VOLUME XV NO. 2
WINTER 1996
Published by the New Jersey Catholic Historical Records Commission, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey 07079-2696
Most Reverend Dominic A. Marconi, D.D., Chairman; Reverend Monsignor Joseph C. Shenrock, Vice-Chairman; Bernard Bush; Reverend Robert E. Carbonneau, C.P.; JoAnn Cotz; Reverend Augustine Curley, O.S.B.; Reverend Monsignor William N. Field; Reverend Monsignor Charles J. Giglio; Sister Mary Ellen Gleason, S.C.; Reverend Michael G. Krull; Reverend Raymond J. Kupke; Joseph F. Mahoney; Sister Margherita Marchione, M.P.F.; Reverend Monsignor Robert Moneta; George L.A. Reilly; Sister Irene Marie Richards, O.P.; Sister Thomas Mary Salerno, S.C.; Bernhard W. Scholz; Reverend Monsignor Francis R. Seymour; Reverend Joseph D. Wallace; Barbara Geller, Consulting Member; Joseph F. Mahoney, Newsletter editor.
COMMISSION MEMBER HONORED
At its annual conference held at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University on December 2,1995 the New Jersey Historical Commission awarded its hightest honor, the Richard J. Hughes Award, to Bernard Bush, long-time member of the New Jersey Catholic Historical Records Commission. The award, named for the late governor and chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, recognizes a career of outstanding accomplishments in the service of New Jersey history.
From 1969 to 1991 Mr. Bush was executive director of the New Jersey Historical Commission. During that time he established the programs by which the commission earned national recognition--its Newsletter and grant-in-aid programs as well as its policy of supporting and presenting scholarship in a variety of media both old and new. Before his service with the Historical Commission he was library director of the New Jersey Historical Society and chief of the state library's History Section. He headed a group of librarians who researched and edited New Jersey and the Negro, 1715-1966, a bibliographical tool which remains the only published guide to the historiography of New Jersey African-Americans. He has also compiled the four-volume work The Laws of the Royal Colony of New Jersey, 1703-1775. He is currently president of the League of Historical Societies of New Jersey and a trustee of the Advocates for New Jersey History. For the Catholic Historical Records Commission, he has been an active member of the publications committee and a splendid analyst of activities proposed as well as proponent of how to accomplish them.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS OF INTEREST
New Jersey History, the quarterly journal of the New Jersey Historical Society, devoted the Spring-Summer, 1995 issue to the topic of Caribbean peoples in New Jersey. Since a large percentage of these immigrants are Catholic, the articles are of interest to all those concerned with the history of Catholicism in the state.
Henry Bischoff's "Caribbean Peoples in New Jersey: An Overview" examines the history of the migration from the Caribbean to this area, focusing on the years since 1940, when the migration assumed large proportions.
Ana-Maria Diaz Stevens has adapted her keynote address to the Commission's 1994 conference at Plainsboro into "Postwar Migrants and Immigrants from the Caribbean: Their Impact upon New Jersey Catholic History."
Yolanda Prieto, also one of the principal speakers at the 1994 conference, offers "Continuity or Change? Two Generations of Cuban American Women." The article is based on her interviews in Hudson County of a group of older Cuban women and their daughters.
Isabel Nazario discusses how Caribbean immigrants have expressed traditional motifs of their arts and crafts in a radically different environment in "Moving through Memory: Caribbean Folk Arts in New Jersey."
Also of interest is Gloria Bonilla-Santiago, Organizing Puerto Rican Migrant Farm Workers: The Experience of Puerto Ricans in New Jersey. This is a sociological study analyzing the structural evolution of labor organizations serving migrant workers, and is published by Peter Lang Publishing Company of New York and Bern.
PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION ACQUIRED BY ARCHIVES
The Seton Hall University Archives has recently acquired the Daniel Zehnder Photo Collection of the Catholic Advocate. Packed in some thirty containers of various sizes, the collection consists of several thousand 4" by 5" negatives and prints. Zehnder was a photographer for The Catholic Advocate, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Newark, from 1952 to 1990. The collection spans the entire period and shows the wide variety of activities of the archbishops and the central organs of administration, as well as of the parishes, schools, other organizations and individuals.
Before it can be made available to researchers, the collection needs to be organized, catalogued and conserved. The univesity archives is seeking a qualified volunteer to begin the process of ordering the materials at the Special Collections Center of Walsh Library. Anyone who is qualified and would like to help should contact Ms. JoAnn Cotz, Special Collections, Walsh Library, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ 07079.
CONFERENCE RECALLS MINISTRY OF WOMEN RELIGIOUS
On the very wet morning of October 28 Bishop Dominic A. Marconi, chairman of the Commission, welcomed the audience at the annual conference with a reminder of Pope John Paul II's comment a few weeks earlier at Giants Stadium that water is a sign of life. Those who attended the sessions on the last Saturday of October struggled through heavy downpours of that symbol, but were rewarded with a stimulating examination of the varied ministry of women religious in New Jersey.
