CATHEDRAL PREP Celebrating 100 Years Of Catholic Academic Excellence & Forming Men for Greatness OCTOBER 4, 2015 Celebrating 100 Years Of Catholic Academic Excellence & Forming Men for Greatness Best Wishes to the Kiwanis Club of Middle Village On Their 1st AnnualCongratulations Awards Dinner CathedralHonoring Preparatory School and Seminary Anthony Calabrese On the hosting of its ThomasGala Dinner Clark Celebrating 100 Years of &Catholic Academic Excellence Samuel Oryson 79-21 CMetropolitanelebrating 125 Y eAvenuears MiddleThe N aVillage,me Rema iNYns t h11379e Same Reinvesting in our Community “What Better or More Blessed Investment” The History of Cathedral Preparatory School and Seminary 1914-2015 Patrick J. McNamara, Ph.D. Class of 1986 Charles Edward McDonnell, Brooklyn’s second Bishop, was a man who talked little but did much. During his twenty- nine years as Bishop (1892-1921), McDonnell dedicated hundreds of churches, schools, and hospitals across Long Island. He founded Catholic Charities, started the diocesan newspaper, The Tablet, and welcomed many religious communities to the Diocese. As the Catholic population grew, Bishop McDonnell was concerned about further cultivating vocations to the priesthood. In the pages of The Tablet, he wrote: All of us are agreed, I believe, that we must take special measures if we would shelter those among our Catholic boys, whom their pastors and confessors would choose as probably called to the priesthood, and protect them from the modern materialistic spirit that pervades the very atmosphere… by placing them apart, educating them with those only who look forward to that same great work in life, the priestly field of labor… In 1891, Brooklyn’s first Bishop, John Loughlin, founded St. John’s Seminary in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Bishop McDonnell saw the need for a minor seminary to nurture vocations at an earlier stage. In 1913, then, he asked Auxiliary Bishop George W. Mundelein, to work on starting such a school. (In 1563, the Council of Trent decreed that every diocese was “bound to support, to rear in piety, and to train in ecclesiastical discipline a certain number of youths, in a college to be chosen by the bishop for that purpose.”) A capable administrator and fundraiser, Bishop Mundelein persuaded Mr. George Logan Duval, a successful businessman and a devout Catholic, to help. On June 2, 1914, he purchased the S.A.R. Moses estate on the corner of Brooklyn’s Washington and Atlantic Avenues for fifty-thousand dollars. The site was chosen for its accessibility to trains and buses. Duval has been called “Cathedral’s greatest lay benefactor.” In July 1914, Bishop Mundelein wrote to the priests of the Diocese: Rarely has a diocese undertaken a work of greater importance and of more splendid promise… Long after we have been called to receive the vineyard laborer’s wages, may it be a source of blessings to this Diocese… Even if all of its students did not become priests, Bishop Mundelein insisted, the school would still produce committed laymen loyal to the Church. Furthermore, he wrote, the school’s very insistence symbolized the Diocese’s commitment to fostering vocations. On the morning of September 7, 1914, 8:30 a.m., at St. John’s Chapel in Fort Greene, 85 young men gathered from all corners of Long Island for the school’s opening Mass. Bishop Mundelein who asked the students: Why are you here? Why have we begun this college? The answer is to be found in the fact that the army of peace must have officers as well as the army of war. You have been selected to fill the officers’ posts and you have come here to be trained for that work. Yours is to be a more vigorous course of training than that of other colleges, for yours is a higher work. Celebrating 100 Years Of Catholic Academic Excellence & Forming Men for Greatness God willing, he said, one day “you will find yourselves at the altar of your ordination.” It all depended on whether they answered two questions: “(1)Is God calling you? (2) Are you listening to the call?” Then and now, Cathedral was a place where young men could discern that call, to determine where God was calling them and to listen what God was saying to them. What made the school unique was its focus on preparing young men for the priesthood. The new school was named Cathedral College of the Immaculate Conception, since it was the Bishop’s own school for future priests. The Tablet enthusiastically endorsed the work of Cathedral: What better or more blessed investment could possibly be conceived than that whereby some worthy boy is enabled to realize his pious ambition of becoming a priest of God. Classes at Cathedral started on September 14, 1914. The Washington Avenue school was dedicated on December 8th, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. In the tradition of Roman seminaries, the students had