The Missionary Pastors of St. Mary’s
St. Mary’s began its life as a mission outpost
of Jamaica. The Irish-born Rev. Michael Curran was the “circuit-riding”
missionary assigned by Archbishop John Hughes of New York for Queens and
Suffolk. He had been ordained in 1826 at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in
Emmetsburg, Maryland, and was to establish numerous mission outposts
throughout Long Island. While servicing St. Monica’s parish in Jamaica,
he came to Far Rockaway and it was he who celebrated the first Mass here
in William Caffrey’s Hotel in 1847. He died as pastor of Our Lady of
Mount Carmel parish in Astoria in 1856 after 30 years in the priesthood
and is buried in Holy Cross Cemetery in Flatbush.
The priests who succeeded Father Curran at St. Monica’s church in
Jamaica took care of Far Rockaway’s Catholics between 1848 and 1868. In
1848 the Reverend Edward Maginnis, born in Ireland and ordained in 1837
at Mount St. Mary’s, took over the mission at Far Rockaway, and in 1850
began holding services under a tent for the large summer congregation.
He was a doughty Long Island missionary who had built the first church
of St. Patrick’s in Huntington, Long Island, in 1849 and celebrated the
first Mass in Glen Cove. It was to him Andrew Brady donated the land at
today’s Plainview Ave. and B. 19 St. for the erection of a church in Far
Rockaway. In a small irony, Father Maginnis was named the first resident
pastor of St. Mary, Star of the Sea on Court St. in Brooklyn in 1855. He
became a professor of the seminary faculty at Niagara University in 1858
where he died in 1861.
St. Mary’s cornerstone-laying took place on August 15, 1852. Archbishop
Hughes of New York was unable to preach at the occasion because he had
sailed to Halifax the previous week in search of priests and religious
for his growing diocese. So he sent in his stead the Rev. John Murray
Forbes, a notable minor figure in nineteenth century theological
controversies.
Father Farley succeeded Father Maginnis as resident pastor of St.
Monica’s in 1855 and continued the service to Far Rockaway. Father
Farley was also born in Ireland in 1814 and ordained in 1843 at Rome’s
Lateran Seminary. During his tenure the first St. Mary’s church was
completed in 1857. One of the earliest newspaper references to a service
in Far Rockaway discovered so far was one conducted by Father Farley,
the marriage of John Gedney to Maria Fleming, reported in the Hempstead
Inquirer on August 15, 1857. He is numbered among those Brooklyn priests
who during this “brick and mortar” missionary period were also noted as
clerical authors and translators. Father Farley died in 1890.
