Thursday, November 5, 2009

Calling All Irish Men in Alabama



Do you have Irish heritage?

The Birmingham Division of the Ancient Order of Hibernians is holding an informational meeting at the Our Lady of Sorrows Assembly Hall on Thursday, November 19 at 7.00pm. Refreshments will be provided.

The Hibernians are the largest Irish Catholic organization in the country. It is a men's charitable and fraternal organization with membership throughout the U.S. The American organization was founded in 1836 in New York and traces its roots to 16th century Ireland.

Since its inception, the Hibernians have been at the forefront of promoting Irish Catholic culture and causes in the States. The group's motto and primary mission is to promote "Friendship, Unity and Christian Charity."

Membership is available to males over the age of 16 who are Roman Catholic and Irish by descent or birth. Please contact Dan Murphy at dmurphy8@gmail.com for more information.
The photo above is of James Larkin, a leader of the 1916 Irish Rising against the British Crown.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

New Resting Place for Mass Grave Irish Immigrants in New York


New resting place for mass grave immigrants in New York
LARA MARLOWE
Mon, Oct 19, 2009




IN THE mid-19th century, newly arrived Irish immigrants wandered Staten Island, penniless and disoriented, scrounging for food, waiting for children, spouses, siblings or parents interned in the quarantine hospital to die or be discharged.


They were remembered here this weekend, at a moving ceremony that united those who left Ireland and those who stayed, forever linked by what Edward Cardinal Egan called “the immense suffering” of the emigrants.


A dozen men in green kilts, white Aran jumpers and berets with Tricolour plumes, from the Ancient Order of Hibernians, were pallbearers for two oversized coffins. A beige coffin contained the remains of adults, a white one the bones of children. Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Micheál Martin, the Ambassador to Washington, Michael Collins, and Niall Burgess, the Consul General in New York, represented those who stayed. After the service, women wearing Tricolour sashes seized the opportunity to have their photographs taken with Martin – proof that those who stayed still cared about the ones who crossed the Atlantic.
Some 600,000 European immigrants passed through the Staten Island immigrant station between 1799 and 1858, when it was burned to the ground and transferred, eventually to Ellis Island.


“The Irish influx during the Famine destroyed the quarantine hospital,” explains Lynn Rogers, executive director of the Friends of Abandoned Cemeteries. “The Irish relatives of those in quarantine built a shanty town. The locals didn’t want them. A lot stayed on in Staten Island, including my ancestors.”


At least 1,000 people died in the quarantine hospital, of typhoid and other diseases. They were buried in a mass grave across the road from what is now the Staten Island ferry station. There were Germans, Scots, English, Poles, Czechs and others, but Rogers says the majority were Irish.


In 1957, a car park was built over the mass grave. “We found a whole row of remains cut off at the knee; a bulldozer rolled over them,” says Rogers. “People back then didn’t care.”
Six years ago, the Friends of Abandoned Cemeteries interrupted a plan to build a courthouse on the site of the mass grave, forcing the authorities to excavate and remove the remains of the quarantine victims. Until Saturday, the remains were held in storage. They’ve now been placed in a 19th century receiving tomb, while the former parking lot is transformed into a cemetery.


Cardinal Egan linked the wave of immigration in the 19th century to the present day. “It’s not easy for those who are coming now, just as it was not easy for these children,” he said, gesturing towards the white casket, “and these adults,” he nodded at the beige one. “Imagine the pain of those who saw their relatives put into a mass grave. But somehow we made it, and we became citizens of the United States of America...”


“The famine is the foundation of Irish-American identity,” Consul General Noel Burgess said later. “You’re struck by the strength and integrity of the memory here in America. In Ireland, we dealt with it by forgetting for six generations.”


Martin’s four-day visit to the US started in the 21st century, explaining the Lisbon Treaty. By Saturday, he had journeyed back to the 19th century. At number 7 State Street, on the southernmost tip of Manhattan, he visited Our Lady of the Rosary, where a home for Irish immigrant girls received more than 100,000 of the 308,000 young Irishwomen who passed through the Port of New York between 1883 and 1908.


Maureen Murphy, a history professor at Hofstra University, quotes a certain Cardinal Gibbons, explaining the protective mission of the home at the end of the 19th century: “These young maidens, after escaping the perils of the sea and landing on our shores, become a prey to the land sharks that infest your city” who sought “to rob those innocent and confiding women” of “the jewel of purity, for which the Irish maiden to all the world is so conspicuous.”


Like most of the women who left Ireland at the end of the 19th century, Murphy’s own grandmother worked as a maid. “Irish emigration was unusual, because there were more women than men,” Murphy explains. “The eldest boy inherited the land. One daughter was dowered off. Opportunity for boys depended on the economy, but for the girls there was always work.”
Murphy and Fr Peter Meehan, the priest at Our Lady of the Rosary, want to turn number 7 State Street into a research centre. Fr Peter found five leatherbound registers in a safe, containing the names, ages, county of origin, date of arrival and address of destination of 60,000 women – a gold mine for historians and genealogists.


As a politician, Martin said, he most enjoyed his day on Capitol Hill. But as a former history teacher, he was in his element discussing books with Murphy: “In my journey here, and through the various events I attend, a door keeps opening into the story of the Irish in America for me.”


