Destinations: Churches and Saints of Lower Manhattan

Photos by Amy C. Elliott: Skyscrapers tower over the shrine and former home of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton.Can’t afford the airfare to Goa, St. Francis Xavier’s burial grounds in offshore Western India? Not up to a 100-mile hike or bike trip required of pilgrims to the tomb of St. James the Apostle in Santiago de Compostela, Spain? Or summer’s too hot in Mexico City for you to join crowds at the Shrine of St. Juan Diego and Our Lady of Guadalupe? Fear not. The sidewalks of New York -- especially those in Lower Manhattan -- hold the footprints of scores of saintly Americans. At least four one-time New Yorkers -- Isaac Jogues, Elizabeth Ann Seton, Frances Cabrini and John Neumann -- are already saints. Official sainthood remains a work in progress for Dorothy Day, Mychal Judge, Thomas Merton and Pierre Toussaint.

Indeed, from 1643 when French Jesuit Isaac Jogues reported hearing 18 languages, but found only two Catholics in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam to Sept. 11, 2001, when firemen carried the body of Franciscan Mychal Judge out of the wreckage of the Twin Towers, the church can point to 350 years of Catholic life in Lower Manhattan.

This is remarkable, since both the early Protestant Dutch rulers of New Amsterdam and the British authorities, who took over from them in 1664 -- changing the city’s name to New York, after the Duke of York -- banned the practice of Catholicism.

How did such holy men and women emerge from a place where Catholics were forbidden to worship, where priests caught saying Mass could be imprisoned, those attending beaten or arrested, and where Catholic immigrants faced discrimination well into the 19th century? To find out take the subway, bus, Staten Island Ferry or a car to Bowling Green at the end of Broadway, near the tip of the island.

From this historic spot, the original site of Fort Amsterdam, you can begin your journey in the footsteps of the saints, imagining their daily lives, visiting the streets on which they trod and the churches in which they prayed.

Nearby see the red stone carving depicting the Indians selling the island to the Dutch in 1660 and the erection of Fort Amsterdam. The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island are both visible in the distance. Envision the huddled hordes arriving daily, tossed on the waves by Europe’s famines, wars of liberation, and poverty. Many sought not just a new home, but freedom to worship. Hear them speaking in Gaelic, German, Italian, French, Armenian, Scandinavian and Slavic tongues.

Across the street from Bowling Green Park is the U.S. Customs House, today the Museum of Native Americans. The venue is ironic given that early settlers erected Wall Street not far away to keep the Indians out of the new colony.

The museum is free and worth a visit, especially its rotunda that displays portraits of eight explorers of the new world -- six of them commissioned by Catholic monarchs. “They didn’t sail here solo. They must have had priests and Catholic seamen on board,” said Carmelite Fr. Ashley Harrington, a frequent visitor and guide to the area.

Mother Seton

Around the corner from the Customs House is 8 State Street, the shrine and former home of America’s firstborn saint, Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton. New Yorkers and countless visitors have sailed past her front door with its rounded porch supported by four white columns -- a Catholic frontispiece on the shoreline and a rare landmark now that much of Lower Manhattan has given way to skyscraper homes of financial giants.

Seton was born into the prominent Bayley family in 1774 -- her father was a doctor, the first health officer of the Port of New York and a professor at what became Columbia University.

At 20, Elizabeth married William Seton, son of a wealthy shipping family. For a time the couple lived at 27 Wall Street across from today’s Federal Hall. Alexander Hamilton was a neighbor. In 1797 the Setons gave a ball for George Washington’s 65th Regiment.

“Mother Seton loved to dance,” said Sister of Charity Regina Bechtle of the Bronx, an expert on the saint and coeditor of Seton’s four-volume Collected Writings. No wonder the shrine chapel bears the shape of a Georgian ballroom.

But the dance ended early for Seton when her father-in-law died in 1798 and the couple was left to raise her husband’s seven siblings and half-siblings as well as their own children. Business woes, the death of her father from yellow fever in 1801 and her husband’s deteriorating health all took their toll.

Moved by the poverty and diseases all around her, Seton formed a society for the relief of poor widows with children in 1797. At the end of its first year, the society had aided 152 widows and 420 children under age 12. Seton crossed the city on foot visiting poor women and finding many of them work as laundresses.

