The Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary Under the Title of the Immaculate Conception

The church and surrounding buildings stand on land once owned by Charles Carroll of Carrollton, born in 1737 and died in 1832, the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence and the last signer to die. At the rear is Carroll Manor, built about 1730, his birthplace, where he was married, lived during the Revolution, and entertained George Washington. For decades, when Maryland law forbade public Catholic worship, Catholics were welcomed there for frequent Mass in the Carroll family chapel. About 1825, Carroll had a small mission church built on the site of the present old school. In 1853 his granddaughters conveyed the property to the Redemptorists, who opened a novitiate in the house and founded St. Mary’s Parish. St. John Nepomucene Neumann, born in 1811 and died in 1860, blessed the cornerstone and original bell of the current church on May 13, 1858. The adjoining monastery, begun in 1859, long served as a major Redemptorist training center and base for extensive missionary work in the eastern United States and Canada. The pastor here during the Civil War was Father Francis Xavier Seelos, born in 1819 and died in 1867, whose cause for canonization was introduced in 1903. A shrine in the church honors one of the first three copies in America of the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, venerated in 1906. In 1906 Charles Adams Zimmerman, born in 1861 and died in 1916, while longtime Naval Academy Bandmaster and St. Mary’s organist, composed the Navy’s “Anchors Aweigh,” whose refrain opens by echoing the melody of the ancient Latin Marian hymn “Salve Regina.”

Annapolis, Maryland · United States