Author: Pise, Charles Constantine
Biography:
PISE, Charles Constantine (1801-66: ancestry.com)
A distinguished Roman Catholic churchman, he was born in Annapolis MD on 22 Nov. 1801 to an Italian father, Louis Sylvester Pise, and an American mother of an old Philadelphia family, Margaret (or Marguerite) Gamble. After graduating from Georgetown College in Washington he went to Rome to pursue his studies and entered the Society of Jesus as a novice, but he left the Jesuits and returned to the US on the death of his father. He completed his training and was ordained at Mount St. Mary's College and Seminary in Emmitsburg MD in 1821-2, serving at the same time as Professor of Rhetoric there. He undertook missionary work in Maryland and was later attached to the Cathedral in Baltimore. He published a History of the Church in five vols. (1827-30) as well as shorter works in different genres in the service of the church: essays, fiction, biography, and verse. (Apart from The Pleasures of Religion his only significant poem is a versified and annotated Acts of the Apostles, 1845.) For his literary labours, he received several honours in Rome in 1831: Papal Count Palatine, Knight of the Holy Roman Empire, and DD. On his return to the US he was attached to the cathedral in Washington DC and appointed the first Roman Catholic chaplain of the Senate in 1832, but he moved on to New York to resume his missionary work. He arranged the purchase of a church in Brooklyn, had it renamed St. Charles Borromeo, and took charge of it in 1849. He died in Brooklyn on 26 May 1866 and was buried in the clerical vault of Holy Cross Cemetery in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. (ancestry.com 19 Nov. 2021; findmypast.com 19 Nov. 2021; Appleton; Catholic Standard [Philadelphia] 9 June 1866)