Profiles in Cortona

One weekend last fall, I noticed something new in the vestibule of Saint Margaret of Cortona, my local church: a plaque, placed there by our new pastor. The plaque featured a photo of an old church, one we had never seen or heard of before, and a picture of a boy, a register, and President Kennedy. “A Proud Moment in Our Parish History,” the plaque read. “On 27th April 1928, John F. Kennedy received the Sacrament of Confirmation at the old St. Margaret’s Church. The ten-year-old future president took ‘Francis’ as his name and patron saint. This son of our parish became the 35th president of the United States of America in 1961, the first Roman Catholic to hold the highest office in the land.” My father and I were surprised. We never knew there had been an old Saint Margaret’s Church, much less that President Kennedy had been confirmed there.

Others gathered around the plaque. I asked a few old-timers about it. “President Kennedy was confirmed here?” said one. “I never knew.” Another told me a Jewish family had donated the land the church sat on. Still another said the school had been the old church and the photo was of the school. But I had no clear answers. I looked at the church’s website, old newspaper articles, census records and library websites, and old local history books given to me by my neighbor in the hopes of explaining my parish’s unknown history.

The presence of Saint Margaret’s is what helped my father decide to move to North Riverdale in the Bronx. The church had the same name as his boyhood parish church (albeit a different Saint Margaret), and the idea of his son attending a Saint Margaret’s school just as he had done when he was a child seemed like a fine idea. He could not have known at the time that in moving to the Bronx from Manhattan he was following not only the path of our sister church, Saint Gabriel’s, but also the footsteps of many Catholic New Yorkers before us, including John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

The current Saint Margaret’s church building was completed in 1965. It is a large church that has all the hallmarks of a Vatican II parish: a white and cyan color scheme inside, a squarish marble pulpit with an abstract tongue of fire decorating it, a pyramidal tabernacle, and dangling circular and spiky chandeliers. Until recently the altar had a modern artwork of a sacrificial lamb between the legs. Blocky, triangular Jesuses and Marys and Romans populate the Stations of the Cross on the walls. A confessional was converted into a statuary for the Sacred Heart. A solitary Marian side chapel is accessible from the vestibule. Given such simplicity, it is difficult to believe John Kennedy was confirmed in this parish, and given such size, it is hard to believe that the parish was originally established through the efforts of Irish domestics and a man born a Quaker in Flushing.

The church was established by decree of Archbishop Michael A. Corrigan on November 9, 1889, and he installed the Reverend James F. Kiely as its pastor. The first Mass was held in an auditorium at the nearby University of Mount Saint Vincent. The following Sunday Mass drew one hundred eighty-three people, mostly working-class Irish families from the nearby mansions and estates. The first collection taken up amounted to twenty-one dollars and eighty-seven cents, a little more than seven hundred sixty dollars today.

The early history of the parish is inseparable from that of the local Yonkersonian Thomas C. Cornell. He was a Quaker from Flushing, Queens, who had moved upstate to Rochester as a child before eventually coming to what was then Yonkers as an engineer for the Hudson River Railroad. A self-made man who never went to college or even high school, Cornell had become a convert to “Romanism” and a major benefactor of the Catholic Church in the Bronx and Yonkers. Aside from assisting the Sisters of Charity in acquiring the lands that became the site of the University of Mount Saint Vincent, he had a hand in establishing three churches in Yonkers and donated to the archdiocese the land upon which the first church of Saint Margaret of Cortona was built. The archdiocese still owns that land.

Construction on the church began in 1890. By Christmas of 1891, the church was open to the public. Over the next few decades, a proper rectory was built, together with a school initially rented out to the public schooling system before being used as a private Catholic school beginning in 1926, two years into the pastorate of Father Joseph T. Doyle.

The following year, Saint Margaret of Cortona received a new family of parishioners: Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., and his wife and children, fresh from Brookline, Massachusetts. Kennedy needed to be closer to his business interests in the city, and so the family took up residence at a home on Independence Avenue with views of the Hudson River.

The Kennedy family attended Mass regularly and donated generously, ranking among the largest contributors to the parish. On Friday, April 27, 1928, John and his sister, Rosemary, were confirmed by John Joseph Dunn, auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of New York. John was wearing a suit and a pair of white kid gloves, and Rosemary a white dress, a pale veil, and a wreath of flowers. John—as we have observed—took the confirmation name Francis. Rosemary took the name Louise. John became the first Catholic president of the United States at the age of forty-three and was assassinated three years later. Rosemary was lobotomized at the age of twenty-three and institutionalized for the last sixty-three years of her life.

