As Black History Month comes to a close, it’s a good time to mention Henriette Delille (1813-1862), foundress of the second community for African-American women. (The first was the Oblates Sisters of Providence in 1829.) Born in 1813 to a white Creole and his African-American mistress, she grew up in the city’s free Black community. From an early age she was being prepared for life as a mistress for a wealthy man. But when she was eleven she met a... Read more

Today marks the death of James J. Walsh (1865-1942), physician, historian and author. Born in Pennsylvania, he studied at St. John’s College (now Fordham University) in the Bronx before joining the Jesuits. After a few years, he left and enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a medical degree. After post-doctoral studies in Europe, he worked as a neurologist in New York City, where he lived for the rest of his life. He also served as dean of... Read more

Today marks the death of Father Jean-Claude Colin (1790-1875), who in 1816 founded the Society of Mary, known as the Marists. Born in France, he grew up in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which event had devastated the French presbyterate. As seminarians, he and Jean-Claude Courveille decided to form an order that would help restore the Church in the revolution’s aftermath. Courveille believed that just as a Society dedicated to Jesus arose during the Reformation, now the time had... Read more

As an archivist, you see a lot of interesting photos. This one shows an altar built by a patient in a tubercular hospital during the early 1940’s. It was featured in the pages of The Tablet, the Brooklyn Diocese’s official newspaper. A few years later, I came across this same image in a family photo album that was missing for many years. Well, this very same picture was in the album, and it turns out that the altar was built... Read more

JOHN D. CALANDRA ITALIAN AMERICAN INSTITUTEQueens College, CUNY THE PHILIP V. CANNISTRARO SEMINAR SERIES IN ITALIAN AMERICAN STUDIES Tuesday, March 10, 2009, 6 p.m.The Crescent City Lynchings: Reconstructing the 1891 New Orleans LynchingTom SmithAfter a sensational trial, eleven Italian Americans acquitted in the murder of New Orleans police chief David Hennessy were killed in the largest group lynching in American history. The 1891 incident caused an international diplomatic conflict, heightened the association of the word “mafia” with Italian immigrants, and... Read more

The 1930’s saw priests, religious and laypeople vigorously working for social justice. In 1933 Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin started the Catholic Worker with its threefold program of a newspaper, soup kitchens and “Houses of hospitality.” The Catholic Worker was an unparalleled attempt by Catholics to live out a radically evangelical form of poverty in solidarity with the poor. Priests started labor schools to educate Catholic workers about their rights and to warn them about communism. David O’Brien calls this... Read more

Today marks the death of Ella B. Edes (1832-1916), convert, journalist and Vatican lobbyist. Born in Massachusetts, she inherited a considerable estate from her merchant father. In 1852, she converted to Catholicism. After her mother died, she moved permanently to Rome, where she got a job as secretary to Cardinal Alessandro Barnabo, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, which oversaw the Church’s missionary activity. (Until 1908, the United States was classified as mission territory.) She... Read more

Since the time of Constantine, state control of the Church has always been an issue. In France this problem was known as Gallicanism, the term being derived from the Latin for “French Church” (ecclesia gallicana). Basically, it meant that the King was the unofficial head of the Church in France, controlling all appointments and overseeing its finances. Unlike Henry VIII, the French monarch had no need to form a separate church; he already had complete control. But the nineteenth century... Read more

Today marks the death of Cardinal Rafael Merry Del Val (1865-1930), papal diplomat and cardinal. Born Rafael María José Pedro Francisco Borja Domingo Gerardo de la Santísma Trinidad Merry del Val y Zulueta in London to a Spanish diplomat father and an English mother, he lived in England until he was thirteen. Ordained in 1888, he entered the Vatican’s diplomatic service. In 1899 he was appointed head of the Academy for Noble Ecclasiastics, the school for training papal diplomats. In... Read more

This day in 1922 marks the dedication of St. Peter Claver Church, the Diocese of Brooklyn’s first African-American parish. The parish was (and is) located in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a growing center of African-American life in New York City since the First World War. Many of the first parishioners were migrants from the Jim Crow South looking for work, and a good number migrated from the West Indies. In 1920 Bishop Charles E. McDonnell appointed Father Bernard J. Quinn, a former army... Read more