THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF HOLY CROSS

Irish-born Archbishop John Hughes created Manhattan’s Holy Cross Parish in 1852 to serve the thousands of Irish Catholics moving north of lower Manhattan into what became known as Longacre Square (later Times Square) and the developing neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. Holy Cross maintained a strong Irish American identity into the mid twentieth century and its path charted the transformation of the disciplined folk piety created by the “devotional Revolution” in Ireland in the nineteenth century into an American Catholicism dominated by Irish-American clergy that sought to defend communalistic Catholic distinctiveness amid the rapid urban growth and burgeoning individualistic capitalism of an historically Protestant nation. Since World War II as Hell’s Kitchen has diversified and in recent decades gentrified amid urban inequality, the parish has served a racially, ethnically, and economically diverse flock that includes Hell’s Kitchen residents and commuters and travellers coming through the adjoining Port Authority Terminal transit hub.

In 1852 Archbishop Hughes appointed Fr. Joseph Anthony Lutz, who would become the parish’s first pastor, to lead the effort to organize Holy Cross Church, one of seventeen parishes that Hughes would create in midtown and upper Manhattan between 1840 and 1860 as New York City and its burgeoning Catholic population, largely recent Irish and German immigrants, burst out of overcrowded lower Manhattan districts. From 1840 to 1860, largely due to the arrival of Irish refugees fleeing the Great Famine, 1845-1849, but also due to on-going German immigration, the numbers of New York City’s Catholics expanded from 80-90,000 to 300-400,000. Holy Cross represented a northward extension of Antebellum New York’s predominantly Irish Catholicism, which had taken root in twenty-two territorial parishes largely identical with Irish identity. After early conflicts within downtown parishes between Irish and German Catholics, German Catholics were accommodated by 1865 in seven national parishes. On November 25, 1852, Bishop Richard Vincent Whelan of Wheeling, West Virginia, laid the cornerstone for the church to be built on W. 42^nd Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues and Hughes preached the sermon. Offering services out of a temporary chapel on W. 42^nd St., Lutz oversaw fund-raising, including a “Benevolent Lares’ Fair” that was advertised in the city’s Irish Catholic press. At the same time the apparently hasty construction of the church began, in line with Hughes’ desire to respond to the city’s rapidly growing Catholic population by putting up “plain and solid” churches designed more out of “pressing want than any aesthetic idea,” as Gilded Age New York church historian John Gilmary Shea expressed it.

It is unclear why Hughes appointed Fr. Lutz, a German, to pastor Holy Cross, which would quickly develop an Irish congregation and identity; in any case, an Irish assistant priest, the Rev. Patrick Mahony, would serve along with Lutz when the church opened in 1854. Perhaps Hughes chose Lutz because he spoke good English, which he had acquired over several decades in working as a priest in the United States not exclusively with German Catholic communities but rather in a variety of capacities, initially in the diocese of St. Louis. After Lutz’s arrival in New York in 1848, Bishop Hughes designated him pastor of St. John the Baptist, a German parish on W. 30^th St., where he served until 1852 and his appointment to organize Holy Cross further uptown. Lutz was available for Holy Cross because Hughes had placed the German parishioners at St. John’s, resistant to the Irish bishop’s efforts to extinguish lay trustee control, under interdict. Familiar with traditions of robust lay church governance (kirchenrat) in Germany and drawing on precedents of extensive lay participation in parish governance by American Catholics in the early nineteenth century, German parishioners particularly resisted Hughes’ efforts to do away with lay control. Drawing on the embattled Catholic experience in his native Ireland as American Catholics faced a rising tide of nativism and anti-Catholicism, Hughes argued that defiant lay trustees were acting like Protestants and harming the Catholic Church. In the early 1840s, Hughes virtually eliminated the independent authority of lay trustees in New York, with power over parish property and finances concentrated instead in the hands of the pastor and the bishop. Hughes’ actions were part of a larger nineteenth century effort to strengthen clerical and episcopal authority and standardize liturgical practices and to conform local Catholic cultures to Tridentine (Council of Trent) Catholicism and strengthen hierarchical church authority, including that of the bishops and the papacy. In Ireland, from where Bishop Hughes and many Holy Cross parishioners came, this took the form of a post-famine “devotional revolution” that standardized Irish Catholic worship in sacramental life within parishes rather than in traditional Gaelic Catholic practices of pilgrimages to sacred sites and devotions at holy wells.

