USA > New York > Nassau County > Long Island; a history of two great counties, Nassau and Suffolk, Volume II > Part 13
USA > New York > Suffolk County > Long Island; a history of two great counties, Nassau and Suffolk, Volume II > Part 13
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T HE Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, comprising all of Long Island, was established in 1853. Long before that date, however, Catholics had visited and indeed had settled there. While it is quite possible that Thorfinn Karlsefni, a Catholic Norseman, wintered at Buzzard's Bay and looked upon Long Island about the year 1006, there is no evidence to prove this other than the Scandinavian sagas. Recorded history, however, states that in 1524, probably in mid-April, Giovanni de Verrazano, a Florentine in the service of Francis First of France, sailed his caravel Dalfina into the upper Bay of New York and later put a boat ashore at what is now Rockaway and then at Quogue.
The English Catholic, Sir Edmund Plowden, under charter granted in 1624 by Charles First, which read "no persecution to any dissenting", arrived at New Amsterdam in 1642 to claim Plowden's or Long Isle but the Dutch refused to recognize the charter. Nicolaes, the Frenchman from the Brooklyn Wallabout, is the next Catholic name to appear. He was fined in April, 1657, for refusing to support the Dutch Reformed Church, giving the "frivolous excuse that he was a Catholic."
A prominent Catholic of those early. days was the Irish-born Sir Thomas Dongan. He was Governor of the Royal Province of New York from 1683 to 1688. Dongan and his party first entered the province at its eastern end, probably at Sag Harbor. They journeyed through Long Island to New York and on the way, in mid-August, 1683, his chaplain, the Jesuit Father Thomas Harvey, probably offered the first Mass on Long Island. Dongan, a general favorite with all historians, is famous for calling the first Representative Gen- eral Assembly of New York, held October 17, 1683. He spent part of his time on a manor presented to him by the towns of Hempstead and Flushing just south of Lake Success. With the fall of the House of Stuart, Dongan went into retirement and left New York in 1691.
Beginning that year, 1691, a succession of anti-Catholic laws, culminating a decade later in a decree providing the death penalty for priests and heavy punishments for those who sheltered them, outlawed the external practices of Catholicism from the Province of New York. Despite this, the names of Catholic colonists have sur- vived from the seventeenth century and may be found in increasing numbers through the eighteenth, in such sources as town and court records, tax rates, militia rolls, censuses, private diaries, ledgers and journals, early newspapers, tombstones, etc. French and Spanish prisoners of war, including Father Peter de Mareuil, S.J., who was held at Flatbush from 1709 to 1711, were quartered in Brooklyn and
L. I .- II-8
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on Long Island during the eighteenth century. Two groups of the Acadians who had been deported from Nova Scotia because of anti- Catholic laws also came here. The second group to arrive had been exiled to Georgia and South Carolina. Unwanted there, they were allowed to depart in frail craft. They arrived at a Long Island cove on August 22, 1756, only to be captured and transported upstate. The first group to come was brought to New York as prisoners on April 28, 1756, and 109 of them were distributed through the Long Island towns of Flatbush, Bushwick, Newtown, Flushing, Jamaica, Hempstead, Oyster Bay, Smithtown, Huntington, Brookhaven, South- old, East Hampton and Southampton. They are referred to in the official proceedings of the Provincial Assembly, in private journals and in various church and town records until 1764, at which date they were probably deported.
The War of Independence inscribed many Catholic names on the rolls of the local Continental militia and a number of Catholics were reported among the German mercenaries in the English forces quar- tered on Long Island. One of the first celebrations of St. Patrick's Day in America took place in 1779 at Jamaica where the Volunteers of Ireland were encamped.
After the war, freedom of religion was legalized by the Constitu- tion and the trickle of Irish Catholic immigrants grew larger until by 1800 a couple of hundred had settled about the Wallabout, the site of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The father of Brooklyn-born John McCloskey, who later became America's first Cardinal, was praised for supervising the labors of some twelve hundred Irishmen who prepared defensive fortifications on Brooklyn Heights against the expected British attack in August, 1814. By then the infant Brooklyn Star and, farther east, the Sag Harbor Corrector were printing in- creasingly frequent references to Catholic names. At this time St. Peter's Church, Barclay Street, New York, which had been openly organized immediately after the Revolution and, after 1809, St. Patrick's Cathedral on Mott Street, were the churches to which the Brooklyn Catholics ferried for Sunday Mass.
