Proud Legacy
As millennium nears, a historian views the Church of New York in the 20th century
By MSGR. THOMAS J. SHELLEYIn April 1908 New York Catholics celebrated the centenary of their diocese with festivities that lasted a whole week. It was the occasion for numerous sermons and speeches extolling the achievements of the first 100 years of the diocese. No doubt there will be a repeat performance on the 200th anniversary in the year 2008 when historians will take stock of what has occurred during the diocese's second century. However, the main outlines of that story--New York Catholicism in the 20th century--are already discernible, and perhaps it is not too soon to offer a preliminary sketch.
Looking Back From 1908
In 1908 Archbishop John Murphy Farley reveled in the contrast between the mighty archdiocese that he headed and the unpromising little diocese created by Pope Pius VII on April 8, 1808. The original Diocese of New York was not little in size. It covered 10 times the area of the present archdiocese, comprising all of New York state and the northern half of New Jersey, a total of some 55,000 square miles. In that vast area in 1808, however, there was a grand total of two churches, St. Peter's in New York City and St. Mary's in Albany, both of them little more than rudimentary wooden shells. The poverty of the Catholic community meant that the erection of new churches was often a slow and painful process. In Saugerties, for example, the walls of the first Catholic church were constructed in 1833, but two years later the roof was unfinished and the building still lacked windows, doors or even a floor. The editor of the Catholic paper of that day, The Truth-Teller, asked plaintively: "Who will deny a few shillings for the completion of such an object?"
Priests were almost as scarce as churches. In 1822 there were eight priests in the diocese, most of them itinerant Irish-born missionaries. "Paddy Priests," they were commonly called. Father Philip Larissy was one of them. The Catholic Directory for 1822 listed him as "attend[ing] regularly at Staten Island and different other congregations along the Hudson River."
Father Michael O'Gorman was the first priest ordained for the new diocese. He spent several of his nine years as a New York priest traveling between Albany and Auburn, celebrating Sunday Mass in the construction camps of the Irish laborers who were digging the Erie Canal. (He died in 1824 at the age of 32.) A decade later, Father John Cummiskey, first pastor of St. Joseph's Church in Greenwich Village, celebrated Mass whenever and wherever he could as he followed the progress of the construction crews who built the first Croton aqueduct.
The lot of New York's first bishops was not much different from that of their priests. "My daily burdens are truly greater than my strength, owing to my not having more than three priests to help me in this city," said John Connolly, New York's first resident bishop in 1816, a year after he came to the diocese. His successor, Bishop John Dubois, made practically the same complaint in 1827, a year after his arrival in New York. "I scarcely have time to take my meals and very little rest at night," said Bishop Dubois, "with a population of 25,000 people and seven priests only to share in my labors." When New York's first archbishop, the formidable John Hughes, came to New York in 1838 as coadjutor to the aging Bishop Dubois, he surveyed the scene around him and confided to a friend: "I think that I have been sent here in punishment for my sins."
Centenary of the Diocese: 1908
Archbishop John Farley was never known to express such sentiments. The archdiocese over which he presided in 1908 was the largest in population in the whole United States and reportedly the wealthiest. In addition to the flourishing Archdiocese of New York (whose present boundaries date from 1861), seven new dioceses had been carved out of the original Diocese of New York. Together the eight episcopal Sees contained 1,546 churches, 2,710 priests, 251,383 students in Catholic schools and more than 3 million faithful.
New York Catholics had ample reason for self-congratulation as they looked back on how far they had come between 1808 and 1908. For some of them, like old Bishop Bernard McQuaid of Rochester, it was a matter of personal history. Born in New York City in 1823, McQuaid was baptized by the first resident Bishop of New York, confirmed by the second, ordained a priest by the third, consecrated a bishop by the fourth, served as mentor to the fifth, and was instrumental in the selection of the sixth, John Murphy Farley. However, the star of the show in 1908 was neither Archbishop Farley nor the venerable Bishop McQuaid, but Cardinal William Logue, the Archbishop of Armagh and primate of All Ireland, who was lionized wherever he went as "the 114th successor of St. Patrick."
