St. Mary’s Seminary

St. Mary's Seminary and University

Motto	Apostolica civilisque (Latin)
Motto in English	Apostolic and public
Type	Roman Catholic seminary
Established	1791 (226 years ago)
Affiliation	Roman Catholic Church (Sulpician Fathers)
President Rector	Rev. Phillip J. Brown, S.S., J.D., S.T.B., J.C.D, J.C.L.
Students	294
Location	Baltimore, Maryland, United States 39°21′37″N 76°38′24″W / 39.3604°N 76.6400°W / 39.3604; -76.6400Coordinates: 39°21′37″N 76°38′24″W / 39.3604°N 76.6400°W / 39.3604; -76.6400
Campus	40 acres (16 ha)
Website	www.stmarys.edu

St. Mary's Seminary and University is a Roman Catholic seminary located within the Archdiocese of Baltimore in Baltimore, Maryland; it was the first seminary founded in the United States of America after the Revolution.

Founded in 1791 as a Catholic seminary under the leadership of newly ordained first Bishop John Carroll, (1735-1815), after he returned to America from his consecration in England that year. A former large tavern was secured just northwest outside of the growing Baltimore Town on the Hookstown Road (which later became known as Pennsylvania Avenue in the Upton neighborhood, the main Afro-American/Black commercial and entertainment district in the early 20th Century). Within a decade, the Seminary was moved south to North Paca Street at the developed northwest edge of the newly incorporated city. St. Mary's was additionally chartered as a civil college by the State of Maryland in 1805 (1806?) and was operated until 1852 by the Sulpicians religious order and graduated hundreds of young men and formed an important educational role in the growing city during the first half of the 19th Century. The under-graduate secular St. Mary's College was later closed and replaced in the same year by the opening of Loyola College and Loyola High School by the Jesuits (Society of Jesus) in two small rented townhouses on Holliday Street, between East Lexington and East Fayette Streets - (the site, two decades later in the future, across from the massive new second Baltimore City Hall of 1867-1875, now the site of the War Memorial Plaza), with the permission of officials with the Archdiocese of Baltimore. St. Mary's was established as a theological seminary in 1822 by Pope Pius VII, when it was authorized as the first ecclesiastical faculty in the United States with the right to grant degrees in the name of the Holy See. The seminary was founded by the French Sulpician Fathers, and continued to be operated by that Community after 1852.