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A Catholic Presence on LI

Having met prejudice, churches take root in Westbury, Glen Cove, Sag Harbor

By Stuart Vincent | Staff Writer

`Probably we shall never know if Long Island was visited by St. Brendan or other Irish seafarers between the Sixth and Ninth Centuries . . .''

So mused Msgr. John Sharp as he began his centennial history of the Diocese of Brooklyn (1853-1953), which at the time of the book's publication in 1954 encompassed all of Long Island from Coney Island to Montauk Point. In fact, even after the Dutch colonies of New Amsterdam and Breuckelen were founded in the early 1600s, little is known of the early Catholics because anti-Catholic sentiment forced them to maintain a low profile.

The first Catholic who laid eyes on Long Island was probably Giovanni da Verrazano, a Florentine explorer who in 1524 sailed into New York Harbor beneath the spot where a bridge would one day bear his name. But Catholics who lived in the colonies were not granted the freedom to practice their religion until the English took over in 1664. Even then, it was a brief respite.

After King James II declared himself a Catholic in 1674, he granted religious liberty to all in New York, ``provided they give no disturbance to the public peace.'' He appointed New York's first Irish politician, Sir Thomas Dongan, who became governor in 1683. Dongan sailed from Nantucket to Long Island, then traveled the length of the Island to New York. His chaplain, the Rev. Thomas Harvey, may have celebrated the first mass on Long Island during the journey. Harvey did offer the first mass in New York on Bowling Green on the site of the former Custom House.

Soon after arriving in New York, Dongan issued the Provincial Charter of Liberties, which stated that no one ``which profess faith in God by Jesus Christ shall at any time be any ways molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question for any difference in opinion or matter of religious concernment . . . ''

But in 1688, James II was forced to flee his throne by the English Protestants. Anti-Catholic sentiment dominated the colonies for the next century. That didn't change until after the Revolutionary War in 1784, when a New York law outlawing priests was repealed. The following year, the Roman Catholic Church in New York was incorporated and the cornerstone was laid for the first Catholic church in Manhattan, St. Peter's.

In 1822, the cornerstone was laid for St. James in Brooklyn, now the cathedral for the Diocese of Brooklyn. Flushing village in Queens hosted that future borough's first Catholic mass in 1826 in a Main Street shop, and St. Michael's Church was dedicated there in 1842.

The first known mass in what is now Nassau County was said in 1840 at the home of Barney Powers in northern Uniondale by the Rev. James O'Donnell from St. Paul's in Brooklyn. Four adults and three children attended. ``Money was collected for a church, but only enough was raised to build a shed,'' according to an 1882 Queens history.

It wasn't until 1850 that Nassau's first Catholic church was born when New York Archbishop John Hughes formed a society to raise money for a sanctuary. The next year, they bought land on what is now Post Avenue in Westbury for what would become St. Brigid's Church.

Sharp noted that a wooden frame for the church was built, but Alfred Peck, who is writing a history of the church for its 150th anniversary, said the first church was a converted farmhouse. In any case, Sharp wrote that 600 Catholics came to the first mass in 1851. St. Brigid's was dedicated by Bishop John Laughlin, first bishop of Brooklyn. (It would be just over a century -- 1957 -- before the Diocese of Rockville Centre would be created.)

But St. Brigid's didn't have a resident pastor until 1892, and was served until then by pastors from St. Patrick's Church in the more populous Glen Cove, which led to a friendly dispute between the two parishes as to which is the ``mother church'' of Nassau County.

Glen Cove's claim goes back to 1854 when the Rev. Patrick Kelly oversaw the building of a wooden church atop a hill on Glen Street. St. Patrick's parish was established two years later. ``The first Catholics here were Irish Catholics. They came for the [Duryea corn] starch factory, and some of them were farmers, too,'' said Msgr. John McCann, the current pastor of St. Patrick's.

But Glen Cove's Catholics didn't wait for a church to be built to say their first mass. Mary Ford, who came to Oyster Bay from Ireland in 1850, wrote in a letter that in 1850, she and others from Oyster Bay ``came over to Glen Cove in a party of four or five and went down to a place called Garvies Point and held mass on a rock by a mulberry bush.''

The new St. Patrick's parish went far beyond the city limits. The Rev. James McEnroe, who took over as pastor in 1858, was a circuit-riding priest. Galloping through the countryside on a white horse, his area included Sea Cliff, Oyster Bay, Roslyn, Mineola, Farmingdale, Massapequa, Garden City, Bethpage, Hempstead, Freeport and Bellmore.

Suffolk's first parish was St. Andrew's in Sag Harbor, established in 1859, followed a year later by another St. Patrick's, in Huntington. But masses had already been said for decades in those and other communities such as Smithtown, Greenport and Riverhead.

No priest was known to have set foot in Sag Harbor prior to 1832, but an Irishman named Michael Burke organized Sunday services at his home as early as 1829 for 15 families -- 14 Irish and one Portuguese. Priests said mass in the whaling center in the early 1830s and the mission was adopted by St. James' Church in Brooklyn about 1835. When the local Methodist congregation outgrew its church soon afterwards, Burke arranged to buy it for $1,052.50 through a third party, who was Protestant. Because of anti-Catholic feelings in the village, according to the parish history, he believed the Methodists were unlikely to sell their church to ``papists.''

The Rev. Joseph Brunemann became St. Andrews' first resident pastor in 1859, when the parish was established.

The name St. Patrick's -- reflecting the Irish population -- is repeated throughout Suffolk. St. Patrick's, Smithtown, began as a mission chapel in 1841, becoming a parish in1952. St. Patrick's, Huntington, opened in 1849, becoming a parish in 1860.