The following is the text of a talk given by our new abbot, and which offers a timely insight for all of us. It also puts me in the mood for Thanksgiving.

Address to the Honors Convocation on Founder’s Day

Boniface Wimmer

Saint Vincent College, Latrobe PA, November 17, 2022

Augustine J. Curley, O.S.B.

On his way from Germany to Latrobe, Boniface Wimmer (a Benedictine from Bavaria who was to establish the presence of Benedictines in the U.S.) stopped off in Newark, NJ, where he was the guest of Fr. Nicholas Balleis, a monk of St. Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg, Austria, who was the pastor of a parish established to serve the sacramental needs of the many German Catholics who had been settling in Newark since the 1840s. Balleis tried to convince Wimmer that there was a greater need for his work in Newark than in western Pennsylvania. Wimmer did briefly consider staying and making his foundation in Newark, b Wimmer but he decided to continue on to his original destination. Perhaps part of the reason for his reluctance to stay in Newark had to do with Balleis’s personality. Wimmer probably had hints already of something he would discover more clearly later, that no one would be able to live with Balleis. But that was not the end of the story. After Wimmer had made his monastic foundation in Latrobe, the bishop of New York, John Hughes, implored him to make a foundation in Newark, offering to let him take over St. Mary’s parish. Pleading a lack of personnel, Wimmer demurred, although he did send a couple of monks to help Balleis. 

In 1853, New Jersey was separated from the dioceses of New York and Philadelphia, between which it had been split, and the Diocese of Newark was established. The newly-appointed Bishop of Newark, James Roosevelt Bayley, asked Wimmer to send monks to take over St. Mary’s and found a priory. Wimmer did not like cities, and thought they were not a good place for monks, especially young monks who could be enticed by the attractions of city life. So he again demurred.

In the meantime, Balleis was busy expanding his parish. The parishioners came from the various regions that would eventually join together to form the country of Germany, as well as from other German-speaking lands, such as Balleis’s native Austria. They seemed to get along fairly well, with some of the biggest controversies centering around which hymns to sing. But there was one disagreement that would split the parish. Balleis was opinionated and nationalistic. He antagonized many in the parish and in the city.  He was intent on making the parish an instrument for the preservation of German culture and language. He was reluctant to allow the children to learn English in the parish school. Some in the parish disagreed with this. They had not come to America to remain German. They wanted to become Americans, not forsaking their German heritage, but recognizing that they should become part of the land they had come to. 

1854 was the height of the Know-Nothing movement in America. Led by radical Protestants who considered themselves the true Americans, they looked down on these non-English speaking foreigners who swore allegiance to a foreign power.  That power, the Vatican, was, according to the nativists, sending these rejects from Ireland and Germany to be the advance guard of a papal invasion that would eventually subvert the American government and the American way of life.

On September 5, 1854, the American Protestant Association planned a parade to commemorate the anniversary of the first sitting of the American Congress. Orange Lodges from around the area came to participate. The originally planned route of the parade would not have gone past St. Mary’s, but after a break for lunch, the organizers decided to change the route, now bringing the marchers past St. Mary’s Church. Some claim that the march was intended to end at St. Patrick’s Church, newly-established as the cathedral of the diocese. Whether or not this is true, they never made it there, since, at least according to The New York Times of the next day, the “orderly group of marchers” was fired upon by Irishmen who had barricade themselves in the church and were firing guns through the windows. Naturally, the marchers felt the need to defend themselves, and so they broke into the church, where they proceeded to cause much damage to the altar and the furnishings, and even the organ, putting it permanently out of tune, as the New York Times remarked. And they did not encounter any Irishmen with guns. The only person in the church when they entered was the housekeeper, armed only with a broomstick.

Boniface Wimmer came to visit the pastor after the riot, and pledged his help to restore the church. But it all proved too much for Balleis, who soon resigned his pastorate, and left to visit his native Austria. A Redemptorist would take over as pastor, and make plans for a large brick church to replace the small wooden one damaged in the riot. But soon, he took off, abandoning his baggage at a railroad station. Bishop Bayley once again implored Wimmer to send monks, offering to give him ownership of Saint Mary’s and the cemetery at the original site of the church, and encouraging him to establish a monastery of Benedictines in Newark. Under their leadership, the parish completed the building of the new church within three years. It was the tallest building in the city, and stood on a height overlooking downtown, looming over the Presbyterian church which was the church of the Puritan founders of Newark. Its status as the tallest building in Newark lasted only a few years, until a Dutch Reformed church was built downtown that exceeded the height of St. Mary’s by just a few feet.