As the building neared completion, the Church of the Holy Cross was formally dedicated on December 17, 1854. The Rev. William Starrs, Vicar General of the diocese, celebrated the “Solemn High Mass” with the assistance of Fr. Lutz. The Rev. Patrick Moriarty, a Dublin-born Augustinian friar who led Villanova University and who would clash in the 1860s with the bishop of Philadelphia, James F. Wood, over Moriarty’s vocal support for the controversial Irish nationalist Fenian movement, preached at the formal dedication Mass. In the late 1870s John Gilmary Shea recalled the church’s original brick building, which was heavily damaged by lightning in 1867, as constructed in Roman style, one hundred feet in depth and seventy-five feet in width, with a seating capacity of fourteen to fifteen hundred. Shea remembered that the original church lacked “elaborate ornamentation, but was grand and imposing; the tall spire, towering one hundred and sixty feet, making it a conspicuous object” looming over the still quite modest and low-flung Midtown environs that were filling in with Irish immigrants. Holy Cross’s Irish identity took fuller shape in the next several months as Hughes transferred Fr. Lutz and replaced him with clergy of Irish extraction, bringing in the Rev. Thomas Martin, O.S.D. from St. Brigid’s, a downtown Irish parish, to administer the nascent parish and then appointing Patrick McCarthy as rector in November 1855. John Gilmary Shea quotes Archbishop Hughes’ description of Fr. Martin’s parish-building efforts at Holy Cross, a characterization that highlights the importance of effective pastoral leadership but also hints at Hughes’ understanding of the crucial importance of ethnic consciousness and solidarity in parish community formation.  “He [Fr. Martin] went to the then hardly formed congregation on Forty-second Street, where, without haranguing, he began silently and noiselessly to work to show them their way through their difficulties until the people began to understand themselves and to be a congregation—a numerous congregation.” Participating in Archbishop Hughes’ effort to create a Catholic school system separate from and parallel to the public school system, by 1857 Holy Cross supported two schools, one for males with 160 students, and another in the basement for females with 200 students.

Holy Cross was one of eight Irish parishes formed in New York City in the 1850s, corresponding with the burst of Irish immigration to the United States that occurred in the wake of the famine. By the end of the Civil War in 1865, twenty-three of New York City’s thirty-two parishes (72%) were Irish-identified. In his studies of Irish Catholics in New York City, Jay P. Dolan has argued that while a substantial portion of the Irish immigrant population in the city was unchurched, perhaps half of the population attended Mass regularly, filling parishes to overflowing at early Sunday Masses. At the Solemn Mass later in the morning, unskilled Irish immigrants filled the galleries while Irish skilled laborers and professionals sat in pews for which they had paid pew rents. Pew rents and fees for seating or even admission to Mass became standard in New York, a crucial means by which parishes raised funds. By the 1880s, those who sat in the galleries for the early Masses at Holy Cross were expected to pay 5 cents while those who sat on the main floor of the church were to pay 10 cents. Seats at the High Mass cost a dime more, ensuring a degree of social stratification by hour on Sunday morning. The early Masses tended to last a half hour, with priests celebrating Mass in Latin facing the altar with back to the congregation and assisted by altar boys. Special weekday evening services occurred during the Lenten season, with such services held at Holy Cross on Tuesday evenings during Lent in 1857. The pomp of liturgy at Irish parishes, particularly during key moments in the liturgical calendar, contrasted markedly with the squalid conditions of Irish neighborhoods such as Five Points and Hell’s Kitchen. Sermons offered the opportunity for instruction in Romanized doctrine. For instance, the New York Herald noted that Fr. McCarthy delivered an “eloquent discourse on the Immaculate Conception” on that feast day at Holy Cross in December 1866, twelve years after Pius IX had pronounced the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854. The parish’s choir and the “children of the sodalities” had preceded the Mass with a solemn procession and hymns. As the transatlantic Irish “devotional revolution” took root in New York under the direction of Bishop and then Archbishop (in 1850) John Hughes at parishes that included Holy Cross, confession and the reception of communion became more frequent, funeral Masses supplemented but did not replace wakes, and confraternities cultivated devotions to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Confraternity of the Sacred Heart. Holy Cross’s sacramental register from the 1850s documents scores of Irish surnamed infants baptized by Frs. Lutz and McCarthy, sometimes only a day or two after birth, according with the era’s high infant mortality and the then-prevalent Catholic notion that the souls of infants who died before baptism entered a “limbo” short of heaven. In the transition from the mid to the late nineteenth century, predominant images of Irish and Irish-American priesthood transitioned from heroic images of ascetic priests serving the sick and poor to “priest-builders,” “brick-and-mortar priests” constructing large churches and parish plants.

