Miracle on High Street: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of St. Benedict's Prep in Newark, N.J.

2. ‘‘Necessary, Useful, and Beautiful’’: Founding Fathers and a Catholic Day College, 1868–1900

2 ‘‘Necessary, Useful, and Beautiful’’: Founding Fathers and a Catholic Day College, 1868–1900 It was a family school from the start. John and William McGurk, teenage sons of poor Irish Catholic immigrants, walked to school each morning from their home in a predominantly Irish workingclass neighborhood of Newark. Within a few blocks of their apartment they climbed one of city’s grand avenues, the aptly named High Street—home to many of Newark’s well-to-do citizens, who could literally look down on the McGurks from their perch. High Street was in the Hill District, a section of the city that overlooked downtown Newark and Manhattan in the distance. First settled in the 1840s, the ‘‘Hill’’ was full of Germans, ones who had made it in the rapidly industrializing city and others who were still on the rise, as well as their churches, shops, breweries, and factories. As the brothers strode by Newark Academy—the oldest prep school in the city, where wealthy Protestants sent their sons—and crossed William Street, they stood in the shadow of the steeple of the rebuilt St. Mary’s Church, now one of the tallest structures in the city. Two doors down, John and William entered a humble two-story frame house, where they encountered a handful of bearded, black-robed Bavarian monks teaching the sons of Catholic immigrants.1 The McGurk brothers were among the twenty or so pioneering scholars to enter St. Benedict’s after the Order of St. Benedict was incorporated in the state of New Jersey in 1868. Originally called a high school, a literal translation of the German Hochschul, a new name—Collegium Sancti Benedicti, or Saint Benedict’s College—was used by 1870. In the late nineteenth century St. Benedict’s did confer college degrees, including a two-year ‘‘Master of Accounts’’ degree, but ‘‘necessary, useful, and beautiful’’ | 19 it was a preparatory school for the most part, and in the early part of the twentieth century the monks abandoned the college program for good. John and William McGurk never received a degree because their father struggled to pay the modest tuition of fifteen dollars per quarter. The brothers remained at St. Benedict’s for only two years, and ten years later they still lived in the same house, at that point with their widowed mother and four other siblings. William was employed as a hatter and John was a foreman in a local factory. But it was altogether fitting that they were the first recorded students at St. Benedict’s, as it foreshadowed the unique mix of students that the school would commit to serve for years to come.2 On December 22, 1870, the city was in the midst of a cold snap, but four priests huddled in the pastoral residence of St. Mary’s Church to adopt bylaws for the ‘‘Order of St. Benedict of New Jersey.’’ Abbot Boniface Wimmer traveled from St. Vincent Abbey to meet with Father Roman Hell, who, despite his demonic surname, was the spiritual leader of the Newark monastery, and two pastors of local German Catholic parishes, one of whom was Father Peter Henry Lemke, a missionary priest who had helped persuade Wimmer to come to the United States twenty-five years earlier. Abbot Boniface and his monks now operated a successful seminary, college, and preparatory school in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, based on a straightforward educational philosophy . ‘‘Only God can create something out of nothing,’’ reasoned Wimmer, which led him to believe students should be taught ‘‘first what is necessary, then what is useful, and finally what is beautiful and will contribute to their refinement.’’3 In 1866 Wimmer assigned Hell to Newark, where he helped found one of the first Catholic secondary schools and colleges in New Jersey. When Wimmer and Hell met with the two other priests, they unanimously agreed on the following: ‘‘The objects of this corporation are divided between the spiritual guidance of souls and the educational training of youth.’’4 The founding of St. Benedict’s was sandwiched between two great events in Newark’s history: the two hundredth anniversary of its founding and the Newark Industrial Exposition of 1872. The first event paid tribute to a city’s founding fathers and their Puritan ideals, while the second saluted Newark’s industrial diversity and manufacturing 20 | ‘‘necessary, useful, and beautiful’’ might. A second set of founding fathers, a band of religious...