“The Finger of God Touched Here”
The remarkable birth of Catholicism in Newton Grove, NC
By Rich Reece / Pictures by Denmark Photo & Video
At the beginning of 1871, no one in the rural east Carolina town of Newton Grove was Catholic. In the next two decades, more than 300 men, women and children, many of them one-time haters of Catholics, had joined the Church.
It’s tempting to call this flowering of the faith in such unlikely soil a miracle. Abundance from nothing, like the loaves and fishes. A contradiction of nature, like the roses Juan Diego brought in midwinter to the Bishop of Mexico. In any case, it began with a startling coincidence.
In 1871, one of the most influential and popular pillars of the Newton Grove community was undergoing a crisis of faith. Forty-four-year-old Dr. John Carr Monk had been a staunch member of the local Methodist church, but the year before he had seen his congregation eject its black members. What kind of Christianity, he wondered, would seek to separate its believers from each other?
While these thoughts were troubling the physician, he received a package of medical supplies he had ordered from New York. They were wrapped in recent edition of the New York Herald, an edition which had published the New Year’s Day sermon of Archbishop William McCloskey, a sermon that preached the necessity of unity among Christians and touted the Catholic Church as the place where that unity could be found.
Monk was already well known and highly regarded as a man who backed his convictions with action, and McCloskey’s sermon moved him. But what was he to do? Historian William F. Powers, in his book Tar Heel Catholics (University Press of America, 2003), describes Monk’s situation:
“Until this moment, Monk had never read any Catholic materials, entered a Catholic church, or had any communication with a Catholic clergyman… In addition, there were no members of that religion in Sampson County where he lived and only a few hundred in the entire state. Furthermore, anti-Catholic sentiment was as pervasive in his community as the acres of cotton fields through which he traveled each day to visit his patients.”
Nevertheless, Monk wrote a letter describing his dissatisfaction with his own church and his interest in learning about Catholicism, and addressed it “To Any Catholic Priest, Wilmington, NC.” Would such a letter get delivered today? Amazingly, Monk’s letter was given to Father Mark S. Gross, Pastor of Wilmington’s St. Thomas Church. Father Gross showed the letter to Bishop (later Cardinal) James Gibbons, Vicar Apostolic of North Carolina, who sent Monk a list of books to read about the Church. The doctor did his homework, and in October, along with his wife and two daughters, was received into the Church in Wilmington by Bishop Gibbons.
Then Dr. John Carr Monk went home, and became North Carolina’s most productive Catholic missionary up until that time. Overcoming anti-Catholicism with what Powers calls his “obvious sincerity, personal integrity and jovial disposition,” the doctor answered questions, handed out literature and welcomed Father Gross and Bishop Gibbons, who visited Newton Grove and preached to crowds larger than they had encountered anywhere else in the state.
Charles H. Bowman, Jr., in his entry on Dr. Monk in the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography (The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), writes that “it became necessary to erect a temporary shelter for their accommodation and to make plans for the construction of a permanent church and a schoolhouse. Monk donated money and land for the buildings, and work on them soon commenced.” In 1874, Bishop Gibbons consecrated St. Mark Church, so named in honor of Father Gross. The congregation continued to grow, even after Dr. Monk’s sudden death at the age of 50, and Cardinal Gibbons would refer to the doctor years later as “the Monk who fathered 300 children.”
Today many of Monk’s actual descendants attend the Catholic church, now named after Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Newton Grove. Many more have lived and died, and are buried in the cemetery behind the church. The headstone at Dr. Monk’s gravesite bears this inscription: “A faithful husband; a devoted father; a Christian. In God’s hands the founder of this Catholic Mission; the ‘Cornelius’ of the neighborhood. In life he kept the Faith; and he here rests, awaiting the blessed Hope of the Resurrection.” “Cornelius” is a reference to the centurion in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 10. A Gentile, he was inspired to invite Peter to his home, where the Apostle preached and converted Cornelius and many other Gentiles.
As Powers notes, Bishop Gibbons and Father Gross hoped that the relative explosion of Catholicism in Newton Grove would be a pattern followed across the state, but this never happened. The way in which the faith flowered in Newton Grove was unique. Was it a miracle? Some think so. In the church, a stained glass window shows a devout Dr. Monk looking towards the heavens. God’s hand extends from the clouds and touches the doctor’s forehead. A scroll in the air reads, “The Finger of God Touched Here.”
A Saint Visited Here
St. Katharine Drexel (1858-1955), a benefactor of the church in Newton Grove, visited there in 1910.
St. Katharine Drexel, the Philadelphia heiress and nun who founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, spent her entire fortune, some $20 million, on missionary work, particularly on the care and evangelization of blacks and native Americans.
Father James F. Garneau, a Church historian and at the time Pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Newton Grove, wrote about Mother Drexel’s generosity to the Church in North Carolina in The North Carolina Catholic in 1988, on the occasion of her beatification. (St. Katharine was canonized in 2000.)
In 1895, Fr. Garneau wrote, “$500 was given [among other contribution to churches in the state] to enlarge the church in Newton Grove, with the provision that a section of pews would be set aside in the enlarged church for use by ‘Colored People,’ and that they would always be welcomed in the church.”
Mother Drexel began a correspondence with Fr. Michael Irwin, pastor in Newton Grove, which would last more than 20 years. “He constantly informed her of his progress and struggles in the rural mission,” Fr. Garneau wrote, “and continually pleaded for her generosity… Always her support came with the requirement that particular attention be given to the spiritual needs of the black community…
“In 1910, Mother Katharine visited Fr. Irwin in Newton Grove. Staying with the Sisters who were teaching at both the white and colored schools then in existence, she was able to witness the missionary efforts of the Catholic Church in this area, and the zeal of Fr. Irwin.”
The Priests’ Cemetery
On October 3rd, Bishop Michael F. Burbidge dedicated the granite altar in the cemetery at Our Lady of Guadalupe in Newton Grove. The altar, near the grave of Bishop Vincent S. Waters, third Bishop of Raleigh, was erected in a section of the cemetery set aside for priests of the Diocese of Raleigh. It is also the site, each year, of a Mass celebrated by the Bishop on All Souls Day. The Latin inscription on the altar translates as “You Are a Priest Forever.”