John Carroll
Leonard Neale
Ambrose Maréchal
James Whitfield
Samuel Eccleston
Francis Kenrick
Martin Spalding
James Bayley
James Gibbons
Michael Curley
Francis Keough
Lawrence Shehan
William Borders
Current Shepherd:
Cardinal Keeler

Archbishops of Baltimore

	James Roosevelt Bayley (1872-1877) Sharing ancestors with both Presidents Roosevelt, Archbishop Bayley was born in New York in 1814. After ordination and rectorship as an Episcopal clergyman, he was received into the Church at the age of twenty-eight, and was ordained a priest two years later. An early professor and president of St. john's College, Fordham, he became secretary to New York's Bishop Hughes; and in 1853, the first bishop of Newark. He was promoted to Baltimore in 1872 where he consecrated the Basilica, now debt-free, during the national centennial. The following year he died during a visit to Newark, and was buried in Emmitsburg, near his aunt, Mother Seton. more on him at the archdiocesan site
	James Gibbons (1877-1921) The only native (1834) of Baltimore to become its archbishop, James Gibbons was created the second cardinal of the American Church shortly after he presided as Apostolic Delegate over the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore (1884). After spending his childhood years in Ireland he returned to America and was ordained two months after the outbreak of the Civil War. He became Archbishop Spalding's secretary following several years of parish work in Baltimore. In 1868 he was consecrated a bishop and sent as Vicar-Apostolic to North Carolina. In 1872 he became bishop of Richmond, and succeeded Archbishop Bayley five years later. During the next forty-four years, as churchman and as citizen, he exercised sage and constructive influence on a host of thorny problems and arduous undertakings. He is particularly remembered for his work, The Faith of Our Fathers, and for his role in the founding and support of the Catholic University of America and the National Catholic Welfare Conference. When consecrated, he was the youngest bishop in the world; at his death in 1921 he was the oldest. more on him at the archdiocesan site
	Michael Joseph Curley (1921-1947) Like Archbishop Kenrick before him, Baltimore's tenth Metropolitan was born in Ireland (Athlone, 1879), studied in Rome and was there ordained (1904), and volunteered for mission work in the United States. Arriving in Florida he labored there for ten years as a parish priest, and was then named the fourth bishop of St. Augustine. In 1921 he succeeded Cardinal Gibbons, becoming thereby the youngest archbishop in America. When the Archdiocese of Washington was created in 1939, he was appointed its first ordinary, while continuing his post in Baltimore. During his twenty-five energetic years as archbishop he achieved renown as a champion of Catholic education, a forceful speaker, and a farseeing foe of Communism.

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