© 2009 The Irish Times




New Standing Meeting Date and Agenda

After two successful trial runs, I am pleased to announce our Division's new standing meeting date and agenda:


  • Location and Times: St. Paul's Cathedral for Mass 6:30 pm, St. Paul's Cathedral Board Room for meeting at 7:00 pm; Matthew's Bar & Grill for pints afterward
  • Date: Third Tuesday of every month (10/20/2009, November 2009 to be determined due to Thanksgiving, December 2009 to be determined due to Christmas, 1/19/2010, 2/16/2010, 3/16/2010, etc.)

Anyone is welcome to attend the Mass and post-meeting pints. Brothers only for the meeting.

Please contact me (dmurphy8@gmail.com) with any questions. Slainte!

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Jasper Coal - Half Way to St. Patrick's Day Party on 9/19/09 - Fundraiser for AOH


Come on downtown to Matthew's Bar and Grill (2208 Morris Avenue) on Saturday, September 19, 2009 for a performance by Alabama's finest Irish rebel band, Jasper Coal (http://www.jaspercoal.com/).

The show begins at 8:00 p.m. and will go on until after midnight. The band has generously offered to donate a portion of the $7 cover charge to our AOH division.

We are extremely fortunate to have an Irish band of this caliber in Alabama and you are guaranteed to hear the most authentic pub and rebel music this side of Boston.

You can either get on a plane to hear legit versions of Merry Plough Boy, Follow Me Up to Carlow, and Come Out Ye Black and Tans, or just get in your car and pilot yourself to Matthew's on 9/19.

Up the Republic.

Friday, July 31, 2009

Father Coyle Memorial Mass - Tuesday, August 11, 12:10 p.m. - St. Paul's Cathedral

Celebration of Father Coyle's Life
August 11 at St. Paul's Cathedral
by John Wright, Jr.

The 12:10 Mass on Tuesday, August 11 at St. Paul's Cathedral and a reception will honor the life of Father James Edwin Coyle on the 88th anniversary of his assassination in Birmingham. The Irish-born priest served as Pastor of St. Paul's for almost seventeen years, from October of 1904 until his death at 48 years of age.

Father Coyle courageously defended the Catholic Church and what Catholics believe during a time of public anti-Catholic economic and psychological persecution, promoted by the Ku Klux Klan and the True Americans, a powerful anti-Catholic group in Birmingham.In the early evening of Thursday, August 11, 1921, Father Coyle was shot in cold blood as he sat in the swing on the porch of the former parish rectory.

He was killed by an emotionally unstable minister, who was a Klansman, because Father had presided at the marriage of the man's daughter, Ruth, to a dark-skinned Puerto Rican, Pedro Gussman, less than two hours before the murder. The shooter was found not guilty after a one-week trial held in the former Jefferson County Courthouse, then located in the same block as St. Paul's.

This year's celebration of Father Coyle's life is co-sponsored by The Cathedral of St. Paul, the Father James E. Coyle Knights of Columbus Council 9862 based at St. Paul's, the FatherJames E. Coyle Birmingham Divison of the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Father James E. Coyle Memorial Project.

The reception will be held immediately after Mass in the Cathedral Life Center. "We invite everyone to join us as we give thanks for Father Coyle's heroic, faithful priesthood during what was a tense and fearful time for Catholics in Birmingham," said Jim Pinto, Jr., Director of the Father Coyle Memorial Project.

More information about Father Coyle can be found at thewebsite, www.FatherCoyle.org.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Meeting on Tuesday, July 21, 6.30 p.m. at St. Paul's Cathedral

A Chairde,

For a change of pace, we will be holding our meeting this month downtown at the Cathedral of St. Paul on Tuesday, July 21 at 6.30p.m. Details will follow on the meeting room at the Cathedral.

After the meeting, we will head to Matthew's Bar & Grill for fellowship, craic, and delicious draft pints of Guinness, on special for $3.50 for the Hibernians thanks to Nathan Tucker.

Beanacht de Agat,
Dan

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Father James E. Coyle


Our Division is named after Father James E. Coyle, Pastor of St. Paul's Cathedral in Birmingham, Alabama during the early 1900's and a native of Ireland. Below is a letter I submitted to the Birmingham News on the 87th anniversary of his death.


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Dear Editor,

On August 11, 1921, Father James Coyle, rector of St. Paul’s Cathedral in downtown Birmingham, was murdered by a local minister and member of the KKK. The minister shot the Irish priest in the head while he was swinging on the porch of the parish rectory as retribution for performing the marriage of the minister’s daughter to a Catholic Puerto Rican.

Although an eyewitness observed the murder, and the shooter did not dispute that he had killed Father Coyle, the minister was found not guilty of the murder after a trial presided over by a judge who was a Klansmen. The KKK funded the minister’s legal defense, which was conducted by a team of attorneys including future Supreme Court Justice and civil rights champion Hugo Black.

Birmingham’s civil rights history is rightly well-documented. Less well known, however, is the past persecution suffered by the city’s Catholics, particularly in the early 1900’s. As the Magic City rose out of the red clay mountains to become a national industrial power, thousands of immigrants flooded into the city to meet an insatiable demand for labor. Many of these immigrants were Catholics from Ireland and other European countries.

The influx of largely Catholic immigrants created a widespread anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment, which translated into active terrorism by groups such as the KKK, the Know-Nothing party, and the True Americans.

Father Coyle was an outspoken defender of the Catholic community at a time when such advocacy could result in physical attack or death. On this 87th anniversary of Father Coyle’s assassination, we remember his heroism and life of courageous ministry. A memorial Mass will be held for Father Coyle on August 11 at 12:10 p.m. at St. Paul’s Cathedral. All are welcome to attend.