JOY and GRATITUDE

Year of Bicentennial celebration to begin at Mass in St. Patrick's Cathedral April 15

By MARY ANN POUST

The yearlong celebration leading to the 200th anniversary of the Archdiocese of New York will begin on Sunday, April 15, with a proclamation by Cardinal Egan calling on the parishes, institutions and people of the archdiocese to "enter into joyful and grateful expressions of thanksgiving to Divine Providence."

The cardinal will celebrate a special Mass of Thanksgiving at St. Patrick's Cathedral on Sunday to open the Bicentennial Year, with its theme, "Through Faith We Grow."

A Mass at Radio City Music Hall on April 8, 2008, the actual 200th anniversary, will close the year.

The cardinal's proclamation will be read at the cathedral Mass and in all parishes of the 10-county archdiocese, as Catholics join in celebrating its faith-filled journey from humble beginnings two centuries ago to one of the most important sees in the Catholic world.

The founding of the archdiocese on April 8, 1808, reflects the growth of the Catholic population in the United States as it emerged from its colonial roots.

At that time, four new dioceses—New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Bardstown, Ky., what is now Louisville—were carved out of the Diocese of Baltimore, which until then had been the single U.S. diocese.

The new diocese covered the entire state of New York and a good portion of northern New Jersey. It became an archdiocese in 1850, when additional New York and New Jersey dioceses were established and the current archdiocesan boundaries set.

In its 200 years, the Archdiocese of New York established the network of parishes, schools, hospitals and nursing homes, child care services and other programs that made it an important component of the region's social and political fabric in addition to its role in the spiritual lives of Catholics.

The archdiocese today serves some 2.5 million Catholics and covers 4,700 square miles of a dramatically diverse landscape that includes the skyscraper canyons of Manhattan, the scenic Hudson Valley, and the farm country that borders the Catskill Mountains in the north.

The 400 parishes and 273 schools of the archdiocese serve the people in the New York City boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island, and in the seven northern counties of Westchester, Putnam, Dutchess, Rockland, Orange, Ulster and Sullivan.

In every part of that vast territory, the Bicentennial celebration will be an important part of the Catholic experience in the year to come.

"We want to get all two-and-a-half million Catholics involved," said Auxiliary Bishop Robert A. Brucato, the vicar general, who is coordinating the planning effort with vice chancellor Sister Eileen Clifford, O.P. Working with them are Kelly Gleeson and Patrick Howley.

Cardinal Egan will personally take the Bicentennial message to the 19 vicariate regions of the archdiocese with visits to each of them beginning with Sullivan County on Aug. 19.

Banners proclaiming the 200th anniversary will hang in churches, and special prayer cards with the Bicentennial Prayer and copies of the proclamation will be available. A Bicentennial hymn, "By Our Faith in You, O Lord," by Deborah Jamini of the choir at St. Patrick's Cathedral will be incorporated into many of the liturgical celebrations.

Historical exhibits focusing on various aspects of the archdiocese such as immigration, charities, education and the contributions of religious will be mounted throughout the year.

One of them, at the Historical Society of Rockland County in New City, has already opened and traces Catholic development there. A revolving-theme exhibit in the lobby of the New York Catholic Center in Manhattan opens this month with a display on the 12 archbishops who have served these past 200 years; a cooperative exhibit by St. Patrick's Old Cathedral and the Tenement Museum in lower Manhattan will focus on parishes in the area, which were the first in the archdiocese; and an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York in early 2008 will highlight a period of Catholic growth.

Educational events include an Oct. 2 academic convocation celebrating Catholic higher education at St. Paul's Chapel of Columbia University, and a series of lectures sponsored by Fordham University on aspects of archdiocesan history. There will also be writing and art contests and projects in elementary and high schools.

The annual archdiocesan Teachers Institute and Catechetical Convocation conferences—usually held in two sessions—will each be combined into single sessions this year and will have Bicentennial themes.

In Yonkers, Msgr. Hugh J. Corrigan, the regional vicar and pastor of Immaculate Conception-St. Mary's, will be principal celebrant of an outdoor Bicentennial Mass on Saturday, Sept. 22, at 11 a.m. in Stefanik Park near the aqueduct at Nepperhan Avenue, where the first public Masses in that city were offered for the Catholic laborers, most of them Irish, who dug the aqueduct in the late 1830s.

Participants will then walk in procession to St. Mary's Church—the oldest parish in Yonkers, where the first Mass was celebrated on Christmas Day of 1848—where there will be an exhibit and refreshments.

The Yonkers celebration is one of the many Bicentennial-themed prayer services, Masses and other liturgical events in parishes and vicariates throughout the year—mindful of the Bicentennial Prayer's thanks to God for "the abundant blessings" that have been "bestowed upon the Church in the Archdiocese of New York."

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