This Day in Brooklyn Catholic History

On this day in 1891, the First Mass was celebrated at Blessed Sacrament Church in Brooklyn’s Cypress Hills section. The Mass was held in the hall adjoining the Lafayette Hotel located at Cresecent and Fulton Streets. Before then, the nearest parish to Cypress Hills was St. Malachy’s in East New York, which the parish history tells us was “overcrowded and difficult to reach in bad weather.” Blessed Sacrament was composed mainly of Irish and Germans who had moved along the railroad line out of the borough’s older neighborhoods like downtown Brooklyn and Williamsburg. A school was started in 1914, with 240 students and three Sisters of St. Joseph. By the late 1950’s, the school would have well over a thousand students. Today the parish and school continue to thrive as it ministers to a largely Hispanic community. And today the school continues to educate the children of immigrants, just as it did at the start. At the time of the parish’s fiftieth anniversary in 1941, Monsignor James H. Griffiths said:

Our Churches were not built by princes or endowed by noblemen. They were not constructed by state architects by means of grants derived through taxes from government treasuries. Our sacred edifices were raised to heaven by the free will offerings of artisans and ditch-diggers and hod-carriers and charwomen— the true noblemen and noblewomen of God.