When her husband’s health continued to decline, the couple and their oldest daughter sailed to Italy in 1803, told that a sea voyage might help him recover. But William died in Pisa. While waiting for a ship to New York, Elizabeth Seton, an Episcopalian, was offered hospitality by the Filicchis, a Catholic family, whose strong faith and piety led her to enter the Catholic church shortly after her return.

This shrine was dedicated in 1963 on the day Pope John XXIII beatified Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton.The shrine’s stained glass windows detail her life in New York as well as her initiating the Catholic parochial school system and founding the first religious order of women in America, the Sisters of Charity, both in Maryland. In 1817 she sent three of her nuns to New York to open an orphan asylum on Prince Street. The second building serves today as St. Patrick’s School in the heart of Little Italy.

Although Seton moved to Maryland with her children in 1808 and died there in 1821, her charitable influence continued in Manhattan where in 1883 the New York archdiocese secured a permanent site at 7 State Street. Known as the Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary, the former Watson Mansion offered social services and hospitality to some 60,000 Irish women who continued to pour into the immigration center at Castle Garden, in what is today Battery Park. The present shrine was dedicated in 1963 on the day Pope John XXIII beatified Seton.

After leaving the shrine, you may want to wet your whistle at Fraunces Tavern, only two blocks away on the corner of Pearl and Broad Streets. Washington thanked his generals for their service in the Revolutionary War here.

Within months of the defeated British army’s taking leave of its lost colony, life got better for New York Catholics. In 1784 the State Assembly repealed the 1700 anti-priest law.

First church

The following year a group of Catholic laymen made plans to build the city’s first Catholic church, St. Peter’s, on the corner of Barclay and Church Streets. To get there, head north on Broad Street toward Wall Street. If you go east on Wall Street, you will come to Wall and Water, site of America’s second largest slave market.

St. Peter's Church exterior“This is a moral blind spot,” said Harrington, pointing to the slave site at one end of the street and Trinity Church at the other. On any tour of Wall Street, the priest makes the slave market a prayer stop and asks: “What are our moral blind spots today?”

As you head west on Wall Street, you will recognize historic Trinity Episcopal Church, which Seton attended prior to her conversion at St. Peter’s. The laymen who created St. Peter’s in 1785 did so after obtaining five lots of the Trinity Church Farm.

To reach New York’s first parish, head into Rector Street and then north along Trinity Place, which becomes Church Street at Liberty Street. You may want to stop and view the remains of Ground Zero and the work in progress toward a new Freedom Tower as you pass between Liberty and Vesey Streets.

From its start, St. Peter’s mirrored the diversity that is commonplace among today’s New York Catholics. Its first lay board included a Portuguese merchant as well as eight English- and Irish-speakers. Many Spaniards joined the congregation. French-speaking parishioners included refugees from the 1789 slave revolt in Haiti. Among them was Pierre Toussaint, a member of the parish and a daily communicant from 1787 until his death 66 years later.

Under the watch of the third pastor, Dominican William O’Brien, St. Peter’s opened New York’s first Catholic school in 1800. The priest traveled to Mexico City and returned with $5,000 for the church as well as several paintings. The artworks adorn the new St. Peter’s, built in 1836 in Greek Revival style with six Ionic columns.

At the turn of the 19th century the parish was known for its valiant service during the yellow fever epidemics that befell the city. That same spirit of outreach persisted two centuries later when the church offered refuge and supplies to rescuers at Ground Zero. It was before the altar here that firefighters laid the body of their chaplain, Mychal Judge, on 9/11. Visitors can look to the far northwest corner of the upper church where part of the engine of one of the hijacked planes dug a small hole into the church’s roof.

The iron-beam cross from Ground Zero is now displayed on the sidewalk by St. Peter's.Two iron crossbeams -- one from One World Trade Center, the other from Six World Trade Center, were fused in the terrorist attacks. For a few years the cross occupied a corner of Ground Zero. Today it stands along the outside wall of St. Peter’s.

