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

Newark’s Rise and the Project’s Revival

At one point in the aftermath of ill-fated 1870s cathedral project, the Diocese of Newark considered selling the cathedral property. Monsignor Doane rallied with others to protect it. Guarded interest in resuscitating the plans occurred in the late 1880s. This was accompanied by doubt of another kind. Despite the picturesque e¤ects that the site promised for architecture, it begged a practical question: Were there enough Catholics near it to justify the services of a new parish? So the diocese repeated a first step of the generation before and put up a small church, designed by O’Rourke, to test the location’s utility. Much had changed since the first cathedral chapel was built in 1870. Newark had become a modern city, with a population of a quarter of million . New industries, especially jewelry, foundry, and machine operations broadened an already wide business base. In the city’s rising skyline were the headquarters of some of the country’s largest insurance companies, one of which occupied Newark’s tallest building, twelve stories high. Grand department stores—Plaut’s Bee Hive, Bamberger’s, and Hahne’s—enlivened a busy commercial culture. New technologies changed the rhythms and tempo of everyday life, and many were obvious everywhere: the city was festooned in thickets of electric and telegraph and telephone wires. Trolleys plied all the major streets and fostered additional suburban communities around Newark. The latter added to the appeal of the new cathedral site because the trolley system’s crosstown line passed it, giving ready access to all east-west routes. 11 Newark’s Rise and the Project’s Revival 99 “Sacred Heart”: Reflecting Change and Diversity When the diocese opened the small church meant to test the viability of the location in 1891, it placed the church under the patronage of the Sacred Heart. As it turned out, this established the cathedral’s dedication.1 Devotion to the Sacred Heart was at fever pitch at the time, a phenomenon of piety that had been building for two centuries. Its main themes were Christ’s love for humanity, His su¤ering to redeem it, and the continuing sorrows hostile or indi¤erent men and women inflicted on Him. Aspects of this preoccupation with su¤ering seem understandable in America, where most Catholics had experienced wretched years: first, troubles in their homeland , the wrenching decision to leave it, and then the degradations of immigrant life.2 A popular hymn of the time assured: “All ye who seek a comfort sure in trouble and distress / Whatsoever sorrows vex the mind or guilt the soul oppress / Jesus who gave himself for you upon the cross to die / Opens to you his Sacred Heart; oh to that Heart draw nigh.”3 Images of the Sacred Heart were ubiquitous. In churches, they appeared as statues and in murals and stained-glass windows. Catholic households with virtually no other decoration often had a print or chromolithographic image of the Sacred Heart.4 In the early 1870s, the dedication “Our Lady and Saint Patrick,” had made sense, given Irish dominance in the diocese. “Sacred Heart,” not referential to the patron saint of any one country or faction, was a prudently universal dedication for a cathedral meant to serve a place as multicultural as Newark had become. And in fact the district just around the cathedral site became a predominantly Italian neighborhood. Hesitations Strong interest in starting to build the cathedral itself arose again in the reviving economy of the late 1890s. Deliberations were held in an advisory body to the bishop, who stepped back from his earlier stance that he would not build a cathedral until every diocesan church was debt-free. When he aired the cathedral project with his clergy, it met a mixed response. Many had witnessed economic cycles that ended with ferocious busts. Just a few years before, the Panic of 1893 and its tail of depression raised the specter that doomed Newark’s former hopes, and some priests felt that fund-raising prospects remained poor. Others thought the venture would bleed resources needed for parishes, schools, hospitals, and other institutions. Formidable Father McNulty of Saint John’s in Paterson, expressing a view that others furtively harbored, believed the money could be better spent, though his 100 Sacred Heart Cathedral fellow clergy recalled that when he planned the church over which he still presided, he built what the ecclesiologists would have described...