Then priests began coming from New York to celebrate Mass in Brooklyn. Such a one, Father Phillip Lariscey, an Irish Augustinian, celebrated the first known Mass in 1821 in William Purcell's house which is still standing at the northeast corner of York and Gold Streets. On January 1, 1822, Peter Turner, a prominent Catholic layman, circularized the Catholics of Brooklyn Village, who then num- bered possibly eight hundred persons or one-tenth of its population, and he organized the first Catholic congregation on Long Island. Sunday Mass was offered thereafter with some regularity by priests from New York, especially by Doctor John Power, V.G., and in places such as Dempsey's Blooming Grove Garden on lower Fulton Street, since removed for the Brooklyn Bridge approach.
A plot of ground on the corner of Jay and Chapel Streets was purchased March 1, 1822, by the Roman Catholic Society of the Village of Brooklyn. It was blessed for cemetery and church purposes April 25, 1822, and next year, on August 28th, St. James', the first
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Catholic church on Long Island and the sixth in the State, was blessed by Bishop Connolly, the second Bishop of New York. A church base- ment school was opened that September. In 1825 the first resident pastor, Reverend John Farnan, was appointed. The beginnings of Catholic charitable endeavor are discerned in the formation by a group of laymen in 1829 of the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum Society. Some Sisters of Charity came from Emmitsburg, Maryland, in 1831 to live on lower Fulton Street, where they conducted an academy and taught at St. James' School. An orphan asylum and a convent for the sisters was erected on the west side of Jay Street and in 1833 the sisters moved in. In 1838 the orphanage was trans- ferred to St. Paul's Parish where a new building had been erected.
Catholic growth was slow at first and during the 1830s, '40s and '50s, there was much open antagonism to the newcomers. By 1840, however, it was quite apparent that the Church had come to stay on the Island first seen by European Catholics over three centuries before. Heavy tides of immigration set in, beginning 1846, and the Catholic population and the number of churches and schools increased. Large numbers of Catholics were taking honorable and useful parts in building up the growing City of Brooklyn and, in smaller measure, the hamlets in Kings, Queens and Suffolk Counties. In Suffolk County, in remote Sag Harbor, a Catholic congregation had a church as early as 1838. Among the pioneers of those early days the names of the Parmentiers, of Cornelius Heeney and Father John Walsh, pastor of St. James', 1829-1841, deserve mention.
In this pre-diocesan period the seeds of most of today's great diocesan, educational and charitable enterprises had taken firm root. Relatively poor themselves, the Catholic congregations were also con- tributing to Irish relief during the dreadful famine years and to various other religious and humanitarian projects abroad and in the United States. They were enjoying a social and cultural life of their own, supporting Catholic newspapers and patronizing a growing number of Catholic men of letters. Parish libraries were active and went hand in hand with the efforts of the Sunday schools to instruct children attending the public schools. Sickness and death benefit societies had been formed and the accounts of contemporary first Communion and Confirmation days, school commencements and cor- nerstone layings read much like today's. Parish societies were flour- ishing and some important people were entering the Church as converts. Temperance societies, first started at St. Mary's, Williams- burgh, in 1840, were strengthened by the visit to Brooklyn in 1849 of the famous apostle of temperance, Father Theobald Mathew.
Since public authority had been unable to secure suitable religious instruction for the children of the various denominations in the tax- supported public schools and Bishop Hughes was refused public moneys for free parish schools, Catholics were forced to build their own school system and at the same time to contribute taxes for the support of public schools for non-Catholic children. Unfortunately, since then, the pubic schools have grown increasingly secular, religion has been divorced from education-which is pedagogically unsound
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and contrary to early American tradition - and generations have grown up without vital moral and religious instruction.
There was a small number of excellent private Catholic lay- conducted schools but these did not suffice. Gradually more Sisters
Old St. James Church, Brooklyn
of Charity came, the Christian Brothers entered Brooklyn in 1851 and the Sisters of St. Dominic in 1853, to lay the foundations of our parish elementary school system and to open their academies for secondary education. One such academy had already been conducted at Ravenswood (now part of Long Island City), 1844-1847, by the Religious of the Sacred Heart.
