THE POPE'S HERITAGE German Catholics Have Made Their Mark at Manhattan Church
By BETH GRIFFIN
When Pope Benedict XVI leads an ecumenical prayer service April 18 at St. Joseph's Church in Manhattan, he will see evidence of the mark that Germans made on New York history. St. Joseph's, on East 87th Street in the city's Yorkville neighborhood, was established in 1873 to serve German immigrants. The church was built in 1895 in the Romanesque revival style, and its stained-glass windows bear inscriptions from the German-American parishioners whose donations financed the building.
A German-language Mass is celebrated once a month at St. Joseph's and draws as many as 100 people, many from outside the parish, said Julia Winter, a longtime parishioner. "We have a German ministry," Ms. Winter said. "It's not just a Mass." The ministry includes concerts, baptisms, funerals or commemorative Masses celebrated in German, as well as an informal housing referral service for young Germans coming to New York. The Yorkville neighborhood, once a center of all things German in Manhattan, is German mostly in memory now. Father Boniface Ramsey, administrator of St. Christopher's parish on Staten Island, occasionally celebrates the German-language Mass at St. Joseph's. He traced the history of the Germans in New York. "The German immigrants were always fractured; they were Lutheran, Catholic and Jewish. And they assimilated pretty well to begin with," he said. Nonetheless, Father Ramsey said that New York was the third-largest German-speaking city in the world at the turn of the 20th century, after Berlin and Vienna, Austria. And today, he said, "More people in the United States claim German heritage than any other. " Father Ramsey said, "The German heritage was devastated by World War I, World War II, the General Slocum disaster and demographic changes." Prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York, the General Slocum fire caused the largest single loss of life in New York City. And in New York, the center of German activity moved from Alphabet City on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Yorkville and later to Ridgewood, Queens. Ms. Winter, the chair of St. Joseph's German Committee since 1971, emigrated from Bavaria as a child. She said that, until the mid-1940s, the priests assigned to the parish spoke German. She said the Yorkville neighborhood began to change in the 1950s and 1960s, as small buildings were replaced by high-rise apartment buildings. In an only-in-New-York scenario that reflects the changes in the neighborhood and the universality of the Church, the monthly German-language Mass at St. Joseph's is celebrated by a rotating group of priests: the administrator of the parish, Msgr. John B. Sullivan, an Irish-American who studied German in a Jesuit high school in Manhattan; parochial vicar Father Emmanuel Nartey, a Ghanaian who speaks German as one of four languages; and Father Ramsey, whose mother, born in Germany, attended the same school in Aschau am Inn as the pope and immigrated to the United States by herself at 16. Father Ramsey said, "Julia Winter is the Teutonic spirit of St. Joseph's." Msgr. Sullivan said that she will likely be among the 10 parishioners from St. Joseph's who have been invited to observe the pope's prayer service with ecumenical leaders. "It's important for the pope to see that there are German Catholics in the city and they have a place to come to worship," she said. —CNS
Catholic New York - Papal Visit - April 10, 2008