Cardinal Logue's prominence in the festivities was a reminder of the heavily Irish complexion of New York Catholicism at the beginning of the 20th century. Although there were 42 national parishes in New York City alone, representing 11 different ethnic groups, no one would have suspected it from viewing the centenary celebrations. The tone was set when Cardinal Logue's steamship was welcomed to New York Harbor by a band playing "The Wearin' o' the Green." It was perhaps the first and last time a Cunard liner ever received such a greeting.
The Irish cardinal responded warmly to New York. He said, tongue-in-cheek, that some of the youngest participants might live to take part in the next centenary celebration. "If you do," he predicted, "you will live to see the Church in New York and America the most flourishing in Christendom."
Early 20th Century
The Catholic population of the archdiocese continued to grow during the first two decades of the 20th century, but at a more modest rate than before, from 1.2 million in 1902 to about 1,325,000 in 1918. Under Cardinal Patrick Hayes, the Catholic population actually declined to about 1 million between 1918 and 1938. As a result, in 1936 Boston surpassed New York as the largest American diocese. There were several reasons for the drop in numbers, such as restrictive immigration laws in the 1920s and the low birth rate during the Depression years. Another factor was the exodus to the suburbs. As far back as 1898, Father James McGean, pastor of St. Peter's Church on Barclay Street, lamented that "Brooklyn and [New] Jersey have taken away our industrious middle class." Nevertheless, the infrastructure of the archdiocese continued to expand. Cardinal Farley established 71 new parishes, and Cardinal Hayes almost matched that figure with 65.
One major demographic change was the influx of large numbers of Italian immigrants. As late as 1880 there were only 20,000 Italians in New York City. Between 1880 and 1914, however, more than 3 million Italians entered the United States through Castle Garden and Ellis Island. Many of them settled permanently in the New York area. By 1902, thanks to the efforts of Archbishop Michael Corrigan, New York had 25 parishes with Italian-speaking priests caring for more than 135,000 people.
The Italian population of the archdiocese swelled to about 400,000 by 1918. As the Italians left lower Manhattan and East Harlem for the greener pastures of the Bronx and Staten Island, the archdiocese continued to establish new parishes for them, a total of 44 by 1918. Cardinal Farley bristled at complaints from Rome that New York was not doing enough for the Italians. "I should like to know how such a condition of things would be met in Italy, if the case were reversed," he said with unusual candor.
Archbishop Corrigan had relied heavily on priests from religious orders to staff the Italian parishes. Both Cardinal Farley and Cardinal Hayes preferred diocesan clergy, recruited first in Italy and later at home. Some of them were remarkable men. Beginning in 1913, Father Louis Riccio started nine mission churches on Staten Island, seven of which developed into full-fledged parishes. Not all of the priests in this apostolate were Italians. Father Daniel Burke, the founding pastor of St. Philip Neri Church on the Grand Concourse, was instrumental in the creation of a number of Italian parishes in the East Bronx. At the time of Father Burke's death in 1931, Father Louis Congedo said: "The Italians have lost in him one of their staunchest friends and supporters."
Cardinal Farley was the first Archbishop of New York who did not have to worry about a shortage of vocations to the priesthood. "Thank God," he said in 1917, "we in this diocese have nothing to complain of." A major reason for the abundance of vocations was Cathedral College, the minor seminary opened by Cardinal Farley in 1903. It was a daring American innovation in seminary education, a day school rather than a traditional European boarding school. By the time Cathedral College celebrated its 25th anniversary in 1928, it had supplied the archdiocese with 350 priests. In 1932 the enrollment at St. Joseph's Seminary in Dunwoodie reached an all-time high of 302 students. Mixing his metaphors, the rector complained that the seminary was so crowded that "Dunwoodie might well be compared to sardines in a rush-hour subway."
