested permission from Gabriel Gruber, the Jesuit Superior General. In 1805, the Society of Jesus was restored in the United States, and the Jesuit novitiate opened at Georgetown College.[52] With the order newly re-established, it relied on foreign support, and Carroll succeeded in recruiting several European Jesuits, such as Anthony Kohlmann, to Georgetown.[32]

When John Carroll died, Neale succeeded him as the second Archbishop of Baltimore on December 3, 1815, and he received the pallium from Pope Pius VII the following year. He ascended to the position at the age of 70, and his health had begun to deteriorate.[46] Rather than moving to Baltimore, Neale continued to reside in Georgetown, near the Visitation nuns. One of his first acts was to request that Pope Pius VII formally recognize the Visitation nuns' community. With the pope's approval, Neale officially recognized the community as the Georgetown Visitation Monastery.[53] For this, he was recognized as the founder of the institution.[7]

Neale as Archbishop of Baltimore

The most significant challenge that Neale faced during his time as archbishop was the growing phenomenon of lay trusteeism in the United States, whereby the states vested the ownership of church property and management of its affairs, including the selection of the church's priests, in a board of lay trustees elected by parishioners.[54] While facially compliant with the Catholic canon law of jus patronatus, this arrangement often resulted in the trustees defying the orders of bishops in managing the churches.[55] Neale inherited much of this conflict that arose during his predecessor's tenure.[54] His first conflicts were with boards of trustees in Philadelphia in 1796, and in Norfolk, Virginia.[56]

A much larger controversy would be found in Charleston, South Carolina, which came to be known as the Charleston Schism of 1815 to 1818. In 1815, Carroll assigned the French priest Pierre-Joseph de Clorivière as the pastor of St. Mary of the Annunciation Church, where Carroll had previously stationed him as an assistant priest. Clorivière would take the place of the interim pastor, Robert Browne, who was to return to his congregation in Augusta, Georgia.[57] The trustees of the church, which was predominantly Irish and harbored anti-French sentiment, opposed Clorivière.[55]

The Leonard Neale House in Dupont Circle in 2009

Browne defied Neale's order to return to Augusta, and Browne's predecessor at St. Mary's, Felix Simon Gallagher, asserted that Neale had no authority to appoint a new pastor without his assent, and that to do so would be schismatic. Neale responded by withdrawing the priestly faculties of Gallagher and Browne on February 21, 1816. However, Browne ignored Neale's order, resuming the pastorate on March 28 and dismissing Clorivière.[58] With the congregation siding with Browne, Neale placed the church under an interdict.[59] Browne then argued his case in Rome, where he obtained an order from Cardinal Lorenzo Litta, the prefect of the Propaganda Fide, allowing him to return as pastor. Neale appealed this decision to Pope Pius VII, who reversed Litta on July 6, 1817.[60]

Due to his declining health, Neale requested that the authorities in Rome appoint Jean-Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus, the Bishop of Boston, as his coadjutor to assist him, but Cheverus objected. Instead, Ambrose Maréchal was appointed on July 24, 1817, but before he could receive notification of this, Neale died on June 18, 1817; Maréchal succeeded him as archbishop.[1] He was buried in the crypt of the chapel at the Visitation Monastery.[50]

The Leonard Neale House in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C. was the home of a Jesuit community from the 1960s until its merger with the Jesuit community at Gonzaga College High School in 2016.[61][62]