Leonard Neale
American Catholic archbishop (1746-1817)
Leonard Neale (October 15, 1746 – June 18, 1817) was an American Catholic prelate and Jesuit who became the second archbishop of Baltimore and the first Catholic bishop to be ordained in the United States. While president of Georgetown College, Neale became the coadjutor bishop to Bishop John Carroll and founded the Georgetown Visitation Monastery and Academy.
Neale was born in the British Province of Maryland to a prominent family that produced many Catholic leaders, including his brothers, Francis and Charles. He was educated in Europe, where he entered the Society of Jesus in 1767. Neale then volunteered to become a missionary in a Dutch colony in South America in 1779. He spent four years there, before becoming discouraged by the resistance from both the European colonists and indigenous people to his proselytism. He returned to Maryland, where he rejoined his former Jesuit colleagues from Europe at St. Thomas Manor.
In 1793, Neale was appointed pastor of Old St. Joseph's and Old St.
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This entry incorporates text from “Leonard Neale” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.