Isaac Hecker: Who He is, Why He Matters

December 18, 2018 By Pat McNamara

The Paulist Fathers were founded by Servant of God Isaac Hecker in 1858 as the first religious community of Catholic priests in the United States. Tonight at their motherhouse, St. Paul the Apostle Church in Manhattan, they are celebrating a Mass to begin a year-long commemoration of the bicentennial of their founder’s birth on December 18, 1819. The Paulists have long been one of my favorite religious communities with their emphasis on outreach, reconciliation and ecumenism. They have been aptly... Read more

Forgotten Catholic Poets: John Bannister Tabb (1845-1909)

December 14, 2018 By Pat McNamara

It’s hard to imagine just how profoundly different Catholics in 1800’s America felt from their neighbors. Much of this had to do with anti-Catholicism, which led them, writes Charles Morris, to “execute a remarkable emotional withdrawal from secular America.” As a result, Morris notes, there arose a “parallel of Catholic organizations of every variety”: academic societies, publishing houses, lawyers’ and doctors’ guilds, to name a few. Catholics even had their own separate literary world, replete with “Catholic novelists” and “Catholic... Read more

Who’s It Named For? Collins Hall, Fordham University, Bronx, New York

December 13, 2018 By Pat McNamara

At so many Catholic colleges, we pass by buildings named for people associated with the school, and yet we never bother to ask about the significance of that name. I for one have certainly been guilty of that! During my undergraduate years at Fordham’s “green and gothic” Bronx campus, I passed by Collins Hall every day, then home to the school theater as well as the Theology and Philosophy Departments. (Today it houses the Theater Department.) Never did I stop... Read more

Who’s Buried in Catholic Cemeteries: Gary Cooper

December 12, 2018 By Pat McNamara

Gary Cooper wasn’t raised Catholic, but his wife Veronica and daughter Maria were devout Catholics. “In the mid to late fifties,” his daughter Maria recalls, “my father’s conversion to Catholicism started silently. He never discussed much about it but simply started joining us for Mass more often.” On April 9, 1959, two years before his death of cancer, Cooper was formally received into the Catholic Church at Beverly Hills’s Church of the Good Shepherd. His daughter recalled that in his... Read more

The Unwilling Catholic: General William Tecumseh Sherman

December 11, 2018 By Pat McNamara

Not long before his death, General William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891) told an interviewer: “My family is strongly Roman Catholic. I am not.” Technically, that wasn’t true. Born Tecumseh Sherman, his father died when he was age nine, one of eleven children, leaving the family in dire straits. The family of Ohio Senator Thomas Ewing, nearby neighbors, took him in and raised him as their foster child. Mrs. Ewing, a devout Catholic, had one condition: the boy had to be baptized... Read more

Scandal and Renewal at Gethsemani Abbey

December 10, 2018 By Pat McNamara

In 1948, the book world’s surprise hit was The Seven Storey Mountain, the autobiography of a Trappist monk named Thomas Merton. That year also marked the centennial of his monastery, Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey. Over the next few years, Merton’s writings would attract unprecedented numbers of applicants to the monastery. As the year closed, Merton praised “the great sea of graces that was flowing down on Gethsemani.” But during the abbey’s early years, its survival seemed doubtful. Lack of... Read more

Catholics in the Movies: Raoul Walsh (1887-1980)

December 9, 2018 By Pat McNamara

He was one of Golden Age Hollywood’s most prolific figures, its premier action director. Over fifty years he directed the likes of Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, and James Cagney. He gave young Marion Morrison his first starring role (and stage name). Raoul Walsh never won an Oscar, but he more than held his own with the era’s best directors. Yet the last thing he wanted, biographer Marilyn Ann Moss notes, was to be called an artist. Born Albert... Read more

Brooklyn College Dedicated to the Immaculate Conception, 1915

December 8, 2018 By Pat McNamara

Right Rev. George W. Mundelein, “New Cathedral College of the Immaculate Conception,” The Brooklyn Eagle, September 7, 1915, 9. The Right Rev. Bishop McDonnell will bless the completed wing of the new Cathedral College of the Immaculate Conception, being built at Atlantic and Washington Avenues, tomorrow afternoon at 3 o’clock. He will be assisted by the Right Rev. George W. Mundelein, Auxiliary Bishop of Brooklyn, and the professors of the new Brooklyn preparatory seminary, the Rev. Dr. Anthony Reichert, the Rev. Francis... Read more

Before Alcoholics Anonymous: Father Mathew and the Pledge

December 7, 2018 By Pat McNamara

When I was growing up in Queens, I had a number of friends whose Irish-born parents had as teens taken “the Pledge,” a vow to abstain from alcohol until age eighteen. Some kept it their whole lives. I found this fascinating, given the fact that alcohol plays such an undeniably large role in Irish/Irish-American culture. Yet outside of the Islamic world, Ireland actually has the highest rate of abstinence from alcohol. One fifth of the adult population refrains completely. This... Read more

Brooklyn Catholic Architect Receives Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal, 1884

December 5, 2018 By Pat McNamara

Patrick C. Keely Receives Laetare Medal, March 30, 1884, The Catholic Review, April 5, 1884 The Laetare Medal of the University of Notre Dame was conferred last Sunday on the great Catholic architect, Mr. Patrick Charles Keely of Brooklyn. No more honorable selection could have been made, nor one that would certainly reflect back on the University conferring it an honor fully corresponding to that which it gave. All public testimonies of honor, such as this, ought to have a mutual... Read more