St. Mary's Church Sacked

St. Mary's Church  Sacked

 Between 1830 and 1850, two million immigrants entered the United States, forty percent of them German and Irish Catholics. Prejudice against Catholics and Catholicism became epidemic and anti-Catholic and anti immigrant riots occurred in various places including Newark. On the morning of 5 September 1854, a large crowd of armed men from various Protestant Orange lodges and members of the American Protestant Association (APA) were parading through the streets of Newark. As the day wore on, many became “heated with liquor” as the newspapers reported. They paraded from Broad Street up William Street where they encountered little St. Mary’s Church.

One of the marchers, according to the subsequent investigation, threw a stone that ignited a riot, with the marchers concluding that it had come from the church. In any case, an innocent spectator, one Thomas McCarthy, was killed, and the rioters burst into the church and destroyed its furnishings, including a statue of the Virgin whose disfigured form was preserved. Strangely, its missing head was only recovered years later by Abbot Ernest Helmstetter, OSB, who encountered it by coincidence at St. Vincent Archabbey. The statue can still be seen at Newark Abbey.

Menawhile, Fr. Geyerstanger had removed the Blessed Sacrament to a neighbor’s house at the risk o his life. The mob next broke into the rectory where they were met by the courageous housekeeper, Mrs. Dietrich, grandmother of James Zilliox, the future first abbot of St. Mary’s. The story was told that she faced down the attackers and did excellent work with a broom stick. The cost of repair of the church amounted to $1900 which Fr. Nicholas had to bear.

In 1853, Bishop Bayley had assumed care of a diocese comprising the entire State of New Jersey. In an appeal for financial support to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Lyons, France in June 1854, Bayley stated that he was able to count on only thirty-three priests and not a single Catholic institution or religious community. The same day Bayley wrote this letter, he wrote to Bishop Michael O’Connor of Pittsburgh enquiring about the Benedictines of St. Vincent, thus hinting at a potential solution to one of his problems.

Father Nicholas, for his part, eventually returned to New York and to the Diocese of Brooklyn where he worked until shortly before his death on 13 December 1891 at the age of eighty-three, having labored in the mission to German speaking Catholics for fifty-five years, He was invited to spend his last years at St. Mary’s where he died. He is buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery in East Orange. In his will, he left vestments, books and the contents of several bank accounts to St. Mary’s Abbey.

Fr. Hilary Pfraengle, second Abbot of St. Mary’s, in a letter to Fr. Hugo Pfaff, OSB, designated these funds for the land purchased for the new foundation begun in 1889 in Manchester, New Hampshire. The books also went north to enhance the library of the fledgling  St. Anselm College. While not a man with the vision and drive of a Wimmer to establish the Benedictine Order in the United States, Fr. Nicholas Balleis left an indelible mark on the history of St. Mary’s Abbey and on the Benedictines in the United States.