Fr. Michael leads the congregation in prayer before blessing the new organ.

On June 24 the Church of St. John the Baptist celebrated its patronal feast with a majestic liturgy at 5:15 p.m. In his homily Fr. Michael spoke of John the Baptizer, the last of the prophets, as one who sought to right the wrongs of his day...

Prayer, yes. But decidedly not a multiplication of words. Rather our prayer begins and ends with listening. We pray so as to listen through all of the raucous voices of our day seeking to hear the word that took flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. After a season of distorted, manipulative words, a time of deceitful speech, our prayer is meant to help us salvage the truthfulness of our shared speech. To cherish the divine gift that is our human capacity for communication. By divine grace, a people devoted to dwelling in the Word made flesh.

In over 50 years in the organ business, I have learned that few organs were as heavily used as those in Catholic churches during the mid-20th century. I recall working in Waterbury, Connecticut, in the mid 1970's, releathering the organ at just such a church, where there were often 100 masses a week, plus a very active funeral and wedding schedule. Fast-forward to 2010, when we were called to Holy Cross Roman Catholic Church on West 42nd Street in Manhattan.

We know that Joseph was a lowly carpenter, betrothed to Mary. He was a “just man,” ever ready to carry out God’s will as revealed to him in the Law and through four dreams. After a long and tiring journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, he beheld the birth of the Messiah in a stable, since “there was no place for them” elsewhere. He witnessed the adoration of the shepherds and the Magi, who represented respectively the people of Israel and the pagan peoples.

Irish-born Archbishop John Hughes created Manhattan’s Holy Cross Parish in 1852 to serve the thousands of Irish Catholics moving north of lower Manhattan into what became known as Longacre Square (later Times Square) and the developing neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. Holy Cross maintained a strong Irish American identity into the mid twentieth century and its path charted the transformation of the disciplined folk piety created by the “devotional Revolution” in Ireland in the nineteenth century into an American Catholicism dominated by Irish-American clergy that sought to defend communalistic Catholic distinctiveness amid the rapid urban growth and burgeoning individualistic capitalism of an historically Protestant nation.