So the Benedictines came to Newark at a time of great animosity. And the animosity was not just between the descendants of the founders and the newcomers, it was also between the Irish and the Germans who, while united when faced with a common enemy, otherwise did not get along with each other. 

A new venture would soon face Wimmer. Seton Hall College had been founded in 1856 as a residential college. By 1868, the bishop saw a need for a day college, catering to those students whose family wanted them to get a college education, but needed their sons to live at home and help with the family business. Wimmer agreed to meet this need, and the Collegium Sancti Benedicti was opened.  

Wimmer had experienced the tension between the Irish and the Germans in western Pennsylvania. And the church generally was unsettled. As more and  more Irish and Germans came to America, and as most of the Bishops were Irish or of Irish descent, a movement to insist on German Bishops for the German Catholic immigrants took root. This dispute almost split the church in America.

Faced with the difficulty of dealing with the German/Irish animosity in Newark, Wimmer’s solution was similar to one he tried with St. Vincent’s. Forget the adults, he said. They are set in their ways and you are not going to change them. The hope for change lay in reaching the young people. If the young people studied together, played together, and generally got to know each other as individuals, they would be able to overcome the prejudice and animosity that beset their elders.  

The first two students at St. Benedict’s of which there is any record were the McGuirk brothers, sons of Irish immigrant parents, who lived down the street from the new college. But they were soon joined by a large number of students of German descent, and even by a number of students who had come to America as scholastics, preparing themselves to enter the monastery. Over the years, as other ethnic groups came to Newark, they were folded into the St. Benedict’s family. Except for one particular ethnic group.

Due to the efforts of one monk in particular, who heeded Abbot Martin Burne’s call in his address to those attending the banquet celebrating the centennial of the founding of St. Benedict’s that the school not continue to be an island of whiteness that was surrounded by the changing population of Newark that resulted from the great migration of African-Americans from the South, many of whom were Catholic. Even the Catholic African-Americans were not accepted by many in the church, priests included. 

My class, which entered in 1970, was the first class with a significant population of African-Americans and Hispanics. Two years later, I sat in the auditorium as the Headmaster announced that St. Benedict’s would be “suspending operations.”  Disagreements arose among the monks about how to conduct a school that was now across the street from a significant African-American population, in a city that had been torn by –a riot, insurrection, rebellion–whatever you choose to call it–a city that many suburban parents were reluctant to send their sons into. So the school closed, and there was an attempt to move the monastery out of the city, out to the suburbs to where the alumni had moved, but the Benedictine vow of stability, and the commitment of many of the monks to serve the people where God had planted the monastery, prevailed. Today we have students from many different countries stretching from Latin America to Mongolia. And

we also have students from different religions–Catholic and Protestant Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists–who play, work, pray together at our morning convocation, putting  the lie to the idea that we have to be divided because of our differences. Rather, it is our differences, we have found,  that enrich our community.

A number of years ago, when I was teaching Christian morality in St. Benedict’s, I asked the students–telling them that they would know what I was talking about even if I were not explicit–“How many of you, if you brought one of your friends home from school, would have a family member or a neighbor, either aloud or just in his or her thoughts, say ‘What is he doing here?’” Several students raised their hands. That was the case for a number of years. The last time I taught the class, I asked my usual question. The kids had no idea what I was talking about. I think, and I hope I am right, that it had become normal for our students and their families, to welcome young people of different ethnic groups and religions into their homes. 

Of course, some of these early students are now parents themselves, many of them not passing on what they had learned from their parents, but rather what they had learned from the experience of  studying, playing, and praying with students of other races and religions. This is one of the ways that we at Newark Abbey and St. Benedict’s Prep carry on the legacy of your founder, and our founder, Abbot Boniface Wimmer.