  It is highly possible that Holy Cross parishioners participated in the July 1863 Draft Riots, in which Manhattan’s Irish Catholics took out their rage at Protestant, Republican, and African American targets that for them represented abolitionism, the unjustness of the war’s toll on the Irish, and the purported subjection of Irish Democratic laborers to the nativist Republicans’ agenda of racial equality. Nine blocks south of Holy Cross parish, at W. 31^st and 9^th Avenue, the County Kildare-born pastor of St. Michael Parish, Arthur J. Donnelly, dissuaded a mob that probably included some of his parishioners from burning down a Presbyterian Church across the street. The grateful Presbyterian minister gifted St. Michael’s oak chairs that would be used in St. Michael’s sanctuary for decades afterwards. A number of city priests had similarly talked down mobs, including a priest from the Church of the Transfiguration on Mott Street who helped avert the lynching of an African American family, and Isaac Hecker and the Paulists, who spent all night seeking to counsel Irish Catholics they knew away from violence. Meanwhile Irish Catholic laborers lynched African Americans in a number of midtown and downtown locales, including on W. 27^th St. Irish Catholic rioters took refuge in barricades they constructed on Ninth Avenue, from 32^nd to 43^rd streets, a mere half-block from the church on 42^nd street. Across midtown, heeding the request of New York Governor Horatio Seymour, a Peace Democrat, an ailing Archbishop Hughes on July 17th belatedly spoke to a crowd from his residence at 36^th and Madison Street, requesting, amid the crowd’s occasional interruption with racial epithets, that “the disturbances be stopped, for the sake of religion and the honor of Ireland.”

It is likely that Holy Cross parishioners were also among the crowds of Irish Catholics, many of them from Hell’s Kitchen, who thronged Eighth Avenue from 21^st to 33^rd Streets as Irish Protestant Orangemen paraded on July 12, 1871. William M. “Boss” Tweed, Tammany Hall, and city and state authorities had reversed a previous ban on the Orange Parade under pressure from Protestant New Yorkers who feared the growing influence of Irish Catholicism and Irish nationalism, including Fenianism. More than sixty died after militia opened fire on the crowd at 24^th Street, in what became another signal event in Irish Catholic consciousness in nineteenth century New York City.

