Alfred Allen Paul Curtis

Biography

Alfred Curtis was born near Rehobeth in Somerset County, Maryland, to Episcopalian parents. He attended the country school his father had founded, but taught himself Latin, Greek, and Shakespeare. Following his father's death in 1849, he became an assistant teacher at an academy in Princess Anne to support his mother and siblings. He began studying for the ministry in 1855, and was ordained a deacon in 1856 and afterwards a priest in 1859. He then worked as an assistant at St. Luke's Church in Baltimore, from where he was transferred to Frederick County and then to Chestertown, Kent County.

In 1862 he was elected rector of Mount Calvary Church in Baltimore. During the American Civil War, Curtis seemed to favor the Confederacy. He wrote that the Union victories were “steps and stages towards eventual ruin” and that they were “matters of humiliation and not of thanksgiving.” Episcopalian Bishop William Rollinson Whittingham reacted by ceasing to be a pew holder at Mount Calvary, saying that he did not wish to be “associated with a body so treasonably ungrateful for Divine Mercy shown in the deliverance of the State from armed rebels and thieves.” Curtis gradually became more Catholic in his beliefs and practices, to the dismay of Bishop Whittingham. He eventually resigned as rector in 1871 and then went to England, where he was received into the Catholic Church by Dr. John Henry Newman on May 18, 1872. Curtis returned to Baltimore later that year, entering St. Mary's Seminary. He was ordained a Catholic priest by Archbishop James Roosevelt Bayley on December 19, 1874. He then served as Archbishop Bayley's private secretary and an assistant at the Cathedral of Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

On August 3, 1886, Curtis was appointed the second Bishop of Wilmington, Delaware, by Pope Leo XIII. He received his episcopal consecration on the following November 14 from Cardinal James Gibbons, with Bishops John Moore and John Joseph Kain serving as co-consecrators, in Baltimore. He was installed at St. Peter's Cathedral in Wilmington on November 21, 1886. During his tenure, he introduced the Josephite Fathers into the diocese to minister to African American Catholics, for whom he also built St. Joseph Church, an orphanage, and a parochial school. He also erected a cloistered convent for the Visitation Nuns.

After ten years as bishop, Curtis resigned due to poor health on May 23, 1896; he was appointed Titular Bishop of Echinus on the same date. He left the diocese with 25,000 Catholics, thirty priests, twenty-two churches and eighteen missions, twelve seminarians, eight religious communities, three academies, nine parochial schools, and three orphanages. He became an auxiliary bishop of Baltimore in 1897, and assisted Cardinal Gibbons with performing ordinations and confirmations. He later died from cancer at St. Agnes Hospital, aged 77. At his own request, his remains were buried at Visitation Monastery in Wilmington. (In 1993, because of the Visitation community's relocation to Massachusetts, the Wilmington facility was closed and Bishop Curtis' grave was moved to Cathedral Cemetery.)