went unused for one or two years. Instead, the novitiate found another location, and the Washington Seminary opened as a Jesuit scholasticate under Kohlmann's leadership. He became the first president and rector of the school on August 15, 1820, and also assumed the position of professor of dogma. Soon after its founding, prominent Catholics in the area petitioned Kohlmann to open the school to lay students, which he did. The first lay students enrolled on September 1, 1821, alongside the Jesuit scholastics. Kohlmann admitted day students reluctantly and out of financial necessity, as it violated a law of the Jesuit order that forbade them from accepting compensation for educating youths. As a result of it no longer being exclusively for priestly training, the school would later become Gonzaga College High School. The school prospered and came to be the preeminent day school in Washington. In response to the writings of the Unitarian minister Jared Sparks, which were aimed at Baltimore readers, Kohlmann published an apologetical book titled Unitarianism, Theologically and Philosophically Considered. The book was well received in Catholic circles; several editions were published, and it was considered sufficiently authoritative to be read aloud in the refectory of St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore. Kohlmann's tenure as president came to an end in 1824 when he was recalled to Rome by Pope Leo XII, and he was succeeded by Adam Marshall. Kohlmann became involved in the purported miraculous cure of Ann Mattingly, the sister of Thomas Carbery, the Mayor of the District of Columbia. Kohlmann instructed her to pray a novena in union with the German Prince Alexander von Hohenlohe, who had gained a reputation as a miracle worker. On March 10, 1824, Mattingly was restored to health. Despite wariness by Archbishop Ambrose Maréchal and William Matthews (Mattingly's pastor), Kohlmann was the most emphatic priest in declaring the cure a miracle and published an account of it in a Baltimore newspaper. Seeking to have the miracle declare true, he would later arrange an audience with Pope Leo XII, in which the pope was impressed by the event and ordered a pamphlet about it translated into Italian and published. Roman career In 1824, Pope Leo XII placed the Pontifical Gregorian University under the care of the Society of Jesus, as it had been before the order's suppression. Impressed by Kohlmann's book on Unitarianism, he named Kohlmann as the university's chair of theology.