The midtown Irish parish faced a significant challenge several years after the Draft Riots when lightning in an afternoon thunderstorm severely damaged the church’s steeple on June 18, 1867. Highlighting its fears of further Irish Catholic urban disorder, The New York Times reported that “A roundsman and a section of men from the Twenty-second precinct were soon on the ground and preserved order, keeping the crowd back from the vicinity of the church.” With the remaining structure found to be poorly constructed and physically unsound, Fr. McCarthy decided to replace the existing structure with a new church. Employing a fund-raising method that would be used by other Irish parishes in the city, parishioners contributed to a “New Holy Cross Church Debt Paying Association,” with respective parishioners’ weekly payments announced at Sunday Masses. Several years after the new church was dedicated on the Feast of St. Joseph on May 7, 1870, a parish committee seeking further means to defray the building cost held a benefit at Lyric Hall several blocks away on Sixth Avenue offering a “Panoramic view of Ireland: its scenery, cities, churches, & c.” The benefit was skillfully framed to appeal to the world view of Irish immigrants and their children, for whom a sense of exile from and longing for Ireland would remain a key mental and cultural framework until the early twentieth century. Gilded Age lay New York City church historian John Gilmary Shea described the new Holy Cross Church as “a spacious, cruciform building, in the transition style of Byzantine…In construction it is one of the most solid and substantial churches in the city.”

An Irish Catholic sensibility synthesizing the continued resonance of Irish nationalism with navigation of the inequities of New York City’s Gilded Age capitalistic order characterized the lengthy (thirty-seven years) pastorate of Charles McCready, who became rector at Holy Cross in September 1877. Born in Letterkenny, Ulster, in 1837, McCready began studies for the priesthood in Ireland at Maynooth but came to the United States in 1864, where he completed his seminary studies at Mount Saint Mary’s, Emmitsburg, Maryland. New York Archbishop John McCloskey ordained McCready in Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1866.

Shaped like many of his parishioners by the searing experience of the famine which occurred during his boyhood years and by the on-going struggle against British rule, McCready along with many Irish-born clergy and laity was an ardent supporter of Irish nationalist causes, a means of expressing an exile’s longing for Ireland and of constructing an Irish national consciousness within a community of Irish and Irish Americans in the United States.

The Ulster-born McCready, rector from 1877 until 1913, was recruited to New York by Dr. Edward McGlynn, who would draw international attention as the fiery rector of St. Stephen’s Church on E. 28th St., where McCready initially served him as assistant. In 1887, Archbishop Michael A. Corrigan removed McGlynn as rector of St. Stephen when he refused to repudiate his endorsement of anti-monopolist Henry George’s single tax doctrine that sought to redress the inequalities created by Gilded Age capitalism. After McGlynn refused to report to Rome, church authorities excommunicated him. In 1894, two years after the Vatican’s apostolic delegate, Francesco Satolli, lifted McGlynn’s excommunication, the radical Irish-American priest celebrated Christmas Mass at Holy Cross, pastored by his long-time friend, Charles McCready.

In the early 1880s, Holy Cross’s northern boundaries reached 46^th St., beyond which Sacred Heart on W. 51^st (established in 1876) served Irish Catholics in the northern reaches of Hell’s Kitchen. Below Holy Cross’s southern periphery at W. 38^th, St. Michael’s on W. 31^st served Irish Catholics in the southern stretches of the neighborhood. German Catholics in Midtown West worshipped at St. Francis of Assisi and St. John the Baptist in the West 30s and after 1858 at Assumption Parish on 49^th St. On the northern fringe of Hell’s Kitchen, the Paulists operated St. Paul the Apostle (founded in 1858) at W. 59^th and 9^th Ave.

