The Diocese of Maryland is one of the nine original dioceses of the Episcopal Church and traces its roots to 1608 when Captain John Smith oversaw the first Christian worship in the upper Chesapeake Bay.[1] In 1692, a law passed by the province's general assembly established the Church of England and the colony, which was divided into ten counties, was divided into 30 parishes (See List of the original 30 Anglican parishes in the Province of Maryland). Sometimes the parish church was centrally located; other times multiple churches or chapels served distant population centers within the parish.
In 1789, the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America was founded. The diocese's first bishop, Thomas John Claggett (1743-1816), was the first American bishop of the Episcopal Church consecrated in the country, in 1792 at Trinity Church facing historic Wall Street in New York City. Among notable historical events in the diocese is the first African-American Episcopal congregations in the South, St. James' Church, at Lafayette Square, in west Baltimore. Another first among Maryland's bishops was the election of John Gardner Murray as Presiding Bishop. He was the first elected primate of the Episcopal Church; for his predecessors, the senior member of the House of Bishops, automatically assumed the position.
On March 29, 2008, Eugene Taylor Sutton was elected as the 14th bishop of the diocese;[3] the first African-American to serve in that capacity was consecrated June 28, 2008. In 2014, Heather Cook was the first woman elected to become a bishop in the diocese and she was consecrated as suffragan to Sutton.[4] However, she was placed on administrative leave at the end of 2014 after involvement in a traffic fatality in north Baltimore.[5] Cook was charged with drunk driving, texting while driving, and leaving the scene of the crime, in addition to vehicular manslaughter.[6] On January 22, 2015, the standing committee of the diocese requested that Cook resign her position.[7] This was followed by the Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, placing formal restrictions on Cook preventing her from presenting herself as an ordained minister of the Episcopal Church.[8] On May 1, 2015, Jefferts Schori announced that both she and the Diocese of Maryland had accepted Cook's resignation as a bishop and as an employee of the diocese. Moreover, both parties reached an accord where Cook received a "Sentence of Disposition" which stripped Cook of her ordained status.[9]
The arms of the diocese were designed by Pierre de Chaignon la Rose and were officially adopted at the 133rd diocesan convention in 1916. They consist of a counterchanged Cross of St George, representing the ancestral Church of England; a canton of Lord Baltimore's arms, representing Maryland; and a pheon or arrowhead, taken from the arms of Bishop Claggett.[10]
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