In the 1920s, the most famous priest in New York, and perhaps in the whole country, was Father Francis P. Duffy. During World War I, at the age of 46, he volunteered to serve as chaplain to the New York 69th Infantry Regiment in France. His commanding officer called him "the outstanding figure of the Rainbow Division," noting that "he was first of all a priest." Before the war Father Duffy had been a professor for 14 years at Dunwoodie where he once said: "Our main drawback is a certain intellectual sloth which masquerades as faith."
After the war Father Duffy became the pastor of Holy Cross Church on West 42nd Street, moving effortlessly between the literati of the theater district and the longshoremen of Hell's Kitchen and throughout the city at large. Alexander Woollcott, the literary critic, said that when Father Duffy "walked down the street--any street--he was a cure striding through his own village. Everyone knew him."
"Father Duffy was of such dimensions," added Woollcott, "that he made New York into a small town."
When Alfred E. Smith came under attack because of his religion during his bid for the presidency in the late 1920s, he turned to Father Duffy for help. Father Duffy was the ghost writer of a famous article in the Atlantic Monthly in which Al Smith stated his belief in freedom of conscience and separation of church and state. The words were Smith's, but the ideas were Duffy's. From Rome, Cardinal John Bonzano, former Apostolic Delegate to the United States, called the article a capo lavoro, "a masterpiece." Father Duffy anticipated by 30 years the work of Father John Courtney Murray, S.J., whose revisionist theology would be incorporated into Vatican II's "Declaration on Religious Freedom."
The Great Depression
New York City was hard hit by the Great Depression. By 1932 one-third of the city's factories had been closed, and one-quarter of the population was unemployed. The Catholic Church was severely affected also. Of the 65 new parishes started by Cardinal Hayes, only five were established in the 1930s. At St. Charles Borromeo parish in Harlem, the financial situation was so desperate that, on at least two occasions, the usually parsimonious Cardinal Hayes sent the hard-pressed pastor a check for $5,000. By 1938 the diocesan debt had climbed to $28 million. Cardinal Hayes was the son of a longshoreman and a native of the lower East Side who never forgot his roots.
He distanced himself from the demagogic radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin, but he gave unambiguous support to Msgr. Robert Keegan, the executive secretary of Catholic Charities, who was an ardent advocate of the social welfare policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Back in 1919, Cardinal Hayes had selected Msgr. Keegan to organize the Catholic Charities of the archdiocese, and in subsequent years, Msgr. Keegan made the organization a model for other dioceses throughout the country.
Depression-era New York also witnessed the opening of the first of the Jesuit "labor colleges" in New York City, Xavier Labor School. It quickly became famous under Father Philip Carey, S.J., and Father John Corridan, S.J., the latter of whom was the model for the labor priest in Bud Schulberg's movie "On the Waterfront."
Another social activist was Father John Monaghan, a teacher at Cathedral College, who introduced a whole generation of future New York diocesan priests to the social teaching of the Church. In 1937 he was also instrumental in the founding of ACTU, the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists. Father Monaghan's weekend ministry at Corpus Christi Church on Morningside Heights brought him into contact with Father George Barry Ford, a pioneer in the liturgical movement in New York. In those years interest in liturgical renewal often went hand in hand with a concern for social justice. More than anyone else, Father Monaghan epitomized that tradition in New York and put it into practice as pastor of St. Margaret Mary Church on Staten Island.
Union Square was a notorious gathering place for leftists of every stripe in
the 1930s. On May Day 1933 the usual denizens noticed a new newspaper on sale for a penny
a copy. It was called The Catholic Worker, edited by Dorothy Day, a radical journalist who
had become a Catholic in 1927. Dorothy Day was the heart and soul of the Catholic Worker
Movement. She not only worked among the poor, but she shared their lives at her
"houses of hospitality." Recognized by many as a saint in her own lifetime, she
turned away such compliments with the comment: "I don't want to be dismissed so
easily.""If I have achieved anything in my lifetime," she once remarked, "it is because I have not been embarrassed to talk about God."