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Early societies, some of which function today, and the dates of their foundation, were the Erin Fraternal Benevolent Association, 1823; the Emerald Benevolent Association, which has held an annual ball since 1839; the Shamrock Benevolent Society, 1841, and the Emmet Benevolent Society, 1845. In addition to the orphan support derived from these societies, Cornelius Heeney organized in 1845 the presently existing Brooklyn Benevolent Society to administer his estate for the poor "without distinction" of creed. A modicum of orphan support also came from public funds.
The growth of the Church necessitated opening another cemetery and, in 1849, after some local opposition, Holy Cross Cemetery began to function in Flatbush. Almost all the early parish churches also had their small adjoining "God's Acre."
In 1853 the following Kings County churches had resident pas- tors: St. James, St. Paul, Assumption, Holy Cross, St. Patrick's on Kent Avenue, St. John the Evangelist, St. Charles Borromeo, St. Francis in the Field, St. Joseph, St. Benedict, SS. Peter and Paul and Holy Trinity. Queens County had resident pastors at St. Michael, Flushing, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, Astoria, and St. Monica, Jamaica. There were also eighteen missions scattered through the present four counties. Of the twenty-five clergymen serving the Catholic congre- gations at the end of 1853, eighteen were born in Ireland, four were of Germanic origin, two were American born and one was Portuguese. Nevertheless, sixty per cent had received their proximate priestly education and training in American seminaries. There were fourteen sisters and brothers and an undetermined number of lay teachers instructing some 2500 children in a dozen parish schools and acad- emies. The Sisters of Charity and the Sisters of St. Dominic were also caring for some 150 orphans. Extant records reveal the fact that during 1853 some 4512 baptisms were administered and some 1838 Brooklyn and Long Island Catholics received Catholic burial. AH told, the Brooklyn and Long Island Catholic population may be con- servatively estimated to have been then about 50,000 in a general population of about 200,000.
So numerous had the Catholics become that Pope Pius IX erected the Diocese of Brooklyn on June 29, 1853, and he selected Very Reverend John Loughlin, V.G., to be the first Bishop. Bishop Lough- lin was born at Drumboniff, Ireland, in 1817 and in 1829 left with his parents for America. The family settled in Albany where the future Bishop attended the famous Dr. Peter Bullion's Albany Academy. He studied at St. Peter's College, Chambly, Canada, and attended Mount St. Mary's Seminary, Emmitsburg, Maryland, until 1839. He spent his last year at St. Mary's Seminary, Baltimore. He was ordained at old St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, 1840, and was consecrated Bishop of Brooklyn on October 30, 1853. He found the Church as described above in a growing metropolis that was neighbor to New York and gateway for the New World immigrants.
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During his long administration of thirty-eight years, his diocese continued growing from the advent of Catholic Europeans whom he helped adjust to the great melting pot of America. When he died in 1891 his flock numbered over 300,000 in a total Long Island population of slightly over one million. To meet the needs of his people he built churches, founding 98 parishes or missions that became parishes. He left 99 English-speaking churches, twenty-three German, three Italian, two Polish and one each of French, Lithuanian, Bohemian and Scan- dinavian. To assist him he introduced congregations of religious priests-the Vincentian Fathers, the Fathers of Mercy and the Pallot- tine Fathers. He recruited his diocesan priesthood from abroad and at home. Until his last days, when St. John's Seminary opened, his
St. Joseph's in the Pines at Brentwood, as It Looked about Fifty Years Ago
clergy were educated and trained outside the diocese. It is worthy of note that Father Raffeiner, patriarch of the Germans, had con- ducted a preparatory seminary from 1856 to 1858. There were eight- een religious and 184 diocesan priests serving in 1891. Of the latter fifty-five per cent had studied theology in the United States, thirteen per cent in Ireland and the rest on the Continent. Forty-four per cent were born in the United States, thirty per cent in Ireland and the others elsewhere in Europe.
The expansion of the Catholic school system quickly followed the multiplication of parishes. To this end Bishop Loughlin invited into the diocese the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of the Visitation, the Sisters of St. Joseph, the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary, the Sisters of Christian Charity, the Franciscan Brothers and the Vin- centian Fathers. These religious engaged in primary and secondary education, while the Vincentians and the Franciscans gave us our first two Catholic colleges in 1870 and 1876, respectively.
