Gothic Pride: The Story of Building a Great Cathedral in Newark

Bust: Crisis and a Grand Hope Deferred

No place dropped further in the fiscal descent than Saint John’s Church in Orange, O’Rourke’s church that had opened only a couple of years before. What happened there is one of the most extraordinary episodes in American church building, and it brought the Diocese of Newark to its knees. Moreover, it forever altered the course of the cathedral project. When the church opened in 1869, Orange’s factories were beginning to feel the slowdown that followed the post–Civil War boom. With slackening demand, manufacturing plants contracted, inducing wage and job loss. Like other Catholic churches of the day, Saint John’s relied on the contributions of working people. Though modest, their gifts were a substantial percentage of their discretionary income and in aggregate serviced mortgage payments on often ambitious parish buildings. Most Catholics in Orange, formerly living in genteel subsistence, now got by in sharply reduced circumstances. As collections plummeted, Father Hickey scavenged for funds, taking whatever he found. Piece by piece, he mortgaged all of Saint John’s property: church, school, rectory, convent, and land belonging to the church. This raised cash but meant more new fixed payments. When Hickey’s woes could hardly seem worse, they deepened. The church caught fire. Starting on a votive altar, flames flashed from the altar to a statue to the vaulting above before fire brigades saved the church. Disaster was averted and insurance covered most losses (an errant burning candle was thought the cause), but Hickey had to ask for donations to complete repairs. 7 Bust Crisis and a Grand Hope Deferred 58 An odor of burnt wood still lingered in the church when Hickey presented a new money-raising scheme. He proposed that collectors make weekend visits to parish homes and requested that everyone put ten cents in the collection at Sunday masses. Just how low the high-flying parish had fallen was clear when Hickey urged girls and boys in the parish schools to o¤er a penny daily in their classrooms. Whether desperately hopeful or delusional, Hickey assured his flock that their cooperation with these measures would eliminate Saint John’s entire debt. His credulous parishioners began speaking about the imminent consecration of their church (possible only when the building is debt-free).1 The men of Orange might as well have dug the church’s foundations with spoons as relied on Hickey’s fund-raising pitches to meet the parish’s huge obligations. In one more desperate act, Hickey took out life insurance policies on himself, naming Saint John’s as the beneficiary.2 The insurance premiums added yet another recurring expense to the parish ledger. By late fall 1872, the parish also fell behind with its regular expenses. With nothing left to mortgage, Hickey—unknown to diocesan superiors and all but a few parishioners—raised funds by borrowing still more. Month after month he signed notes for floating (short-term) debt of thirty-day maturities, financial instruments prudently used only to sustain current operations. In other words, he borrowed short-term to pay long-term obligations . Never wise, escalating interest rates meant that they were taken or renewed each month at ever higher rates. Saint John’s total borrowings reached $280,000.3 Under this staggering mound of debt were land and developments whose original mortgaged value was $79,000. For seven months beginning in November 1872, Father Hickey recorded in the parish minute book that he was authorized by the board of trustees to sign new debt agreements. The resolutions, stating no financial terms, were signed by Hickey and Saint John’s two lay trustees, one of them an elderly fellow who signed the papers in a trembling hand as feeble as the judgment that approved the new debt. This trio also authorized a mortgage loan of $11,000 from Newark resident and former New Jersey Governor Marcus L. Ward, and another one of $38,000 from John O’Rourke (no relation to Jeremiah ), whose construction firm built the church.4 With these actions, Hickey ignored a regulation that he secure written consent from the diocese to sell or mortgage church property or increase parish debt by more than $500. Church authorities heard thunder from Orange as early as summer 1872, when Bishop Bayley, elevated to archbishop of Baltimore and preparing to Bust: Crisis and a Grand Hope Deferred 59 leave Newark, discussed his worries about Saint John’s...