If your feet ache or your soul longs for a meditative stretch, spend some time in St. Peter’s remembering the tens of thousands of Catholics -- from street urchins and slaves in the 19th century to secretaries and titans of finance in the 21st -- who have availed themselves of its warmth and sanctuary.

Ready for lunch? Grab a taxi or walk four blocks north to Chambers Street and board the A-train uptown to West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village, which offers an array of eateries.

Refreshed, you can resume your tour by walking north along Sixth Avenue. You will come to St. Joseph’s Church. Built in 1829 in Greek Revival style, it is the oldest Catholic church building in the city. As Dorothy Day frequented pubs and parks in the area, it is believed she attended St. Joseph’s, as Thomas Merton may have. He lived briefly in the Village in the late 1930s. John McCloskey, pastor from 1839-41, went on to become America’s first cardinal.

The Italians

After the Irish (see related story below), the second great wave of immigrants came from Italy. In 1880 Italian immigrants surpassed 10,000 per year. By 1900 they reached 100,000 per year. The 1880 census indicated there were 44,230 Italian-born persons in the United States. In 1900 that figure stood at 484,027.

Into the flux of all these strangers in a strange land walked Frances Xavier Cabrini, the diminutive Sister of the Sacred Heart from Northern Italy. Pope Leo XIII persuaded her to sail to New York in 1889, where she and her sisters would care for orphans, visit the poor as well as those in hospitals and jails, establish their own hospital and teach adult and children’s catechetical classes.

Cabrini made 23 ocean voyages from Europe and North, Central and Latin America before her death at age 67 in Chicago in 1917. By then she had founded 67 institutions staffed by 1,500 sisters.

She had a great business sense and knew how to run a community, said Mary Elizabeth Brown, an adjunct professor of history at Marymount Manhattan College and a scholar on Italian immigration. Cabrini arrived at a time when the archbishop needed women laborers, but she managed to retain her independence, said Brown.

A mark of Cabrini’s practical nature can be seen in her opting for a black bow under the chin to secure the head garb for her sisters, rather than the wide, white starched wimple worn by most women religious.

No one knows how many hundreds of miles Cabrini and her nuns logged visiting the poor, often bringing them food and clothing. Brown is certain the saint didn’t take the trolley cars, which cost a nickel and would have been unaffordable for the sisters.

Cabrini’s name still resonates with New Yorkers familiar with Cabrini Medical Center and Mother Cabrini High School, where the saint’s body is preserved. Four years after her 1946 canonization, Pope Pius XII proclaimed Cabrini “Patroness of Immigrants.”

Two blocks south of St. Joseph’s on Carmine Street, off Bleecker Street, you can visit Our Lady of Pompeii Church, whose entrance windows depict Italian immigration from Columbus in 1492 to newcomers at Ellis Island 500 years later. Don’t miss the painting of the Holy Family eating lunch in Nazareth. Mange!

As you leave Our Lady of Pompeii, take MacDougal Street two blocks south to West Houston Street. Walk one block East to Sullivan Street and you will see the city’s first Catholic church for Italian immigrants, St. Anthony of Padua, which reopened its doors in 1866. The church contains magnificent stained glass windows depicting the lives of St. Anthony and St. Francis of Assisi. Cabrini was one of its earliest catechists.

The altar at St. Patrick's Old CathedralOld St. Pat’s

Walk one block south on Sullivan to Prince Street and head East some eight colorful blocks to Mulberry and Mott Streets where you will find St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, New York’s premier Catholic edifice from 1809 until the opening of the twin-spired Gothic Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in 1879. Old St. Pat’s was the home church for four of New York’s first five bishops -- the first bishop died in Naples while waiting for a ship to take him to New York. Before entering the church, you can learn something of its history by viewing the cemetery that borders its south side.

Pierre Toussaint was buried in the churchyard in 1853, but his body was exhumed and placed in the crypt under the high altar of the new St. Patrick’s among the deceased cardinal-archbishops of New York. This rare honor came when Cardinal John O’Connor promoted Toussaint’s cause for sainthood and after he was declared venerable in 1996.

In his lifetime, Toussaint was known as a saintly man, a renowned hairdresser and a philanthropist -- especially generous to the Catholic Orphan Asylum, located just south of the Old Cathedral on Prince Street, site of St. Patrick’s school today.

