St. Joseph Church celebrates 250 years of faith and fortitude

WEST MILFORD — On March 16, 2014, St. Joseph Church will open a year-long celebration of the founding of its congregation in the year 1765. The West Milford Messenger will take a look back at its 250-year history in two parts to see how it all started.

Part 1
In the beginning
It can be said that being a Roman Catholic in the colony of New Jersey in the mid 1700s was most assuredly not politically correct. Those early settlers lived under Queen Anne’s 1701 ruling that directed the governor, Lord Cornbury, to “permit liberty of conscience to all persons except Papists.”

In 1764, a German merchant, Peter Hasenclever, was sent by the English to mine the natural resources in the Ringwood-Greenwood Lake area. He brought in workers from Germany and the following year their families joined them. Hailing from the Black Forest Region of Germany, the Marion, Sehulster and Struble families were among the first to settle in the Macopin area of what was later to be named West Milford (in 1834).

These Catholic families, whose descendants can still be found in the pews of St. Joseph Church, are considered the founders of the congregation, the oldest in the state of New Jersey. Their faith and courage enabled their religion to take root and grow in the soil of America and their determination to worship God in their own way laid the foundation of the church that is home to 825 families today.

Visits from a missionary
The German Catholic pioneers began to settle in but soon missed the presence of a priest and the freedom to openly practice their religion. Hearing of the existence of missionaries in Maryland and Pennsylvania, a few brave souls saddled their horses and traveled for weeks through dense forests, returning with Fr. Ferdinand Farmer, a German-born Jesuit priest.

Farmer, one of the true early Catholic missionaries in New Jersey, was based at St. Joseph Church, Philadelphia, the only standing Catholic church between Montreal and Florida at that time. This church owed its existence to William Penn.

“When William Penn received a royal grant for the Pennsylvania colony from the Crown, he purposely sought to exclude the traditional ban on all but adherents of the Protestant religion,” said Rev. Monsignor Raymond J. Kupke, author and adjunct professor of church history at Seton Hall University.

Penn’s aim was to protect the Quakers but it opened the door to establishing the Catholic church in Philadelphia, which still stands and continues to house historical records from the Macopin settlers.

And so a relationship was formed between Farmer and the good people of Macopin that would span 20 years.

In order to celebrate Mass in this area, Farmer travelled on horseback over rough-hewn paths and Indian trails, carrying his vestments, an altar stone, a chalice and wine. His visits were few and far between, and in the interim the pioneers met quietly in private homes to pray together.

According to the monsignor, Catholics were few in number in New Jersey and the remoteness of the West Milford area likely lessened the chance of problems with the British.

“As long as they kept their heads down, they did not attract active persecution. And even then it would be more along the lines of discrimination, rather than actual persecution,” he said.

When Farmer sensed his imminent demise, he instructed his Macopin flock to meet regularly and pray the Rosary. He died in 1786 and thereafter there is just one recorded visit from a priest over the following 25 to 30 years.

Have faith, will travel
A new era of independence and religious freedom came at the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783, but the people of Macopin continued to be without a spiritual leader or a house of worship. Although still contending with some prejudice, these unwavering settlers maintained their faith and passed it on to their children.

During this time, in order to marry or have a baby baptized they had to make the long and arduous trip by horse and buggy to St. Peter’s Church on Barclay Street in New York City. It was in this church in 2001 that the past met the present.

After the fall of the first Twin Tower on Sept. 11, 2001, the body of Father Mychal Judge, O.F.M., was carried from the World Trade Center site by emergency personnel and placed before the altar in nearby St. Peter’s Church. Mychal, a Franciscan friar, was a New York City Fire Department chaplain and a former pastor of St. Joseph Church, West Milford, from 1979 to 1985.

Close to the main altar was a marble image of Christ in his tomb, a relic from the altar of the original St. Peter’s Church. Was it before this altar that the people of Macopin stood to marry or have their child baptized? How many of their descendants were ministered to by Mychal during his years in West Milford?

Next – Part II - Time to build a church

Sources: Saint Joseph Church, West Milford, history files; Rev. Monsignor Raymond J. Kupke, Ph.D., author, church historian; “Built on Faith Since 1765” Ginny Raue, 2005; http://www.newadvent.org; Hans Niederstrasser; Mary O’Neill; Paul Kiel; “NJ Baptismal Records, 1759-1781” - Saint Joseph Church, Philadelphia