When the opportunity came in 1929, Kennedy, Sr., moved the family into a more opulent home in Bronxville, Westchester. North Riverdale, meanwhile, continued to burgeon. The Kennedys were only one of many families moving into North Riverdale, which was rapidly transforming from a semi-rural suburb to an urbanized neighborhood of larger homes and high-rise apartment buildings. Parish membership became so large that the church could no longer physically hold all its members, and additional Sunday Masses had to be offered in the school’s auditorium. A new wing was added to the school in 1955. Monsignor Doyle had plans for further expansion but was forced into semi-retirement due to health issues. He resigned his pastorate in 1962 after serving his parish for nearly thirty-seven years.

In late spring of 1963, the old church and rectory were torn down. The cornerstone, laden with various historical items, was deeply waterlogged, and its contents were unrecognizable. That same year, under the new pastor, Father James E. Richardson, ground was broken for the construction of the current church and rectory. More than a thousand people were present to see its spire put into place in 1964; construction was completed in the following year.

Saint Margaret’s is not alone in having a strange history; its sister church, Saint Gabriel’s, has a similarly complex story. Its destruction was owed to the building of a tunnel, and its salvation to the building of a bridge.

Saint Gabriel’s was formed in 1859 during the Civil War in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Midtown, Manhattan, and built on land donated by a mathematics professor at Columbia College. City authorities seized the church and various other buildings through eminent domain in 1937 to build the Queens–Midtown Tunnel, and the building was demolished in 1939.

In the same year, however, Archbishop Francis Spellman created the parish of Saint Gabriel in Central Riverdale. Like North Riverdale, Central Riverdale had been urbanizing after the construction of the Henry Hudson Bridge in 1936, connecting Inwood on the tip of Manhattan to the neighborhoods of Central Riverdale and Spuyten Duyvil in the West Bronx. The old pews, statues, and altar from Saint Gabriel’s were shipped uptown to be used in the new parish.

As was common, the sixteen-classroom parochial school was built first, on a set of twenty-eight lots. Construction was finished in 1941. Initially, Masses were offered in the school’s auditorium. The auditorium was converted into a chapel and then converted back into an auditorium every weekend for thirty-eight years, until it was finally decided not to build a formal church and to convert the auditorium into a more permanent chapel.

The sanctuary sits at the base of a flight of stairs and is L-shaped with the altar in the middle. The school gym abuts the sanctuary and is connected to it by a pair of sliding doors. Despite the peculiar characteristics of the sanctuary, statues of Mary, Saint Joseph, and the Sacred Heart from the old Saint Gabriel’s still look down on parishioners as they worship.

The two parishes of Saint Margaret of Cortona and Saint Gabriel were formally merged in 2015 as part of a series of parish mergers in the dioceses by Timothy Cardinal Dolan. The schools were merged in 2023, and Saint Gabriel’s school ceased operations. Its former students now attend school in the old Saint Margaret’s building in North Riverdale.

My family moved to the parish just before Father Brian McCarthy became pastor in 2008, when the solitary parish of Saint Margaret’s had four priests and two deacons. Father McCarthy served his parish diligently and was pleased to be assigned to Saint Margaret’s, as many altar servers who had served with him in the past had become Saint Margaret’s parishioners with their families as adults. He skillfully handled the merging of the two parishes and worked tirelessly every year to promote annual fundraisers and the cardinal’s appeal. But decline had set in. When Father McCarthy retired in 2024 at the age of seventy-five, the combined parishes of Saint Margaret’s and Saint Gabriel’s had three priests and one deacon.

Father Seán Connolly was installed as the eighth pastor of the parish on All Saints’ Day of that year, and he promptly made a few alterations. Among his first changes were the installation of a pair of seraphim kneeling on either side of the tabernacle and the addition of a set of crosses to the Saint Joseph’s and Marian altars. The abstract Stations of the Cross have been replaced with more traditional imagery, and a woodcut recreation of Michelangelo’s Last Supper now sits between the altar’s legs. Father Connolly has also instituted weekly parish gatherings, regular solemn Masses on major feast days, and monthly Masses dedicated to the Immaculate Heart.

Today, the parish of Saint Margaret and Saint Gabriel is one of the few parishes in the diocese—possibly the only one—without a single priest over the age of forty. The parish continues to shift and change as it has been doing for the past one hundred thirty-five years. The congregation still has a large body of Irish and Irish Americans, along with a steadily growing Latino constituency. Families come, just as my own has. Families go, just as Kennedy’s did.

The neighborhood also continues to change. The Hudson River Railroad was absorbed by the Metro-North Railroad. The mansions serviced by those Irish domestics became museums and botanical gardens. The hardware store on the corner closed and became a fight club for women. The city of Yonkers proceeds with plans for a homeless shelter just across the border. New coffee shops move in. Saint Margaret’s and Saint Gabriel’s remain.