Death and Transfiguration in Old Newark

Death and Transfiguration in Old Newark

Life in the city was not easy for the newly independent community of Newark Abbey. Enrollment at St. Benedict's Prep continued to decline due to the fear many had of sending sons from the suburbs into the city, and to the competition from newly created diocesan Catholic high schools. Some members of the new abbey believed that the monastery and school should relocate, to the Jersey Shore, for example.  Abbot Ambrose, however, voiced the commitment of the majority, to remain and to build in Newark.

Controversy continued within the community and matters came to a head in early 1971 when, following a special visitation by the American Cassinese Congregation, the Chapter of Newark Abbey voted to close St. Benedict’s Prep at the end of the school year. The headmaster, Father Cornelius Sweeney, had the unenviable task of announcing to the students, at a morning assembly on Ash Wednesday, that their school would die after over a century of life. The remainder of the school year was painful in the extreme and that June was held what most believed would be its final commencement.

The community had voted to close the school on High Street, but, in what might seem a contradiction, not to relocate the monastery outside of the city. Large empty buildings remained which had once housed the abbey’s major apostolate and source of income, and the community appeared stranded in an alien city from which many of its members preferred to depart. Some, especially the older and ill, thought it best, both for themselves and for the remaining Newark community, to return their stability to St. Mary’s in Morristown from which Newark Abbey had separated just four years before.

Abbot Leonard Cassell and the community in Morristown were faced with a dilemma which they resolved in favor of generously accepting all of the monks of Newark who wished to transfer. It would have been most difficult to have done otherwise. Men of both houses had, after all, entered the novitiate together, studied, taken vows, and been ordained together, and had been confreres only a few years before. Shortly after that fatal graduation day in 1971, more than a dozen monks left Newark Abbey for Morristown. Quite likely, the monks of Morristown did not fully appreciate what a betrayal this seemed to those who elected to remain at Newark Abbey.

The twenty-four monks who chose to persevere in Newark were mostly younger, healthy, and determined men with a united commitment to the survival of their community in Newark and to the revival of St. Benedict’s. The following year was devoted to discussions about how the community would support itself and what its work would be. By the fall of the year it was obvious that the group’s heart and talents lay in education and they began to plan how they might respond to Newark’s need, now more than ever, for a good school for young men.
 
The more the monks experimented with new names and curricula for their reincarnated school, the more they discovered that what their neighbors wanted and needed was much the same as the immigrant Germans, Irish, and Italians of the previous century had sought for their sons, namely an opportunity to obtain a disciplined, value-driven education which would enable then to pursue higher education and careers.

Thus the Collegium Sancti Benedicti of the school seal was reborn. The dream of the courageous “remnant” who gave the monastery and school in Newark new life has been abundantly realized in ways beyond the imagination of alumni of the “old” Benedict’s. Boniface Wimmer would be proud and pleased, especially by the largely minority student body of St. Benedict’s. Pastoral and educational care for African-Americans had been a mission dear to his heart, before and after the Civil War. The continuing story of Newark Abbey on High Street, now Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, however, will have to be left to other hands.