“ He shared the feeling for independence growing among the American colonists, foreseeing that it would mean greater religious freedom. In 1776, at the request of the continental congress, he accompanied Benjamin Franklin, Charles Carroll and Samuel Chase on their mission to secure the aid or neutrality of the French-Canadians, and though unsuccessful it gained for him the friendship of Franklin. In 1783 he took a prominent part in the petition to Rome to take the control of the American church away from London ”

“ After the papal brief of the 21st of July 1773 suppressed the Society of Jesus, he accompanied its English members then in Flanders to England. In 1774 he returned to America, and set to work at a mission at Rock Creek, Montgomery county, Maryland, where his mother lived. ”