McCready complained bitterly to the chancery and to his parishioners when a new territorial parish on W. 40^th St., St. Raphael’s, was created for Irish Catholics living west of 10^th Avenue. A 1902 parish history explained what McCready viewed as the injustice of the division, which he had protested in vain in letters to the chancery. “For three-fifths were taken from Holy Cross, and two fifths from St. Michael’s, a larger parish...the church was located nine blocks from St. Michael’s, and two from Holy Cross, and placed within one hundred feet of Holy Cross boundary.” For decades after the division, priests from the adjoining parishes competed to offer the sacraments to Hell’s Kitchen Irish affected by the boundary change.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, New York City parishes were organized territorially or in ‘national parishes’ that emphasized ethnic and racial homogeneity, unlike the city’s parishes early in the nineteenth century—most notably the city’s first Catholic parish, St. Peter’s Church, dedicated in 1786-- that were composed of diverse ethnic groups and racially mixed congregations. In 1898, St. Benedict the Moor, following the northward movement of African Americans in Manhattan, moved from lower Manhattan to W. 53^rd St. Over the next few decades, further Catholic diversification would occur in Hell’s Kitchen as immigrants from additional ethnic Catholic constituencies found employment along or near the Hudson River docks. The new Catholic congregations included an Italian parish, St. Clare’s, on W. 36^th in 1903; a  Polish parish, St. Clemens Mary, established on W. 40^th in the early 1910s; and a Belgian parish, St. Adalbert’s, on W. 47^th in 1917. The construction of the Lincoln Tunnel further reconfigured Hell’s Kitchen Catholicism in the 1930s. The new tunnel adjoined St. Raphael’s, taking out a significant portion of its territory, and St. Clare’s was demolished. In 1974, St. Raphael’s became a Croatian national parish, the Church of Sts. Cyril and Methodius and St. Raphael.

Fr. Francis Duffy, pastor at Holy Cross from 1920 to 1932, drew national fame as chaplain for the U.S. Army’s 69th Regiment in World War I (Pat O’Brien would portray Fr. Duffy in the 1940 film, The Fighting 69th). Over the course of his career, Duffy sought to reconcile ‘Americanism’ with Catholicism. Prior to his appointment at Holy Cross, Duffy edited an innovative and liberal theological journal, the New York Review, which was shuttered by the archdiocese after Pope Pius X’s 1907 condemnation of the heresy of ‘modernism.’ As Holy Cross pastor, Duffy ministered not only to the Irish American longshoremen of Hell’s Kitchen but also to the fourth estate workers around Times Square. Duffy received special dispensation from the Vatican to offer a Printer’s Mass at 2:30 AM on Sunday mornings for nocturnal laborers of the New York Times, Daily News, Daily Mirror, and Herald Tribune. During his time at Holy Cross, Fr. Duffy helped to author Catholic Democratic presidential candidate and New York Governor Al Smith’s impassioned defense of the ability of American Catholics to serve in public office against those who charged that fealty to Rome rendered Catholics incapable of good republican citizenship and responsible office-holding in a famous exchange with Charles Marshall in the Atlantic Monthly in 1927. Smith and Duffy’s rejoinder to Marshall was largely viewed as successful, but Smith would lose the 1928 presidential election to Herbert Hoover. Governor Smith remained a friend of the parish, attending the December 10, 1933, installation Mass for a new Aeolian-Skinner organ at Holy Cross (the organ would be removed for restoration in 2009 and return in 2019).

Msgr. Joseph McCaffrey, pastor at Holy Cross from 1932 until 1968, simultaneously served for many years as chaplain of the New York City Police Department. McCaffrey’s prominent voice represented an Irish American Catholic stance on the evolving urban landscape of New York City, an outspoken perspective on issues such as communism; burlesque houses, obscenity, and smut in Times Square; crime control; juvenile delinquency; blight; and urban renewal. Like many ethnic Catholic parishes in Northeastern and Midwestern cities in the early to mid twentieth century, Holy Cross was losing its traditional parishioners by the 1920s and 30s as Irish Americans moved from Manhattan out to New York City’s outer boroughs and its burgeoning suburbs. In 1935 Fr. Joseph McCaffrey initiated what would become the parish’s most popular ministry, one with significance far beyond Hell’s Kitchen, the Perpetual Novena to Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal. With a live broadcast on Mondays at 1:15 PM on radio station WHN, the Novena grew exponentially, eliciting massive number of listeners as well as worshippers who came to the church on W. 42^nd to participate in person. By 1942, the Novena attracted around 20,000 participants to the church each Monday, with nine services that began at 11:10 AM and concluded at 9:10 PM.  Seven years into the ministry, McCaffrey proudly noted that “more than 4,735,485 persons have made this Novena in this church.” The pastor further explained that the radio broadcasts dramatically expanded the range of the devotion and the circumstances in which the faithful, including the ill and disabled, could seek Marian intercession. “Countless others, in hospitals, in sanitariums, in sick rooms at home, have been enabled to participate in it.” McCaffrey believed that 300 churches in the metropolitan area had been thus inspired to initiate “similar devotions. And it has brought the conversion of more than 500 non-Catholics.”

