In the past few weeks as I observed my golden anniversary of ordination to the priesthood, May 29, 1971 – May 29, 2021, a number of people have asked me about these 50 years. The truth of the Latin phrase Tempus Fugit (Time Flies) is my experience. In response to these inquiries, I decided to write a reflection on the past 50 years of my priesthood. It will appear in THE CATHOLIC STAR HERALD in a few installments.
This is the fourth.
In 1981, after five years as assistant pastor in Saints Philip and James Parish in the northeast Bronx, I was transferred to the Parish of the Ascension on West 107th Street off Broadway on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which is a densely populated area of New York City.
The parish boundaries stretch from the Hudson River to Central Park West and from the upper 90s to West 110th Street. Sections of the neighborhood were beginning to undergo gentrification. Developers reclaimed abandoned buildings and on empty lots constructed new buildings – all of these would rent for market value. Mansions are found on Riverside Drive; beautiful brownstones are located on the streets west of Broadway; a large New York City public housing project dominates Amsterdam Avenue; single-room occupancy buildings were part of the housing mix; tenements and large, solidly constructed apartment buildings make up the remaining of the housing stock.
Talk about a mix of people: young urban professionals, graduate students at nearby Columbia University and Barnard College, immigrants from the Dominican Republic and Haiti, an elderly Puerto Rican community, wealthy people, a sizable Jewish community, many professionals and the old-timers who stayed in the neighborhood through the dark ages of the Upper West Side.
Msgr. Thomas Shelley, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York and an emeritus professor of history at Fordham University, on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of the establishment of the parish, recently wrote and published a scholarly history of Ascension titled “Upper West Side Catholics: Liberal Catholicism in a Conservative Archdiocese,” which tells the story of this area.
The pastor of Ascension, also the area dean, was in the last year of his term as pastor. He had been served by a priest administrator, recently transferred, who ran the business and the ministries of the parish. There was another assistant pastor who was a Spaniard. The parish school was staffed by a lay faculty and administration. It was very much a neighborhood school.
The parish employed a youth minister, whose position and job description were new to me. Two Masses in Spanish were offered on Sunday and one daily in the evening; there were three Masses in English on Sunday and one daily in the morning. There was a religious education coordinator who oversaw a program for the children of the public schools. Two religious women staffed a nearby parish-owned-and-operated retreat house that offered a variety of programs in Spanish.
The parish was very active sacramentally and had a fine program of preparation for Baptism for the parents and godparents in which the laity were involved. A senior citizen center sponsored by the city was located in the lower church and frequented daily by an aging neighborhood population.
I arrived in the parish the weekend of Labor Day and spent the first few months finding my way around the neighborhood and establishing my pastoral areas of responsibility. I gave significant attention to the parish newcomers, whom I considered underserved by the parish. I was busy about the usual sacramental ministries and particularly attentive to preparation for preaching at the English Masses, as there were increasing numbers of educated, newly arrived Upper West-siders attending Mass.
I had a First Friday Communion call way down Columbus Avenue and 110th Street to a tenement – a hovel in which lived a very old lady who was taken care of by a motley group of junkies and homeless people. She put the fear of God in them, and with regal authority, would gather them in prayer around her as I administered the sacrament. It was quite a scene, but the holiness of God was palpable there.
Late on a cold December night, I responded to a call from her for the Last Rites, and walking up to 110th Street and then way down to Columbus Avenue I was stopped by a New York City cop who ordered me into the car and drove me to the address. The cop warned me to never go out alone to that area, which was filled with crime and drugs. I thanked him for his concern and told him I would be all right. Despite the danger there, I had seen the face of God in that woman and her friends. The cop waited for me and drove me back to the rectory. I was kept busy during the winter and spring months of the next year.
Before I knew it, July 1 and the new pastor arrived. On July 2, I received a call from the priest-secretary of Cardinal Cooke to meet the cardinal the next day at his Residence. Anxiously, I went down to the Residence wondering what the “boss” wanted! It was my first time to the cardinal’s Residence, located on the corner of 50th Street and Madison Avenue, next to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. As I entered that imposing building, it never passed my mind that years later I would live there for eight years.
The Eminence was very solicitous about me and even inquired about my mother, and then he got to the reason he wanted to see me. He was appointing me pastor of the Parish of Saint Teresa on the lower east side of Manhattan.
He reviewed some information about the parish, which he had been provided by Chancery officials, and he expressed his concern about appointing me at the recommendation of the Priest Personnel Board, as I was only ordained 11 years. In those days in the Archdiocese of New York, a pastor was normally appointed after 25 years of ordination. He was concerned for me and for the parish. He told me not to stress out about finances, as the parish was one of the poorest in the Archdiocese. He said that was his worry! My priority was to be the pastoral care of the parishioners. Until I received a letter of appointment from him, I was not to say a word to anyone. I left the Residence in a tizzy.
When I told my mother about the new assignment, she said, “Go and love the people” – which is the advice I have repeated when I appoint a pastor. On the Sunday when my transfer was announced, I said to the parishioners of Ascension that given my brief time among them I identified with the song, “Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye,” as I was only there about 10 months.
The transfer and the appointment were so unexpected – and I had two weeks to move – that those final days at Ascension are cloudy in my memory. However, I had to accept that I was ordained to serve the Church in New York and that service involved the needs of the Archdiocese as my bishop identified them and my promise of obedience to him.
Despite the shortness of my appointment to Ascension, I learned valuable lessons for future priestly ministry. Among them, the sweat equity program that enabled poor people to put their sweat into preserving good housing stock which, would become their apartments and allow them to remain in the neighborhood at affordable rents. A group of young Latinos in the parish who were involved in this project were my early mentors in affordable housing.
I also recognized the need for a youth minister, and I learned not to ignore the old-timers, many of whom at Ascension were from Ireland. They were frightened by the changes in the neighborhood and the makeup of the parish. They needed to know the parish was as much theirs as the newcomers.
A young Latino music group was in charge of the music for the Sunday 10 a.m. Spanish Mass and their music was very Latino-Caribbean in style. It attracted lots of young Latinos. The importance of the parish music program as a means of evangelization became a pastoral priority. The need to improve my ability to communicate in Spanish either in conversations or in preaching was more evident to me than before. The involvement of the laity in evangelization was not an option for priestly ministry but a necessity. The biggest lesson learned and never forgotten from that short time at Ascension: To be a priest, I had to be a father of the poor.
After 10 wonderful months on the Upper West Side, I left on a Saturday afternoon and drove downtown to the Lower East Side to the historic Parish of Saint Teresa, where I would live and minister for the next 21 years. Little did I know or realize what was to come.
(To be continued.)
Past installments of Bishop Sullivan’s reflections:
The true Church is one of many races