It was a struggle to support these schools, but if the equipment was not always as good as in the public schools with their almost limitless resources, the results were excellent. By the end of the period there were sixty ecclesiastical students at St. John's Seminary and nearly as many studying elsewhere, there were 465 students in our two colleges and about 32,000 children in 66 parish elementary
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schools and twenty academies. The latter schools were taught by the great majority of the 944 religious personnel then in the diocese and by several hundred lay teachers. The rest of the sisters were staffing the hospitals and houses of charity that the Bishop had organized.
If it is difficult to summarize the educational achievements during this period, it is equally hard to present briefly the story of the problems of relief and how they were met. Here, also, there was opposition on the part of some to freedom of worship for inmates of state and county institutions of correction and social welfare. Then, too, allotments from the public treasury for the many public cases
Academy of Saint Joseph-in-the-Pines, Brentwood
in Catholic orphanages and hospitals were never more than a fraction of the cost of their maintenance, not to speak of capital expenses.
The Bishop's formation of the St. Vincent de Paul Society proved a great blessing. Another was the erection and maintenance of orphanages conducted briefly by the Franciscan Brothers and then by the Sisters of St. Joseph, the Sisters of Charity, the Sisters of Mercy and the Dominican Sisters. The Sisters of the Good Shepherd re- formed wayward girls. St. Vincent's Home for newsboys and St. John's Protectory, Hicksville, sheltered and trained boys. The Little Sisters of the Poor took care of the indigent aged, and the Daughters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary conducted St. Joseph's Institute for deaf children. All told there were twenty-two protective institu- tions and asylums for children and youth, caring for nearly 5000 inmates in 1891. There were three homes for working women and five Catholic hospitals, the latter in 1891 caring for 4307 bed patients, apart from patients treated in their clinics and dispensaries.
The Know Nothing troubles of 1854-55 were serious threats in Brooklyn, but were not so tragic as elsewhere in the country. How- ever, these and other local and open manifestations of hostility
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largely subsided after Catholic Germans and Irish, especially in the Fourteenth and other Brooklyn regiments, died to save the Union in the Civil War.
Bishop Loughlin sponsored and approved many forms of Catholic life including Brooklyn's first two Catholic newspapers, the Brooklyn Catholic, 1869-70, and the Catholic Review, 1872-1899. The Bishop did his utmost to prosper the welfare of the community although he rarely appeared in newspaper notices. That the hierarchy highily re- garded him is evident in the fact that he was thrice proposed by them as Archbishop of New York. He laid the cornerstone of what was planned as a great Brooklyn cathedral, but soon he halted construc- tion and directed his attention to the maintenance of the diocesan orphanages and the erection of a seminary. He lived as simply and humbly as any of his priests. The golden jubilee of his priesthood in 1890, the year before his death, was a notable celebration. If Brook- lyn has been known for decades as the city of churches, John Loughlin had no small responsibility in it.
Like his predecessor, our second Bishop came from an important position in the Archdiocese of New York. Very Reverend Monsignor Charles Edward McDonnell, who was born in New York City and served as secretary to Archbishop Corrigan, was consecrated Bishop of Brooklyn on April 25, 1892, at the height of the staid Victorian era. Bishop McDonnell was a deep thinker and keen observer. He was humble and austere in his personal life and like his predecessor rarely appeared at civic gatherings, although he contributed in many ways to the progress of the community.
The social changes occurring during the twenty-nine years of his episcopate were possibly greater than in any comparable period of history. The nation grew faster than ever before. Of the 31,350,000 immigrants who arrived here between 1821 and 1915, 12,000,000 came after 1901, the great majority now from central, southern and south- eastern Europe. The Catholic Church contributed to American unity and stability by opposing the pan-Germanism of Cahensly. Despite the opposition of the so-called "American Protective Association" and the "Guardians of Liberty", she took her rightful place in American life and gave heroic service in the First World War. By the year 1921 through the growth of Kings and especially Queens County nearly 3,000,000 people lived on Long Island, of whom about 850,000 were Catholics.
