The Gesu in Miami: A Story of God's People in a Subtropical Metropolis, 1896–2006 (review)

Miami's Gesu Church—initially called Holy Name—came into being at the same time that Henry Flagler's train first arrived into Miami, and his workers voted to incorporate Miami—with its passenger station, a few humble buildings, and shacks—as a city. In 1897, a year after the city's incorporation, the Gesu congregation moved into its new church in downtown Miami, two blocks north of the city center. There it would remain a constant witness to the meteoric and often peripatetic transformation in demography, architecture, and economy that became Miami.

Historian Paul S. George has traced the story of South Florida's oldest Catholic church from its pioneer beginning to its present status as downtown parish of a major urban area. George's narrative will please the local antiquarian and old parish member by providing details such as the records of the parish school's football team; the names of important parishioners, priests, and favorite nuns; and statistical data on the number of confessions heard and communions distributed. But, at other times, he deftly weaves the story of the parish into the broader urban, regional, and even national social narrative of the tumultuous twentieth century. Interspersed with details on the cost of the new church bell, for example, is the story of Miamian's interest in the Cuban War of Independence, a war in which Miami, George reminds us, served as a training base for more than 7000 Cuban-bound troops. He also uses the story of the parish as a vehicle to carry the reader through Miami in the World War I years, the economic boom of the twenties, and the rampant nativism of that era. He also describes Depression-era Miami, when the Gesu—along with the Catholic Welfare Bureau—became a last refuge for those down on their luck in Miami.

Probably one of the most significant roles the Gesu church played, not only in the story of Miami but also in the political history of the United States, was when it became the country's first refugee center for Cubans fleeing Castro's Cuba in 1959. Originally established prior to the revolution to serve the entire Hispanic community, Centro Hispano Catolico, located in the basement of the Gesu church, responded to the emerging Cuban refugee crisis by providing the new arrivals with canned goods, free medical examinations, day-care service, employment information, and a few dollars to tide them over. Until the federal government established a center in 1961, Centro Hispano remained the single most important lifeline for the desperate thousands leaving Cuba.

Following the tumultuous decade of the 1960s, the Gesu church suffered the fate of many center city churches that watched their boundaries shrink as new suburban parishes emerged. The once vibrant school closed, and although the church remained relatively full, it housed an extremely eclectic congregation where worshipers in Armani suits rubbed elbows with those in cotton overalls as the church became the principal place of worship for downtown executives as well as for the newest immigrant families, who huddled into the low-rent apartments that border the luxurious downtown business section.

George's work is a sensitive and sympathetic narrative of a venerable church and the diverse parishioners it has served. Unfortunately, there are questions that his history of the region's oldest Catholic church should have addressed. For example, in the Flagler years, immigrant workers—many of them Catholic—protested the railroad's often harsh treatment. Did Flagler's donations to the church buy the clergy's approbation of his treatment of workers? George mentions that Al Capone was a parishioner, but he does not mention the church's stand on organized crime that permeated Miami in the twenties and thirties. Although George mentions that Gesu was the mother church of Miami's first black Catholic parish, he says nothing...