Great Literary Find

Latin Poem composed by Charles Carroll, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, has been discovered. Students are attempting to decipher the work.

LONDON (CNS) -- A poem written by one of the U.S. Founding Fathers has been discovered in the archives of a Catholic high school in England.

Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Catholic and last surviving signer of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, wrote the poem in Latin in 1754 when he was a student in his final year of high school in Saint-Omer, France.

It was found in the archives of Stonyhurst College in Clitheroe, England, by Maurice Whitehead, a professor at the University of Wales, Swansea, who is doing research at the Jesuit-run high school.

"This is a significant discovery," Jan Graffius, curator of the school's collections, announced Oct 28. "This previously unknown composition is bound to be of immense interest to American scholars."

The poem was composed to be read to an unnamed visiting dignitary to the Jesuit high school in Saint-Omer, and it bears Carroll's signature.

It is being translated by a group of seven 17- and 18-year-old Latin students at Stonyhurst and their classics teacher, Judith Parkinson.