Bishop McDonnell revitalized clerical life, held the third, fourth and fifth diocesan synods and in 1909 consecrated the first Auxiliary Bishop, George W. Mundelein, later the first Cardinal of Chicago. Bishop McDonnell built Cathedral College, the preparatory seminary in 1914, and when he died in 1921 he left 122 religious and 496 diocesan priests. Over sixty-eight per cent of the latter were born in the United States, fifteen per cent in Ireland and the rest in other foreign lands. About sixty-eight per cent of these clergymen were educated and trained in America and seven per cent in Ireland. To
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minister more adequately to the congregations of diverse nationalities Bishop McDonnell secured priests well versed in foreign languages and he invited twelve religious congregations of priests to the diocese.
In keeping with the increased rate of immigration after 1901, he established a greater number of parishes in twenty-nine years than Bishop Loughlin had founded in thirty-eight years. In his reign there were established 118 parishes of which seventeen were for Italian- speaking congregations, fifteen Polish, ten German, four Lithuanian and one each for the Spanish people and for those of the Greek Ruthenian, Maronite and Greek Melchite Rites. He left 272 parishes and missions behind him.
Bishop McDonnell intensified parish spiritual life and he appointed diocesan directors to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, the Catholic school system and to the diocesan cemeteries and chari- ties. In 1908 he established the Brooklyn Tablet, the diocesan news- paper which has a weekly circulation today of about 130,000.
The Catholic school system developed greatly during the period. To the eleven teaching communities functioning here in 1892 he added eleven more. He opened two new colleges-one briefly conducted by the Jesuits and the other by the Sisters of St. Joseph, making a total of four. He established fifty-eight more parish elementary schools, making a total of 124 with a registration of about 75,000, and he saw about two dozen academies and high schools opened.
Catholic charitable endeavor was needed during his administra- tion as never before. Increased immigration of generally poor people, growing industrialization of society, recurring business depressions and strikes, and city slums complicated the problem. Although social welfare began to loom larger in civic consciousness, the majority of sick, destitute and unemployed still had to rely upon private charities for relief.
To the problems of finance were added antagonisms from the shallow philosophy of those social reformers who saw in men only bodies without religious dignity or spiritual destiny. The Bishop organized the diocesan Bureau of Charities and a Charities Commis- sion to deal more adequately with the problems of social welfare and he introduced four more religious communities devoted to the spiritual and corporal works of mercy. New hospitals, protective asylums and homes were built and the St. Vincent de Paul Society and other old and new volunteer lay organizations flourished. At the end of the period there were fourteen protective institutions for children and youth with a population of 5114, seven homes for adults housing hundreds, and fen hospitals whose bed patients in 1921 numbered 20,954, in addition to those treated in clinics and dispensaries.
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Before he died on August 8, 1921, Bishop McDonnell had received from the Holy Father an Auxiliary Bishop in the person of Reverend Doctor Thomas E. Molloy. Born in New Hampshire, the present ordinary was ordained in 1908 for the Diocese of Brooklyn and he served as a curate at Queens of All Saints Parish, Brooklyn, and as
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Immaculate Conception Seminary, Huntington
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secretary to Bishop Mundelein. He was consecrated October 3, 1920, and was named the third Bishop of Brooklyn on November 21, 1921.
His regime witnessed the Klu Klux Klan outrages of the middle 1920s, the false prosperity of those years, the depression of the next decade, the rise of totalitarianism abroad and its menace to the American way of life, and our own involvement in the Second World War. During that tragedy America, by its war effort, rose to stand at the summit of the world's material greatness, and Catholic resi- dents of Brooklyn and Long Island contributed their full share. In 1946 they numbered well over one million souls.
Bishop Molloy organized the Diocesan Building Commission, the Diocesan Purchasing Bureau and Parish Service Corporation. He built the new Chancery at 75 Greene Avenue, Brooklyn, in 1930, en- larged it in 1938 and in 1945 moved many of the diocesan commissions, especially Catholic Charities, to the diocesan building at 191 Jorale- mon Street, Brooklyn-so vast had been the growth of the diocesan administrative requirements.
For thirteen years Bishop Molloy had directed the diocese alone when he petitioned the Holy See for a coadjutor and, in 1935, he had the pleasure of consecrating Most Reverend Raymond A. Kearney as Brooklyn's third Auxiliary Bishop.
Bishop Molloy evinced great interest in vocations to the priest- hood and in the education and training of the clergy. Cathedral College expanded and in 1926 a new diocesan major seminary was started at Lloyd Harbor Village. There, in 1930, he opened the present beautiful Seminary of the Immaculate Conception staffed by diocesan priests.
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