NEW YORK
20
NEW YORK
Important factor in Now Year oalculations. The An-
nunciation, with which Dionysiusl)i'f;;iii the Christian
era, was lixcil on 2.") Mardi, ami lircaiiic Xinv Year's
Day forKnjilaml. iiu'urlytinirsaiul I'roiii thclhirlrcnth
century to 1 Jan., 1752, wlicii the proscnt custom
was introduced there. Some countries (c. g. Ger-
many) began with Christmas, thus being almost in
harmony with the ancient Germans, who made the
winter solstice their starting-point. Notwithstanding
the movable character of Easter, France and the Low
Countries took it as the first day of the year, while
Russia, up to the eighteenth century, made September
the first month. The western nations, however,
since the sixteenth, or, at the latest, the eighteenth
century, have adopted and retained the first of Janu-
ary, in Christian liturgy the Church does not refer
to the first of the year, any more than she does to the
fact that the first Sunday of Advent is the first day of
the ecclesiastical year.
In the United States of America the great feast of the Epiphany has ceased to be a holyday of obligation, but New Year continues in force. Since the myste- ries of the Epiphany are commemorated on Christmas — the Orientals consider the feasts one and the same in import — it was thought advisable to retain by prefer- ence, under the title "Circumcision of Our Lord Jesus Christ", New Year's Day as one of the six feasts of obligation. The Fathers of the Third Plenary Coun- cil of Baltimore petitioned Rome to this effect, and their petition was granted (Con. Plen. Bait., Ill, pp. lOosqq.). (See Circumcision, Fea,st OF the; Chro- nology; Christmas.)
ScHROD in Kirchentex,, s. v. Neujahr; Welte, ibid., s. v. Feste; .Abr.vh.vms in Hastings, Diet, of the Bible, a. v. Time; Macdon.\ld, Chronologies and Calendars (London, 1S97); Eder- 8HE1M, The Temple, Its Ministry and Services at the time of Jesus Christ, X, xv; Browne in Did. Christ. Antiq., s. v.; Harper's Classical Did. (New York, 1897), s. v. Calendarium; Feasey, Chrislmastide in Amer. Ecd. Rev. (Dec, 1909); The Old English New Year, ibid. (Jan., 1907); Thurston, Christmas Day and the Christian Calendar, ibid. (Dec, 1898; Jan.. 1899). For Rab- binic legends see Jewish Encycl., a. v. New Year.
John J. Tiernet.
New York, Archdiocese of (Neo-Eboracensis); see erected 8 .\pril, 1808; made archiepiscopal 19 July, 18.50; comprises the Boroughs of Manhattan, Bronx, and Richmond in the City of New York, and the Counties of Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, SuUivan, Ulster, and Westchester in the State of New York; also the Bahama Islands (British Possessions); an area of 4717 square miles in New York and 4466 in the Bahama Islands. The latter territory was placed in 1886 under this jurisdiction by the Holy See because the facilities of access were best from New York; it formerly belonged to the Diocese of Charleston. The suffragans of New York are the Dioceses of Albany, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Ogdensburg, Rochester, and Syra- cuse in the State of New York, and Newark and Tren- ton in New Jersey. All these, in 1808, made up the territory of the original diocese. The first division took place 23 April, 1847, when the creation of the Dioceses of Albany and Buffalo cut off the nort,hern and western sections of the State; and the second, in 1853, when Brooklyn and Newark were erected into separate sees.
New York is now the largest see in population, and the most important in influence and material pros- perity of all the ecclesiastical divisions of the Church in Continental United States.
I. Colonial Period. — Nearly a century before Heiuy Hudson sailed up the great river that bears his name, the Catholic navigators Verrazano and Gomez, had guided their ships along its shores and placed it under the patronage of St. Anthony. The Calvini.stic Hollanders, to whom Hudson gave this foundation for a new colony, manifested their loyalty to their state Church by ordaining that in New Netherland the "Reformed Christian religion ac- cording to the doctrines of the Synod of Dordrecht"
should be dominant. It is probable, but not certain,
that there were priests with Verrazano and Gomez,
and that from a Catholic altar went up the first
prayer uttered on the site of the [jresent great metrop-
olis of the New World. While public worship by
Catholics was not tolerated, the generosity of the
Dutch governor, William Kieft, and the people of
New Amsterdam to the Jesuit martyr. Father Isaac
Jogues, in 1643, and after him, to his brother Jesuits,
Fathers Bressani and Le Moyne, must be remembered
to their everlasting credit. Father Jogues was the
first priest to traverse the Slate of New York; the
first to minister within the limits of the Diocese of
New York. When he reached Manhattan Island,
after his rescue from captivity in the summer of 1643,
he found there two Catholics, a young Irishman and a
Portuguese woman, whose confessions he heard.
St. Alary's, the first rude chajiel in which Mass was said in the State of New York, was begun, on 18 November, 16.5.5, on the banks of the lake where the City of Syracuse now stands, by the Jesuit mission- aries. Fathers Claude Dablon and Pierre Chaumonot. In the same year another Jesuit, Feather Simon Le Moyne, journeyed down the river to New Amster- dam, as we learn from a letter sent by the Dutch preacher, Megapolensis (a renegade Catholic), to the Classis at Amsterdam, telling them that the Jesuit had visited Manhattan "on account of the Papists residing here, and especially for the accommodation of the French sailors, who are Papists and who have arrived here with a good prize." The Church had no foothold on Manhattan Island until after 1664, when the Duke of York claimed it for an English colony. Twenty years later, the Catholic go\'ernor, Thomas Dongan, not only fostered his own faith, but enacted the first law passed in New York establishing rehgious liberty. It is believed that the first Mass said on the island (30 October, 1683) was in a chapel he opened about where the custom house now stands. With him came three English Jesuits, Fathers Thomas Harvey, Henry Harrison, and Charles Gage, and they soon had a Latin school in the same neighbourhood. Of this Jacob Leisler, the fanatical usurper of the government, wrote to the Governor of Boston, in August, 1689: "I have formerly urged to inform your Honr. that Coll Dongan, in his time did erect a Jesuite Colledge upon cullour to learn Latine to the Judges West — Mr. Graham, Judge Palmer, and John Tudor did contribute their sones for sometime but no boddy imitating them, the colledge vanished" (O'Callaghan, "Documentary Hist, of N. Y.", II, 23).
With the fail of James II and the advent of William of Orange to the English throne, New York's Catholic colony was almost stamped out by drastic penal laws (see New York, State of). In spite of them, how- ever, during the years that followed a few scattered representatives of the Faith drifted in and settled down unobstrusively. To minister to them there came now and then from Philadelphia a zealous Ger- man Jesuit missionary, Father Ferdinand Steinmayer, who was commonly called "Father Farmer". Gath- ering them together, he said Mass in the house of a German fellow-countryman in Wall Street, in a loft in Water Street, and wherever else they could find ac- commodation. Then came the Revolution, and in this connexion, owing to one of the prominent politi- cal issues of the time, the spirit of the leading colonists was intensely anti-Catholic. The first flag raised by the Sons of Liberty in New York was inscribed "No Popery". When the war ended, and the president and Congress resided in New York, the Catholic representatives of France, Spain, Portugal, with Charles Carroll, his cousin Daniel, and Thomas Fitz Simmons, Catholic members of Congress, and officers and soldiers of the foreign contingent, merchants and others, soon made up a respectable congregation. Mass was said for them in the house of the Spanish
