Bishop John England (1786–1842)
Bishop of Charleston, South Carolina
The first bishop of Charleston, John England did much to advance the Church in the South, which—except in New Orleans far to the west—was in a nascent and precarious state. He was well respected in non-Catholic circles, an important qualification in the largely non-Catholic region. He also founded one of the first Catholic newspapers in the country, the United States Catholic Miscellany. Although he was solicitous of enslaved blacks to an exemplary degree within the context of the antebellum South, he maintained an accommodationist position on slavery and tendentiously interpreted papal documents that condemned the practice.
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