BROOKLYN — On July 25, 1822, the cornerstone was laid for Brooklyn’s oldest Roman Catholic Church, St. James Cathedral-Basilica at 248 Jay Street.
Brooklyn’s first Catholic church was organized by a group of men that included Hugh McLaughlin, whose son and namesake would become Brooklyn’s Democratic Party leader; William Purcell, who worked in the Navy Yard; dairy farmer George McCloskey and County Wexford-born Peter Turner, who had come to Brooklyn from Ireland around 1800. (A bust of Turner stands in the churchyard near Jay and Chapel Streets.) After extensive fund raising they broke ground for a building in April 1822.
George H. Streeton was the architect who designed the Neo-Georgian structure, with a handsome verdigris copper-clad steeple. Before the building was constructed, Brooklyn’s Roman Catholics had to take ferries to Manhattan to worship. The building is flanked on three sides by an old cemetery — said to be the oldest Catholic burial ground on Long Island.
In Spring of 1823, lawyer and historian Gabriel Furman happily reported: “Morning early and clear and pleasant, but rather damp … This morning St. James Roman Catholic Church in this village, consecrated by the Rt. Rev. Bishop Conelly — It is the first Roman Catholic Church erected on Long Island.”
St. James became the cathedral of Brooklyn in 1853. Its bishop was John Loughlin, who served from 1853 to 1891. In 1896, with the succession of Brooklyn’s second bishop, it was officially renamed the procathedral. Pro, in this instance, means in place of, for that bishop was planning an elaborate new cathedral of his own, the giant Immaculate Conception Cathedral, which never materialized. The procathedral did not become the cathedral once again until 1972. (Cathedral means literally that church which contains the cathedra, or chair of the bishop. Size does not a cathedral make, but, rather, ecclesiastical function. Therefore there can be only one cathedral in any diocese or see).
St. James is the third-oldest Catholic church in the whole of New York City, and the sixth oldest Catholic church in New York State.
In Myrna & Harvey Frommer’s book It Happened in Brooklyn (Harcourt Brace & Co.) Tom Booras, a Long Island businessman, reminisces about his boyhood in Brooklyn at a time when it was a Catholic practice to fast from midnight Saturday until Sunday morning mass in order to receive Holy Communion. He and his pals found that St. James had a 1:15 a.m. mass. He related how “… my buddies and I would hang out at a corner tavern on Jay Street, drinking beer till midnight. A quarter to one Sunday morning, we’d cross over to St. James and sit down like the little holy boys we were. A half-hour later we’d get up and walk down the aisle for communion. We’d be kneeling at the rail, and the priest passing before us would always stiffen as the smell of the beer hit him.”
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2008
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