Faith Works 12-8-23

Faith Works 12-8-23
Jeff Gill

Our local Christmas history, era by era
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By 1844, Father Lamy had finally gotten a church building built for his parish of St. Francis de Sales in Newark, Ohio.

Jean-Baptiste Lamy had been born in France thirty years earlier, and over forty years later he would be buried as the retired first Archbishop of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the crypt of the St. Francis Cathedral he helped build.

Sunday, December 22 of 1844 would be the sixth anniversary of his ordination. It was also the fourth Sunday of the month, and as the priest for now four congregations, he was based in Danville, Ohio where his first parish was already well established. St. Luke's by now had a building, and in Mount Vernon, Father Lamy had built St. Vincent de Paul parish, so dedicated as his favorite saint; however, in his seminary studies he had come to love the writings of St. Francis de Sales, and that was the dedication he asked for his Newark parish.

It was to establish new parishes that he had come, responding to a call put forward into Europe from Bishop John Purcell of the Diocese of Cincinnati, which at that time encompassed all of the state of Ohio. The newly ordained Lamy wanted to pursue his calling on a mission frontier, and he found Maryland migrants and Irish and German immigrants hungry for a Catholic priest's service.

In Newark, as John Horgan notes in his 1975 biography "Lamy of Santa Fe," the priest writes to his bishop that he has a largely German parish, "We have then a very good choir of German Catholics with some fair instruments. They sing very well, but almost all in German, expect the Kyrie, Gloria and Credo in Latin, till they get some books of church music." Unsurprisingly, he asks for some additional financial support to do just that from his bishop, noting "we have got a little help from the Widow McCarthy" so they don't all appear to have been German.

There was a church building, on the location where the 1887 sanctuary stands today, but it was as yet unplastered inside; due to some rounds of illness in Newark, Father Lamy decided to start building a rectory for his monthly residence, trusting in his bishop's retroactive permission and his confidence that very soon they would have their own resident priest.

But on that Christmas Sunday, Lamy's sixth as a priest, on his regular visit to Newark, we can trust that the sanctuary was ornamented "with garlands of evergreen all around with a kind of lustre" as he records was the case a few nights later in Danville; Lamy's good friend Father Machebeuf in Sandusky wrote him that they had greenery, three hundred candles lit, and parishioners had cut perhaps that many stars out of gold paper and affixed them to the ceiling.

So we can imagine that Christmas Sunday in Newark of 1844: garlands of green in contrast to the raw unplastered brick, myriad bright candles, glittering stars overhead, and carols sung in German of the Christ child's birth, "Die Geburt des Christkindes."


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he wanders in other centuries from time to time. Tell him about times past that capture your imagination at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.