World War II and the Cold War
Msgr. Florence Cohalan once pointed out that, ever since 1838, when John Hughes moved into Bishop Dubois' house on Mulberry Street, every Archbishop of New York had spent some time in the service of his predecessor. That tradition was broken on April 15, 1939, when Francis J. Spellman, the auxiliary bishop of Boston, was named the sixth Archbishop of New York. Spellman also broke another precedent. Unlike any of his predecessors, he was already an important figure before he became Archbishop of New York. A friend of both Pope Pius XII and President Roosevelt, Cardinal Spellman quickly became the best-known Catholic prelate in the country. During World War II, in his capacity as Military Vicar for the Armed Forces, he visited American troops throughout the world, becoming a prominent symbol of American Catholic patriotism. After the war he maintained a high profile as an outspoken foe of communism both at home and abroad.Cardinal Spellman's passionate anti-communism led him to make one of the most ill-considered decisions of his career in 1949. A strike by gravediggers
at Calvary and Gate of Heaven cemeteries had resulted in more than 1,000 unburied bodies.
Convinced that a communist-controlled union was responsible for the situation, he brought
in seminarians from Dunwoodie as substitute gravediggers and used them to break the
strike.In contrast to his questionable judgment on that issue, he showed splendid pastoral sense in responding to the major pastoral challenge posed by the massive Puerto Rican migration to New York. In this instance, he relied on good advice from his vicar general, Msgr. John Maguire, and from two young priest sociologists, Father George Kelly and Father Joseph Fitzpatrick, S.J. Abandoning the old-fashioned policy of national parishes, Cardinal Spellman opted for all-inclusive integrated parishes for the Puerto Ricans. He also decided that his own diocesan clergy, rather than the religious orders, should assume the primary responsibility for these newcomers. By 1958 there were approximately 200 Spanish-speaking priests in the archdiocese, and one-quarter of the parishes were providing services in Spanish.
Cardinal Spellman was one of the last of the great American brick-and-mortar archbishops. He placed special emphasis on the expansion of Catholic educational facilities. By 1952, 134 schools had been constructed, renovated or were in the planning stages. Between 1953 and 1959 alone, the archdiocese constructed or expanded 15 churches, 94 schools, 22 rectories, 60 convents and 30 other institutions. Among his other accomplishments, Cardinal Spellman started the diocesan high school system, modernized the major and minor seminaries and laid the foundations for the development of St. Vincent's Hospital into a modern medical center.
Ever since Archbishop Hughes began the Catholic school system in New York in the 1840s, the backbone of the teaching staff had been the women religious, who numbered almost 9,000 in the 1960s. The vast array of Catholic educational and charitable institutions in the archdiocese never would have been built without their services, together with those of the brothers and religious-order priests. One historian, Leslie Woodcock Tentler, recently called attention to the role played by women religious in the development of American Catholicism. "The Catholic sisterhoods," she said, "are without numerical equivalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as alternatives for women to marriage and family life." She added, "Had women under secular or Protestant auspices compiled this record of achievement, they would today be a thoroughly researched population."
Cardinal Spellman's interests were not limited to brick and mortar. He encouraged higher education for his priests at the best American and European universities. He showed a surprising sympathy for modern biblical scholarship and came to the defense of biblical scholars among his own clergy, most notably, Myles Bourke, Patrick Skehan and Richard Dillon. At the height of the civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s, he defended the participation of priests and religious in such demonstrations to a less-than-happy apostolic delegate.