Sister Margherita Marchione, M.P.F. gave the keynote address, "The Catholic Experience in New Jersey: Women Religious." Professor Emerita of Italian Studies at Fairleigh Dickinson University, she recalled addressing an audience at Seton Hall on the seventh centenary of the birth of Dante when she focused on the Inferno, but promised that today she would concentrate on the Paradiso. "Throughout the centuries," she asserted, "women have been the hope of the Church." Looking strictly at the New Jersey scene, she recalled the foundation of the Sisters of Charity of St. Elizabeth in the 1850's as a direct response to the needs of the state's Catholics. In 1863 they were joined by the Sisters of the Poor of St. Francis with hospitals in Hoboken, Jersey City and Newark. 1872 saw the arrival of the Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of St. Joseph and Sisters of St. Dominic. In 1875 came the Sisters of Christian Charity and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd. By 1881, when the diocese of Trenton was established, they had been joined by the Little Sisters of the Poor, the School Sisters of Notre Dame, the Sisters of St. Francis and the Sisters of St. Benedict. Thus early the range of ministries from education to health care to social work to contemplative prayer were firmly entrenched in the state. The influx of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe saw the arrival of numerous communities, such as the Felicians, Pallottine, the Daughters of Divine Charity and the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart.
Noting the post-Vatican II decline in the number of women religious in the state from over 5,600 in 1960 to about 4,000 now, Sister Margherita called each community to re-examine its particular charism in the light of the constantly changing world situation, and to meet with confident hope each new challenge as it arises.
Sister Lois Curry, O.P. then spoke on "Education on the Cutting Edge: From the First Plenary Council of Baltimore to Vatican II And Beyond." Within the limited time available, she reviewed the educational work of women religious in New Jersey and called attention to the current need for adult education to shape an American Catholic culture that is both truly American and truly Catholic.
Sister Catherine Francis, M.S.B.T., director of parish social ministry for the diocese of Paterson concluded the morning activity with a review of the development of Catholic social work in New Jersey by spotlighting the ministry of four communities--the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent of New York, the Little Sisters of the Poor, the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, and the Trinitarians. She was thus able to illustrate both the variety of services undertaken, and the development of social work as a profession over the past century and a half.
During the luncheon break many participants spent a good deal of time examining the exhibit devised by Ms. JoAnn Cotz of Seton Hall University Archives, who is also a member of the Commission. Numerous communities had responded to the Commission's request for data illustrating their ministries in New Jersey, and Ms. Cotz integrated these into an informative display which showed some of the history and much of the current activity of the communities.
After lunch, Fr. Peter Cebulka of the Diocese of Metuchen led off with "Wrapped in Silence: The Ministry of Contemplative Sisters in the State of New Jersey." Fr. Cebulka several years ago won the Archbishop Gerety History Prize for his study of the way New Jersey contemplative communities responded to the initiatives of Vatican II. Recently he returned to the ten houses of contemplatives for this talk. He began by noting the ironic fact that the first female religious community in the original United States were the Discalced Carmelites who landed at Port Tobacco, Maryland in 1790. The demands of the active ministry were such during the early nineteenth century, however, that few bishops were anxious to receive contemplative communities. In 1880, nonetheless, Bishop Michael Corrigan of Newark established four Dominican Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in Newark. In 1891 the Dominican Sisters settled in Union City, and in 1909 the Poor Clares were met with a cross-burning when they settled in Bordentown. Thereafter Discalced Carmelites established themselves in Morristown (1926), the Hermits of Our Lady of Mount Carmel at Chester (1976) and the Contemplative Sisters of the Good Shepherd at Trenton (1986).
These communities, with daughter houses founded later, Cebulka described as the "heart of the Church," for we pay as little attention to them as we daily do to the workings of that muscle in our chests. And like the heart, the unremarked prayers of the contemplatives sustain the labors of everyone else. They are as aware, he said, of the problems of society as anyone else, because the people with the problems bring them daily to the convents and monasteries to ask for the sisters' prayers.
Sister Barbara Conroy, S.C., general superior of the Sisters of Charity of St. Elizabeth and former coordinator of health services at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Paterson concluded the day with a presentation on "The Sisters: Champions of Catholic Health Care Then and Now." Sister Barbara noted that, in New Jersey as elsewhere, the establishment of Catholic health care facilities was invariably a collaborative effort of clergy and women religious, and expressed a fear that we seemed in danger of forgetting this. She reviewed the development of Catholic health care facilities in New Jersey from the Civil War era, illustrating the close cooperation of clergy and religious by incidents from the history of various communities and the facilities they staffed. She noted also that in the United States non-profit health care is mostly Catholic, and that Catholic health care is led principally by women--a notable leadership role of women religious. Reviewing also the contributions of nemerous communities to nursing education, she concluded with brief mention of some of the leading problems of medical ethics today.
The Commission is extremely grateful to the speakers for their excellent overviews of these roles of women religious in New Jersey and hopes in the future to follow up with further study of each area.
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Updated: 06/13/02