History
A Catholic History of Washington, D.C.
Catholic Washington begins in Maryland, where Father Andrew White said the first Mass in the English colonies in 1634, and passes through a century of house chapels before John Carroll becomes the first bishop in 1789. The capital was laid out with Catholic help, Saint Patrick's opened for the Irish builders in 1794, and the Catholic University drew the religious houses of Little Rome to Brookland from 1889. The National Shrine took from 1920 to 2017 to finish, President Kennedy's funeral Mass was said at Saint Matthew's in 1963, and popes came in 1979, 2008 and 2015. Cardinal Robert McElroy has led the archdiocese since 2025.
Before 1689
The Anacostans and Father White
The land that became Washington belonged to the Nacotchtank, the Algonquian people the English called the Anacostans, whose name survives in the Anacostia River. Father Andrew White, a Jesuit who came with the first Maryland colonists, said the first Mass in the English colonies on Saint Clement's Island on March 25, 1634, and carried his mission up the Potomac. A Jesuit letter of 1641 called the king of the Anacostans a promising candidate for baptism.
Maryland was founded as a colony where Catholics could live in safety, and its Act Concerning Religion of 1649 granted toleration to Trinitarian Christians. Nothing from this era stands in the District itself. It is seen in Southern Maryland, at Saint Clement's Island and the Brick Chapel at Saint Mary's City, on a long day trip south.