During Vatican Council II, it was Cardinal Spellman who brought Jesuit Father John Courtney Murray to Rome where Father Murray played a key role in the formulation of the council's "Declaration on Religious Liberty." "My eminent friend of New York," a grateful Father Murray called Cardinal Spellman after he had rescued him from the limbo to which his Jesuit superiors had consigned him.
One of Cardinal Spellman's proudest moments occurred on Oct. 4, 1965, when Pope Paul VI made a one-day whirlwind visit to New York, becoming the first pope to set foot in the New World. Unfortunately, Cardinal Spellman's last years were overshadowed by the Vietnam War. Like many Americans of his generation, he equated the war with World War II and could not comprehend the domestic opposition to it. He also found the turbulence in the post-Vatican Church profoundly disturbing. "I do not think that things in Rome could be any more 'dizzy' than they are here in the United States," he confided to an old Roman friend.
A notably ambitious man, Cardinal Spellman wedded his ambition to the service of both his Church and his country. When he died on Dec. 2, 1967, he had become the best-known, if not always the best-loved, American Catholic churchman since Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore a half century earlier.
The Post-Vatican II Church
The combination of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement helped to make the late 1960s and early 1970s one of the most turbulent periods in American history. In addition to the turmoil in American society, American Catholics had to contend with the changes introduced into the Church by Vatican Council II. In New York, the responsibility for guiding the Church through this difficult period fell upon Terence J. Cooke, who became the seventh Archbishop of New York on March 2, 1968. Only 47 years old and an auxiliary bishop for less than three years, he was a surprise choice for the post.
A native New Yorker with a genial personality and an enviable capacity for
hard work, Cardinal Cooke made no effort to imitate Cardinal Spellman as a national or
international figure. Instead, he made his contribution on the local scene, bringing to
the leadership of the archdiocese two qualities much needed at the time: pastoral
sensitivity and managerial skills. Critics faulted him for lack of vision, but his desire
for consensus rather than confrontation spared the archdiocese the polarization that
occurred in some other dioceses. "He managed to provide a context within which a lot
of viewpoints could be at home," said Msgr. Philip Murnion, the director of the
National Pastoral Life Center.The era of institutional expansion was pretty well over in New York by the time Terence Cooke became the archbishop. A major responsibility of any Archbishop of New York was now the careful husbanding of available resources, a task at which Cardinal Cooke excelled. "When I take on a job," he said, "I try to do my homework." One of his advisers commented: "He can sit with a 70-page memo on how to rescue hospitals and master it." One of Cardinal Cooke's most effective strategies for assisting poor parishes was the establishment of the Commission for Inter-Parish Financing, which levied a tax of 6 percent or 7 percent on all parishes and used the proceeds to aid ailing ones. By 1972 the commission had distributed $27 million. Many inner-city churches and schools would have been forced to close without such assistance.
An area of the archdiocese that became nationally famous (or notorious) in the 1970s was the South Bronx. In fact, in the words of Jill Jonnes, a historian of the Bronx, the term "South Bronx" became "a traveling curse," as arson, crime and the blight of abandoned buildings spread from one Bronx neighborhood to another. During this period of the Bronx's ordeal by fire, Jill Jonnes notes that "the Catholic Church quietly emerged as the institution most committed to preserving and resurrecting the benighted South Bronx. Not one church or Catholic school closed."
When the newly elected Pope John Paul II made a two-day visit to New York in 1979, one of the stops on his crowded itinerary was the South Bronx where he spoke in both Spanish and English. He was welcomed to the area by Father Neil Connolly, the vicar of the South Bronx, who told him: "Your presence here tonight means we count." Said one ecstatic woman: "If the politicians don't care about us, at least God loves us."
On Aug. 27, 1983, even the most unflappable New Yorkers were shocked by a press release from the archdiocese revealing that Cardinal Cooke was terminally ill with cancer, a disease that he had been secretly battling for a number of years. He died 41 days later. Perhaps the finest tribute came from the New York Daily News, which said in an editorial: "A line from Shakespeare seems uniquely appropriate: 'Nothing in his life became him like his leaving of it.' This was a man who showed us all how to pass from time to eternity with courage and grace."
