Today marks the death of Cardinal Aloisius Muench (1889-1962), professor, bishop, and papal diplomat. Born in Milwaukee to German immigrants, he studied for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee at St. Francis Seminary. Ordained in 1913, he went on to earn a doctorate a the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, followed by post-doctoral studies in France and England. He then returned to his alma mater as professor and later as rector. In 1935 he was named the third Bishop of Fargo. In... Read more

Yesterday was the Feast of SS. Cyril & Methodius, and today in 1903 marks the death of Father Joseph Dabrowski , who in 1885 founded SS. Cyril & Methodius Seminary to train Polish priests for work in America. For Poles, the nineteenth century is known as the “century of sadness.” Poland was divided between the Prussians, the Russians, and the Austrians. Father Dabrowski grew up in the Russian partition, and studied at the University of Lublin. He was forced to... Read more

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... Read more

Today marks the death of Nicholas Wiseman (1802-1865), first Archbishop of Westminster and the first resident Cardinal in England for almost three hundred years. In 1850 he oversaw the reestablishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales. Under Henry VIII, Roman Catholic dioceses (the most famous being Canterbury) became Anglican. Rather than using the original names, the new R.C. dioceses received different names. So the head diocese under Wiseman was set up at Westminster in London rather than... Read more

Put him in a stained glass window! This window, located in the sacristy of St. Thomas the Apostle Church, Woodhaven, was installed during the 1960’s. At the time, Bryan J. McEntegart was Bishop of Brooklyn (1957-1968). Bishop McEntegart can be seen on the right, alongside of Christ and Pope Paul VI. The Bishop’s reaction to the window has not been recorded. Read more

There’s never been a newspaper quite like The American Catholic Tribune, an independent Catholic newspaper published between 1886 and 1897. What made it unique was that it was a paper published for African-American Catholics, by African-American Catholics. The driving force behind the paper was a Daniel A. Rudd (1854-1933), a former slave from Bardstown, a heavily Catholic community in Kentucky. As a young man, Rudd moved to Ohio, where he started the paper. He stated his goal in the paper’s... Read more

Today marks pop culture icon and lifelong Catholic Florence Henderson’s seventy-fifth birthday. Born Florence Agnes Henderson in Owensboro, Kentucky, she studied at St. Francis Academy, a local girls’ high school run by the Sisters of St. Benedict of Ferdinand. After graduation she went to New York, making her Broadway debut in 1952. (No information is available for this photo, taken during the years when she was appearing on stage and television.) But it was with the role of Carol Brady... Read more

On February 14, 1898, in Spanish-controlled Havana harbor, the U.S. battleship Maine blew up, the event that triggered the Spanish-American War. Research now shows that the explosion was an accident, but a war-hungry American public was all too eager to accept the conspiracy theory hatched by the jingoist “Yellow Press.” One of the forgotten heroes of that tragic event was a Roman Catholic Chaplain assigned to the ship, Father John P. Chidwick (1863-1935). The Army & Navy Journal later said... Read more

JOHN D. CALANDRA ITALIAN AMERICAN INSTITUTEQueens College, CUNY THE PHILIP V. CANNISTRARO SEMINAR SERIES IN ITALIAN AMERICAN STUDIES Wednesday, February 25, 2009, 6 p.m.Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy AbroadMark Choate, Brigham Young UniversityBetween 1880 and 1915, thirteen million Italians left their homeland, launching the largest emigration from any country in recorded world history. As the newly-created Italian state struggled to adapt to the exodus, it pioneered the establishment of a “global nation,” an Italy abroad cemented by ties of... Read more

Willa Cather once wrote that the story of the Catholic Church in the American Southwest “was the most interesting of all its stories.” She was particularly interested in the figure of Santa Fe’s first Archbishop, Jean-Baptiste Lamy (1814-1888), whom she described as “well bred and distinguished… there was something about him both fearless and fine.” Cather renamed Lamy Father LaTour and made him the hero of her 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop, which recounts the story of how... Read more