A manuscript discovered in the archives of the Archdiocese of Newark offers valuable and even inspiring insights into the heretofore largely unreported stories of early Catholics in southern New Jersey.
The manuscript is published in full in the quarterly journal American Catholic Studies, published at Villanova University. The manuscript was discovered by Professor Peter J. Wosh of New York University whose article situating and contextualizing the manuscript also appears in American Catholic Studies.
Wosh explains that like other northeastern urban centers, the cities of northern New Jersey grew rapidly from the large-scale immigration from Ireland and Germany in the 1840s. Such Catholic immigrants largely populated the cities and factory towns of northern New Jersey, but they “constituted a much less visible and numerically significant presence in the country towns and rural backwaters of Atlantic, Burlington, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland, Gloucester and Salem counties.”
South Jersey’s Roman Catholics remain largely absent from the historical record, but thanks to this manuscript some wonderful stories have been recaptured.
One concerns an unnamed girl of 18, living as a domestic in a family that noticed she did not eat meat on Fridays. The Master of the family tried to compel her to violate her conscience and even “resorted to personal violence; but his effort were all in vain.”
Among some others who were named are the “family of Judge Ward” who lived a few miles below Millville, Honest John McCrea of Cape May County, and John Scanlan of Gloucester City, known for his “manly virtues” and for his “courage and fidelity in maintaining his religion and encouraging all to attend to their religious duties.”
The manuscript, entitled “A Short History of the Condition of the Catholic Church in the Southern Half of New Jersey in 1848” was written by Father Edmund Q. S. Waldron in 1879 at the request of Bishop Michael Augustine Corrigan of Newark. It was based on his three years of missionary work in these then rural areas.
Waldron’s work was not easy. He notes that “as in many other places in the country where no Catholic priest had been sent and no altar erected, great prejudice and even bitterness against our religion prevailed.”
He experienced threats of being stoned and beaten, and was pelted with an egg which spread its contents all over the back of his cassock. He let such things pass, however, “without allowing them to be the occasion of worse troubles.”
The glimpses contained in this manuscript make it clear that the historical record of Catholicism in southern New Jersey has grown notably thanks to Father Waldron, Professor Wosh, and American Catholic Studies.
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