Cardinal John J. O'Connor
The selection of John O'Connor as the eighth Archbishop of New York in 1984 was almost as big a surprise as the choice of Terence Cooke 16 years earlier. A native of Philadelphia, John O'Connor was ordained a priest of that archdiocese in 1945 and spent 27 years as a chaplain in the U.S. Navy, earning a doctorate in political science and rising to Chief of Chaplains with the rank of rear admiral. After retirement from the Navy, he served as auxiliary bishop in the Military Ordinariate for four years until his appointment as Bishop of Scranton in 1983. He had been in Scranton a mere eight months when he was appointed Archbishop of New York on Jan. 31, 1984. The cardinal's red hat followed a little over a year later, on May 25, 1985.
Much had changed in New York since Francis Spellman drove down from Boston almost a half-century earlier to assume the reins of the archdiocese. Cardinal Spellman appeared in the pulpit of St. Patrick's Cathedral fewer than a dozen times during his 28 years as archbishop. However, he wielded enormous power indirectly through the courtship paid to him by the city's power brokers, including that prince of power brokers, Robert Moses.
By 1983, however, the cozy relationship of church and state in New York City had pretty much disappeared with the erosion of Irish political power. Moreover, an aggressively secularistic culture had reduced religion to a peripheral role in public life and promoted, among other things, a value-free acceptance of abortion and homosexuality. Jimmy Breslin, the pugnacious journalist, taunted the new archbishop as "Yesterday O'Connor" in the belief that he would try to revive the leadership style of Cardinal Spellman.
Instead, Cardinal John O'Connor developed a style of leadership that more closely resembles that of Pope John Paul II. It features a heavy emphasis on preaching and public appearances, the use of both the press and television, pastoral visits to parishes and institutions, and the staging of large public events such as an annual Mass for the disabled in St. Patrick's Cathedral and a Youth Rally in Yankee Stadium. In August 1984, before a gathering of 10,000 Cursillistas at the Marian Shrine in Haverstraw, the new archbishop delivered his first sermon in what he called "la lengua de Miguel Cervantes."
A major theme in Cardinal O'Connor's public pronouncements has been the sanctity of human life in an era when it was increasingly threatened by widespread acceptance of both abortion and euthanasia. Another public issue that confronted Cardinal O'Connor immediately after his arrival in New York was the effort of the city's homosexuals to win acceptance of their lifestyle. Mayor Edward I. Koch had recently issued an executive order regulating the hiring practices in private charitable institutions. The rules were formulated so broadly that they could conceivably be used to force Catholic child-caring institutions to hire even militant homosexuals. Cardinal O'Connor said: "We would rather close our child-caring institutions than violate Church teaching." The cardinal won the battle in court, but his victory did not destroy his burgeoning friendship with Mayor Koch. "New York," said the cardinal, "is the only place in the world where good friends sue one another."
The dispute over Koch's executive order did not prevent the archdiocese from expanding its hospital and hospice programs for the victims of AIDS. Gov. Mario M. Cuomo was quick to recognize what the archdiocese was doing. "The health care institutions operated by the archdiocese were the very first to respond to the state's call for dedicated units to care for AIDS patients," said the governor in January 1990. "They were the first and they do the most. It's an inspiration to the community and it has shown leadership."
Other public issues on which Cardinal O'Connor also provided leadership included his condemnation of racism and his opposition to Medicaid cuts in the state budget. He also offered support to labor unions, most notably the hospital workers' union, which included some of the poorest paid workers in the city. At the time of the immensely popular Persian Gulf War in 1991, the former admiral tried to damp down the excesses of patriotic euphoria by saying, "No war is good. Every war is at best the lesser of two evils."
