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

Introduction

Newark’s Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart is an exceptional example of American church building, and the long, important cathedral-building venture that it represents carries many distinctions. Its early leaders were the first American cathedral builders to search abroad for an architect and also the first Catholic cathedral patrons to conduct a formal architectural competition. After many challenges, when later generations finished and opened Sacred Heart in 1954, they helped to complete the largest church in New Jersey and the most expensive Catholic church ever built in the United States. And from the first intimations of the project in the late 1850s to the cathedral’s completion almost a century later, it significantly reflects evolving social, economic, cultural, and religious circumstances. A cathedral serves as the principal church of a diocese and is, literally, the place for the seat of its bishop. (Cathedrals serve an entire diocese, not just the city where they are located and for which they may be named.) When founded in 1853, the Diocese of Newark comprised all of New Jersey . The state’s extraordinary development is an essential factor in Sacred Heart’s history. Evolving business conditions and transportation modes and systems, exponential population increases, and the concomitant growth of cities, towns, and rural areas momentously changed the character of the diocese as much as other aspects of regional life throughout the cathedral project’s span. For the Catholic Church this meant continual adaptation. It also prompted several administrative subdivisions by which new dioceses were carved out of the old statewide Diocese of Newark; one of these, in 1937, raised Newark to an archdiocese. 1 Introduction From first to last, the cathedral’s history is intertwined with immigration and the profound changes it wrought. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the need for, let alone the money required to create, a substantial Catholic cathedral anywhere in the United States was essentially unimaginable . This changed after huge numbers of immigrants, many Catholics among them, arrived in America. By the second half of the century, in Newark, as in other places, building a cathedral became both an aspiration and financially possible, demonstrating the interdependent forces of immigration and economic growth in the period. Worship and devotion are the obvious reasons for creating churches such as Sacred Heart, yet they are scarcely an expression of only religious impulses . Such monumental buildings also manifest their patrons’ social motivations , in this case pride in collective faith and identity, though the latter was sometimes fragmented. In a related matter, this history must confront America’s sometimes troubling response to immigration and immigrants, especially when nativism and anti-Catholicism erupted. For Catholics, this adversity could also be a spur to grand gestures when they had the opportunity to express their presence, particularly by the buildings they raised. As a work of architecture, the cathedral in Newark merits close attention. Taking into consideration size, cost, and architectural significance, it is positioned in the context of the most ambitious cathedral buildings in the United States, among which it undisputedly ranks very high. (A distinction between the Newark cathedral project and Sacred Heart Cathedral must be made because, as we shall see, the diocese attempted to build a new cathedral prior to Sacred Heart, a phase rich both in architectural history and for what it reveals about Newark’s high ambitions.) A cathedral does not imply a particular style of building, but Gothic was always the preference in Newark, as it was for the majority of American cathedrals. The widespread revival of Gothic architecture that took hold in the nineteenth century must be explored to understand why designers and patrons in America looked back to the British and Continental Middle Ages for models of contemporary building. The Newark cathedral project started just before the Civil War. Inaugurated by Newark’s first bishop, its early driving force was George Hobart Doane, a Catholic convert and priest. His father, George Washington Doane, is a key figure in the Gothic Revival in America, and the extraordinary Doanes claim a prominent place in this history. The younger Doane’s fruitful collaboration with Newark architect Jeremiah O’Rourke brought a special 2 Gothic Pride episode in the Gothic Revival, heretofore unexamined, and sets the stage for Newark’s exceptional cathedral-building zeal. Controversy, however, shrouded the first decade of Sacred Heart’s construction . Principally (but not entirely) over the integrity of the...