“They Went a Long Time without Seeing a Priest”

The first Catholic Church built in the State of New Jersey was St. John’s, Trenton, in 1814. However, the oldest Catholic community in the state is St. Joseph’s Church. Located in Echo Lake (once known as Macopin), it dates back to 1765, but it didn’t get its own building until 1829.

The Freeman’s Journal, a nineteenth century Catholic newspaper, commented that St. Joseph’s was “one of the oldest and most interesting Catholic congregations in the whole country.” The first settlement was by German Catholic immigrants before the American Revolution, and they often went “a long time without seeing a priest.” During the 1770’s, priests from Philadelphia visited them once or twice a year.

Then they went for more than thirty years without any priest. By the 1820’s, some traveling Irish priests were celebrating Mass in local homes on a regular basis. It was the people who kept the faith alive in the interim. Father Joseph Flynn, who wrote a history of New Jersey Catholicism in the late 1800’s, interviewed some of these early Catholics. Among them was a Mrs. Littlel, who recalled that her father’s job was to check the credentials of visiting priests “so as to secure the faithful few from impostors.” She remembered “Old Mrs. Seehulster,” who was

A remarkable woman—a regular missionary; every Sunday she would gather the Catholics in Dominick Merrion’s house, say the rosary, distribute holy water, and teach the children catechism.

She also recalled the first she saw Mass celebrated in Macopin:

Many of the young Catholics who had never seen mass celebrated, and Protestants who viewed the whole thing as witchcraft, crowded and hustled the old folks who were kneeling around the priest. The altar was a chest—we had no bureaus in those days.

St. Joseph’s didn’t get a resident priest until nearly twenty years after it was erected. The story of Macopin’s Catholics is just one example of the numerous communities throughout the nation that practiced and preserved their religion in the absence of a priest. Every diocese, and just about every parish, could furnish similar stories from their early histories.