Cardinal O'Connor was particularly successful in establishing good relations with the city's Jewish community and was widely credited with playing a key role in the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and the Holy See. In February 1988, Dr. Ronald B. Sobel, the senior rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, said: "From the very moment that Cardinal John J. O'Connor [became] Archbishop of New York, it was clear that the Jewish people had found a new and powerful friend...I know of no member of the American Catholic hierarchy who has been more consistently sensitive to the interests of the Jewish people."
Perceptive observers caught on to what Cardinal O'Connor was doing. One friendly critic, Joseph Berger, identified the cardinal's use of the media as the source of his strength as a public figure. "Many local politicians believe that the cardinal has already heightened the archdiocese's political impact--its ability to move the city's bureaucracy on behalf of its extensive social programs and its power to get city policy-makers to respect Catholic doctrine," said Berger in 1989. Moreover, Berger explained, "He has done this not so much through influential friends in business and politics, as Francis Cardinal Spellman did...but more through his own assets as a communicator." Ten years later The New York Times admitted that the cardinal was "perhaps the one person in New York with a platform to rival that of the mayor."
Eve of the Millennium
Between 1983 and 1998 the population of the archdiocese grew from 1,839,000 to 2,347,000, and Catholics accounted for 45 percent of the total population of the area. Perhaps the most outstanding feature of the archdiocese was its complexity and variety. In the wealthy Dutchess County village of Millbrook a major community concern was preserving access to 50,000 acres of private land for fox hunting. By contrast, at Our Saviour parish in the Bronx, 58 percent of the families lived below the poverty line in the 1980s. The ethnic character of New York City's neighborhoods was constantly in flux. Mass was celebrated every Sunday in at least 22 languages, with 135 parishes providing Mass in Spanish. St. Ann's parish in East Harlem, once overwhelmingly Italian, by 1990 was 60 percent African-American, 30 percent Puerto Rican and 10 percent Italian. The Redemptorist Church of the Most Holy Redeemer on the lower East Side, once New York's unofficial German cathedral, was now home to 250 families, half English-speaking, half Spanish-speaking, who came, said the pastor, "from a great many nations."
The archdiocese remained deeply involved in both education and social service. There were approximately 108,000 students on the elementary and high school levels. Minority students, many of them non-Catholic, made up almost half the enrollment. The Catholic Church also remained a major provider of social services with 17 hospitals, three health care centers, 17 homes for the aged and 19 child care institutions. In addition, the archdiocese operated 129 different social agencies. No one appreciated their contribution more than Mayor Edward I. Koch, who said: "They provided the best social services that were available."
A Papal Visit
In October 1995 Pope John Paul II returned to New York for his second visit. He attracted large crowds to every public event and received extraordinarily favorable coverage in the secular media. One reason, perhaps, for the favorable attention was the fact that the pope was advocating causes that few public figures any longer cared to mention, such as compassion for the unborn, the poor, the homeless, refugees and immigrants. The highlight of the pope's visit was a Mass on Oct. 7 on the Great Lawn in Central Park before 125,000 people. Speaking alternately in English and in Spanish, beneath a huge banner depicting the ethnic diversity of New York Catholicism, the Holy Father made an impassioned plea for the sanctity of life and social justice. "You are called to respect and defend the mystery of life always and everywhere," he said.
Earlier, on his arrival at Newark International Airport, John Paul had expressed the hope "that America will persevere in its own best traditions of openness and opportunity." Those have been two of America's richest traditions, and nowhere have they been better preserved than in the Immigrant Church of New York. As the Catholics of New York enter upon the third millennium of the Christian era and prepare to celebrate the bicentennial of their own archdiocese, they need only look to the proud legacy of their own local Church for guidance and direction to face the future with confidence.
Msgr. Shelley is historian of the archdiocese and associate professor of historical theology at Fordham University. He formerly was professor of Church history at St. Joseph's Seminary in Dunwoodie. He is the author of "The History of the Archdiocese of New York," published this year.