Thursday off and attended school on Saturdays. Students spent six years at Washington Avenue, where they completed two years of college. If they went on to the major seminary, they would spend six years in the major seminary for further college as well as theological studies. (This was known as the “six and six” system. It lasted until 1967, when a separate college seminary was built in Douglaston, Cathedral College.) On September 8, 1915, Cathedral College’s new building, created in the style of Flemish Gothic architecture, was dedicated. It soon became known as “one of Brooklyn’s famous Catholic landmarks.” Shortly thereafter, Bishop Mundelein was named Archbishop of Chicago. (He was named a Cardinal in 1924.) Bishop McDonnell picked a group of capable and enthusiastic young priests for the faculty, including Father Thomas E. Molloy, future Bishop of Brooklyn, who served as the first Spiritual Director. Father James J. Higgins, Cathedral’s second Rector, wrote Bishop McDonnell in September 1917: “When one is in love with a cause or a work he is encouraged to use every lawful means to advance it. I am in love with the Cathedral College and its work.” Higgins’s successor, Father Anthony Reichert (for whom the first alumni association was named), wrote that the faculty was anxious to “make Cathedral College the first in the nation.” Cathedral College’s first commencement exercises took place in February 1919. Of the 34 graduates in that class, 25 became priests in the Diocese of Brooklyn. Over the next 40 years, the Diocese would ordain an average of 35 priests per year. (Between 1931 and 1933, an incredible 97 priests were ordained!) The majority of these priests were graduates of Cathedral. Over the years, certain families gave their sons to the Church in large numbers: the Holzheimers, Pfundsteins Grahams, Puricks, Crawfords, Regulskis, and Arceses. (Today over one half of the Brooklyn presbyterate is composed of Cathedral alumni.) Up to the present day, Cathedral alumni have also contributed significantly to the ranks of the hierarchy, both in Brooklyn and abroad. The first alumnus to be named a bishop (and Cardinal Archbishop of St Louis) was John J. Carberry, of the Class of 1924. (In 1978, he was the first Cathedral graduate to vote in a papal election.) He was later followed into the College of Cardinals by Anthony J. Bevilacqua, Class of 1943, who became Archbishop of Philadelphia in 1988. (One 1927 graduate, William Kupfer, became a Maryknoll Bishop in China.) In more recent years, Bishops Gerald Barbarito ’67, Raymond Chappetto ’65, Peter Libasci ’69, Paul Sanchez ’66, and Edward Scharfenberger ’65, were ordained to the episcopate. The lay alumni, one graduate stated, “remained devoted to God’s service, but now they would serve in a different way.” Speaking at Cathedral’s fiftieth anniversary in 1964, Mr. George Williams (1924) said that his experience at Cathedral “nurtured and strengthened my Catholic faith as a layman.” Football great Vince Lombardi, who attended the school in the early 1930’s, called Cathedral “the best school in the city.” Asked where he got his considerable energy from, Lombardi best recounted Cathedral’s influence when he said: “I derive my strength from daily Mass.” Celebrating 100 Years Of Catholic Academic Excellence & Forming Men for Greatness Under Archbishop Thomas E. Molloy (1922-1956), Cathedral acquired one of the finest seminary faculties in the nation. Young priest-professors like George Fogarty, Thomas Gradilone, Eugene Molloy and George Deas were sent to graduate school at Fordham, Notre Dame, Columbia, NYU and Johns Hopkins. One the baseball field and the basketball court, Phil Reilly, Marty Bannan, and Howie Basler made Cathedral a force to be reckoned with. For over thirty years, the Father Ryan Players put on a variety of plays, including Stalag 17 in 1964. In addition to the numerous priest-faculty, dedicated lay teachers like John F. (“Jocko”) Crane and Francis X. McDermott contributed richly to the life of the school. Although Cathedral was originally built to hold 250 students, by 1960 the numbers were more than double that. Annex classes were held in St. Joseph’s Parochial School on Pacific Street. In November 1961, Molloy’s successor, Archbishop Bryan J. McEntegart, announced plans to establish a Queens division. In the fall of 1963, Cathedral Preparatory Seminary opened up on 92nd Street in Elmhurst. The site, located near several subway lines, was chosen for its accessibility from most parts of Queens. A statue of Our Lady, a duplicate of that in the lobby of the Brooklyn school, was placed in the new school’s lobby. (Interestingly, one of the alternative sites that had been proposed was used for Archbishop Molloy High School.) One observer noted that its dedication represented “a growing and vibrant Catholicism in the diocese.” Monsignor Robert E.