Andrew White

Background

Andrew White was born in 1579 in London of gentle parentage.

Education

As a proscribed recusant, he was educated in the English refugee colleges on the Continent - at St. Alban's College in Valladolid (1595-), St. Hermenegild's College in Seville, and Douai.

Career

After his ordination to the priesthood at Douai (c. 1605), he volunteered for the Catholic missions in England, where, with two score of priests, he was apprehended by the authorities and banished on penalty of death if he returned. An exile in the Low Countries, he entered the newly founded Jesuit novitiate at Louvain in 1607 and was received into the Society of Jesus in 1609. Ten years later he was professed with his final vows after having served as a lecturer in theology, sacred scripture, and Hebrew in the various colleges of his society in Spain and Flanders. As a Jesuit of sound learning and linguistic attainments, he continued his teaching in theology at Liège and Louvain until about 1629. Thereafter he took his place on the missions in Hampshire, for which he had experience as a former missionary in Suffolk and Devon (1625 - 28) in periods of relief from teaching. As a secret priest living in guarded seclusion, little is known of his career, but he is said to have become interested in Catholic colonization and in the ventures of George Calvert, first Baron of Baltimore, who corresponded with him from Avalon. He composed the Declaratio Coloniae Domini Baronis de Baltimore, which was revised and published by Cecil Calvert as Conditions of Plantation with the thought of advertising his projected colony and attracting settlers. While the Ark and the Dove sailed from Gravesend, White and John Altham and Brother Thomas Gervase did not take ship until its departure from the Isle of Wight (November 22, 1633). Baltimore's selection of White as head of the mission met with the approval of the general of the Society of Jesus, Muzio Vitelleschi, and of the provincial, Richard Blount. On landing at St. Clement's (Blackistone) Isle in the lower Chesapeake (March 25, 1634), Father White said mass and commenced his new labors, which included the writing of the Relatio Itineris in Marilandiam (a Latin version for his superior; an English account to Sir Thomas Lechford, in the possession of the Maryland Historical Society), described by Leonard Calvert, in May 1634, as the composition of a "most honest and discreet gentleman. " The Latin account was discovered in manuscript in the Jesuit archives in Rome by William McSherry, S. J. , in 1832 and has appeared in various editions, probably most authentically in Thomas Hughes's History of the Society of Jesus in North America. For ten years White devoted himself to religious work among the white colonists, of whom a number entered the Catholic communion, and to missionary labors among the Patuxent, Piscataway, Potomac, and Anacostan tribesmen. With the Indians he and his associates had reasonable success as soon as he had compiled a grammar, a dictionary, and a catechism in the native tongue. Despite his religious zeal and militant character, he got along well enough with the Calverts and arranged the scheme of manors for Jesuits as a means of financing the Catholic organization in the palatinate. In the insurrection incited by William Claiborne in 1644, White and two companions were shipped in irons to London by the Puritan victors (1645). Tried for treason, under a statute of 27 Elizabeth, for being a priest in England, White was sentenced merely to banishment on the plea that he was in England through no voluntary action. In vain he sought permission to return to Maryland, and thereupon went in exile to the Low Countries. Despite the imminent danger of death if the law was rigorously enforced, he returned within a few months to England, where under an assumed name he served on the missions and as a chaplain in a noble family of Hampshire. Other than this nothing is known of his career, which is shrouded in doubt, save that in London the "apostle of Maryland" finally passed on to his reward.

Achievements

• He was a chronicler of the early colony, and his writings are a primary source on the land, the Native Americans of the area, and the Jesuit mission in North America. For his efforts in converting and educating the native population, he is frequently referred to as the "Apostle of Maryland. " He is considered a forefather of Georgetown University, and is memorialized in the name of its White-Gravenor building, a central location of offices and classrooms on the university's campus.