St. Joseph’s Church, Brooklyn

Since March is dedicated to St. Joseph, this is a good chance to highlight a local parish dedicated in his name. St. Joseph parish, located in Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights section, was founded in 1853 to meet the needs of Irish immigrants flocking to the area in large numbers. Soon it became what today we call a “megachurch.” In its heyday during the early 1900’s (when this photo was taken), a handful of Josephite nuns ran a parochial school of nearly two thousand students, a high school, and an orphanage. Ten priests served the parish. The pastor, Monsignor William McGuirl, was the first Catholic Chaplain for the New York Police Department. Many Black Catholics worshipped there before they got their own parish. St. Joseph’s parishioners included both John Newton, a former Civil War general (on the Union side) and Enoch Louis Lowe, a former Maryland governor who had to leave the state during the war because of his pro-Confederate sympathies. Another parishioner and school alumnus, Francis X. Ford, joined Maryknoll, became a Bishop and was martyred in China in 1952. (Bishop Ford High School in Park Slope was named for him in 1962.) St. Joseph’s College, the first Catholic women’s college on Long Island, held its baccalaureate Masses there for many years. Archbishop Thomas E. Molloy, Brooklyn’s third Bishop (and first president of the college) was buried out of the parish in 1956. Cathedral College, the college seminary founded in 1914 across the street from the parish, held its opening school year Mass there until it moved to Douglaston in 1967. Over the years, the neighborhood has gone through several demographic shifts, and the school closed in the 1970’s, but the parish remains true to its basic purpose: to welcome the newcomer.