The Victory Chapel was opened on April 22, 1943, in the middle of World War II, in the lower church (today’s basement) with McCaffrey presiding. An estimated 500 persons attended the opening, many of them relatives of those serving in the Armed Services. In his dedication sermon, the New York Times reported, McCaffrey offered prayers for victory and peace and denounced “the philosophy of hatred and revenge.”

A 1952 parish history notes that during World War II the chapel “was a special place of prayer where every mother could come and look upon it as though it were ‘her’ chapel,-could envision there the name of her son upon a flag, a banner or a plaque, and feel united to him in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, for it was ‘his’ chapel too.” During the war, more than 15,000 names were enrolled in the Victory Chapel. Gold Stars would eventually be placed next to the names of those died in the war.

On Armistice Day, November 10, 1946, the Victory Chapel was converted into the Gold Star Chapel of Peacetime. The 1952 parish history noted that this was “a permanent ‘memorial’ dedicated to prayer for the souls of our American Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines, who gave their lives for our country and for us.” During the immediate postwar years, people visited the shrine day and night to light candles for the “repose of the souls” of the soldiers, sailors, and marines who had died in World War II.

In the 1970s or 1980s, while Msgr. Robert Rapplyea was pastor, the Gold Star Chapel of Peacetime was moved into the upper church into the area it currently occupies next to the Sacristy and was converted into the Gold Star Peace Shrine. This area had previously housed the baptismal font. The Gold Star Peace Shrine includes a Book of Honor listing the names of more than 3800 who gave the ultimate sacrifice as well as those listed as Missing in Action in World Wars I and II and the Korean and Vietnam Wars.   

Holy Cross transitioned with dramatic shifts in the demographics of Hell’s Kitchen in the mid to late twentieth century into a parish serving a racially, ethnically, and economically diverse congregation. Amid the demolition of nearby tenements, the 1950 opening of the Port Authority Bus Terminal had particular implication for the parish, as the most significant transportation hub on the East Coast was located across the street from the church, bringing in constant foot traffic from travellers as well those who worked in the terminal or in nearby businesses and the adjoining Theatre District. Msgr. Rappleyea served as pastor in the 1970s and 80s, catalyzing efforts to revitalize Times Square and serving as chaplain of the Port Authority Police from 1975 to 1985, service which is commemorated by a plaque in the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Fr. Peter Colapietro served as pastor and administrator of Holy Cross, 1995-2013. A gregarious Bronx-born former longshoreman, Fr. Peter served as chaplain of the New York City Department of Sanitation and co-chairman of the 42nd Street Civic Association, among other positions. During recent decades, parishioners have served the Midtown community through the Crossroads Food Pantry, which annually feeds thousands of the hungry.

In 2015, the Capuchin order assumed care of Holy Cross, which was merged with St. John the Baptist on W. 30^th, which as discussed above was at the time of Holy Cross’s founding in 1852 a German national parish whose suppression under interdict as lay trustees fought Bishop John Hughes’ demand for control made its rector, Fr. Joseph Anthony Lutz, available for Hughes to assign him as Holy Cross’s first pastor. Thus linked in their earliest years, the two Midtown parishes now share an identity as a merged parish serving the Risen Jesus Christ in the City.

by Dr. Michael J. Pfeifer

Parishioner  of Holy Cross•St. John the Baptist 2020