As a black man, Toussaint was barred from trolleys. He is said to have walked the streets of New York some 16 hours a day to arrive at the homes of his wealthy clients. In 1842 a white usher at St. Patrick’s insulted Toussaint, opposing his presence in the congregation. Later he received an apology from the lay board of trustees.

The Irish not only opposed blacks, but didn’t take kindly to anyone who wasn’t one of them. Not even John Dubois, the third bishop of New York, escaped their wrath. Parishioners left during his sermons, unable to understand his French-accented English. The trustees threatened to deprive him of his pay. Dubois chose to be buried outside the entry of the cathedral, noting that parishioners who had trampled on him during his episcopate (1826-42) could still do so after his death.

So desperate was Dubois for priests that within a month of Deacon John Neumann’s arrival in New York from Bohemia in 1836, Dubois ordained him here at St. Pat’s and dispatched him to Buffalo, N.Y., where he served four years before becoming a Redemptorist.

Neumann spent part of a brief novitiate at Most Holy Redeemer Church on East Third Street -- in an area of German immigrants. In 1852 he became bishop of Philadelphia, where during a span of eight years, until his death at age 48, he created more than 80 new churches, organized the parochial school system and introduced several orders of sisters into the see as well as founding his own order.

Beyond their difficulties with cultures and ethnicities not their own, the Irish themselves experienced the ire of the Nativists, American-born Protestants who feared Catholic immigrants would take their jobs. They opposed Irish rowdiness and German beer gardens, and thought Catholics profaned the Sabbath by enjoying sports and entertainment on their day off.

John Hughes, who became New York’s first archbishop, had a wall built around the church to protect it from Nativists and anti-immigrant mob violence.

The Civil War, factory accidents and maternal death at childbirth left many orphans in the 19th century. Catholic organizations had to create social services to care for their own children lest they be plucked from the street and raised as Protestants. Thus the first mission of the Sisters of Charity began as an orphanage on the cathedral grounds.

History lovers will find no better haven than the crypt at Old St. Patrick’s, which holds a labyrinth of vaults containing the bodies of prominent New York Catholic families -- including Dominic Lynch, one of those who ratified the Constitution.

If you visit on a Sunday, you can relish the cathedral’s 140-year-old Henry Erben pipe organ. You may be able to hear the liturgy celebrated in Spanish or Chinese for today’s immigrant parishioners.

The two Catholics whom Isaac Jogues found in New Amsterdam in 1643 increased to a few hundred at the time of the Revolutionary War. By 1815, the city counted 15,000 Catholics. This year the New York archdiocese marks 200 years of service to Catholics, who today number 2.5 million in the city, 1.5 million in Brooklyn and 1.4 million on Long Island.

The institution once forbidden has become a formidable institution.

Patricia Lefevere is a longtime contributor to NCR.

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The Imprint of the Irish

By the end of the Revolutionary War, some 300,000 to 500,000 Irish had come to the New World at a time when it took 70 or more days to cross the Atlantic. That number swelled to 1 million by 1845. Then the Irish famine of 1845-50 would claim a million lives, and 1.8 million Irish would set sail for North America, the majority arriving in New York.

These later arrivals were uneducated and poor, yet generous to the church once they found jobs in construction, at the docks or as domestic help. Not only did they donate to build churches, schools, orphanages and hospitals, they also gave their sons and daughters to labor in them.

But the Irish were not always welcoming to other Catholic immigrants -- the Italians, Germans, French -- and even less so to black people.

Catholic churches did not produce many abolitionists. One exception was Irish-born Fr. Thomas Farrell, pastor at St. Joseph’s in Greenwich Village around the time of the Civil War. In his 1880 will he left $5,000 to create the first black parish in the city. Farrell told Cardinal John McCloskey that if he did not accede to his wishes, the bequest would go to a Protestant denomination.

In 1883 McCloskey agreed to establish St. Benedict the Moor, the first black Catholic church north of the Mason-Dixon Line. After a sojourn in the Village, the church moved to West 51st Street in the theater district.

-- Patricia Lefevere

National Catholic Reporter June 13, 2008