December 20 marks the birth of Bishop Thomas A. Becker (1832-1898), first Bishop of Willmington (1868-1886) and sixth Bishop of Savannah (1886-1899). Unlike most of his fellow bishops, Becker was not a “cradle Catholic.” Born Thomas Baker in Pittsburgh, he became a Catholic while studying at the University of Virginia. (His parents were so mad they made him change his name to Becker.) He decided to study for the Diocese of Richmond, and was ordained in Rome in 1859. During... Read more

December 20 marks the death of Bishop John DuBois (1764-1842), New York’s third (and the only non-Irish) ordinary. A friend of the Marquis de Lafayette, he fled the French Revolution. Coming to America, he stayed with Patrick Henry, who taught him English. At that time Catholicism was a largely English and French community. When he came to New York, the Irish were making their presence felt, and they weren’t happy with a French bishop . When the trustees of St.... Read more

December 20 marks the birth of Brooklyn’s first Bishop, John Loughlin (1817-1891). Born in County Down, Ireland, on December 20, he studied for the priesthood in America. In 1840, he was ordained by Bishop John Hughes at Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mott Street. A capable administrator, within a few years he was rector of the cathedral and Vicar General of the New York Archdiocese, which then included most of the state and northern New Jersey. When Long Island was... Read more

Today marks the birth of William Howard Bishop (1885-1953), a Harvard-educated Maryland priest who founded the Home Missioners of America (better known as Glenmary) in 1939, for the purpose of evangelizing rural America. Or as he put it, that “the backwoodsmen, the mountaineers, the farm tenants, sharecroppers and day workers might one day eat the Bread of Truth.” Just as the Paulists (founded in 1858) aimed at evangelizing the larger culture, and Maryknoll (founded 1911) focused on overseas missions, Bishop... Read more

I knew that Betty Smith had Brooklyn roots, but until recently I didn’t know that she grew up a German Catholic in Williamsburg. Born Elizabeth Wehner in 1896, she describes her home parish in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (still a great book, by the way): “Francie thought it was the most beautiful church in Brooklyn. It was made of old gray stone and had twin spires that rose cleanly into the sky, high above the tallest tenements. Inside, the... Read more

If you study Church History long enough, you find a lot of interesting trivia that never fits into books or lectures. One of them is the history of clerical garb. Many young priests today tend to be more traditional, and it’s not unusual to find some sporting a cassock, a biretta, or even the old vestments known as “fiddlebacks.” In doing so, they point back to a period when this was the norm. But for most of the 1800’s, Catholic... Read more

It was twenty years ago in June that Pope John Paul II canonized 117 Vietnamese Martyrs. My interest in the Vietnamese Martyrs started about that time when I read a book on St. Theophane Venard (left), a French missionary executed in Vietnam in 1861. I still remember one of the lines I read in that book. Just before his execution, writing to his father back in France, St. Theophane wrote: A slight sabre-cut will separate my head from my body,... Read more

On December 19, 1875, Transfiguration Church in Williamsburg was dedicated. Founded in an area originally known as Wheat Hill, Father John Fagan celebrated the first Mass in a carpenter’s shop on Hooper Street in 1874. (He wanted to name the parish St. Sylvester after his friend and old boss Father Sylvester Malone, but the Bishop put the kibosh on that!) Founded to meet the needs of Williamsburg’s growing Catholic population, for many years it was a predominantly Irish parish. In... Read more

The last few months have seen two great books on the English Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins: a fictionalized account by Ron Hansen, and a biography by Paul Mariani. I’ve always found Hansen’s books a pleasure to read, and this is no exception. I knew of Paul Mariani as a poet and literary biographer, and I really liked Thirty Days, about his experience of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. I’ve been a fan of Hopkins since I read him... Read more

Many years ago, I came across this quote from Cardinal Newman from A Grammar of Assent. He talks here about how the Classics take on a deeper meaning as we get older: Let us consider, too, how differently young and old are affected by the words of some classic author, such as Homer or Horace. Passages, which to a boy are but rhetorical common-places, neither better nor worse than a hundred others which any clever writer might supply, which he... Read more