page_title: James Roosevelt Bayley
section_title: Archbishop of Baltimore
hierarchical_section_title: James Roosevelt Bayley / Archbishop of Baltimore
caption_attribution_description: James Roosevelt Bayley. Library of Congress description: "Bishop Bayley"
context_page_description: James Roosevelt Bayley was an American prelate of the Catholic Church. He served as the first Bishop of Newark and the eighth Archbishop of Baltimore.
context_section_description: At the death of Archbishop Spalding of Baltimore, Bayley was promoted, on July 30, 1872, to succeed that prelate. He left Newark with much reluctance. In 1875 as Apostolic Delegate he imposed the cardinal's biretta on Archbishop John McCloskey of New York. In May, 1876, he consecrated the Baltimore cathedral, having freed it from debt.
  Convening the Eighth Provincial Synod of the clergy in August 1875, Bayley enacted many salutary regulations, particularly with regard to clerical dress, mixed marriages, and church music. Illness obliged him to ask for a coadjutor and Bishop James Gibbons of Richmond was appointed to that position on May 29, 1877. The archbishop then went abroad to seek for relief but in vain. He returned to his former home in Newark in August 1877 and after lingering for two months died in his old room, where he had labored for so long, on October 3, 1877.
  Shortly before Bayley died he spoke of himself by saying, "I am Archbishop; I have been Bishop; but I like Father Bayley best of all." At his own request he was buried beside his aunt, Mother Seton, at the convent at Emmitsburg, Maryland.
  In conversation, Bayley once told the ultramontane Bishop Michael Corrigan that before his conversion he thought of becoming a Jesuit, and before his consecration a Redemptorist, but from both intentions his director dissuaded him. In addition to the volume on the Church on New York he wrote the Memoirs of Simon Gabriel Brute, First Bishop of Vincennes (New York, 1855), about Simon Bruté.
caption: Archbishop Bayley
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