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bishop braxton delivers homily at st. joseph parish, olney's 150th anniversary

Dear People of God:
I. The Sweep of History
“Stir into flame the gift of God you have received!” (Cf. 2 Timothy 1:6)

It is a very great joy for me, as your Bishop, to be with you today to celebrate this Mass of Thanksgiving as you mark your sesquicentennial — one hundred and fifty years of living and celebrating your Faith, Hope, and Love in Jesus Christ. I happily congratulate each of you on this great Day of Jubilee. I give thanks to God for each of you, all of the Christian Faithful of Saint Joseph Parish, your Pastor, Father Wirth, and all of the Parish Staff. Through you I also give thanks to God for all of the priests back to your founding Pastor, Father Laughren, and for the dedicated Ursuline Sisters and the Adorers of the Blood of Christ Sisters who served at Saint Joseph Catholic School during much of the school’s one-hundred year history.

One hundred and fifty years! Because our human lives are so brief, it seems like a long time. But, in fact, it is not. Within the sweep of history, fifteen decades is but a breath; no more than two human life spans of seventy-five years back to back. Yet one-hundred and fifty years ago, in 1857, the world was a different place: no television, no radio, no telephone, no automobiles, no airplanes, no movies, no computers, no i-pods, no medical marvels such as radiation, chemotherapy, and heart transplants, no — well the list is endless.
In 1857 the population of Chicago was only 93,000 up from 4,100 in 1837. An amazing product, condensed milk was introduced by the Bordens Company. Elisha Otis designed and installed the first passenger elevator for a five-story building in downtown New York. New York and St. Louis were connected by railroad causing a nationwide celebration.

New Orleans, ravaged today by Hurricane Katrina, was ravaged by a yellow fever epidemic that swept away more than seven thousand lives. The plague was immortalized in the film “Jezebel,” starring Bette Davis and Henry Fonda. American cities had the highest death rate of any city in the world. Tuberculosis was the primary cause of death consuming four hundred out of every hundred thousand lives. A financial panic gripped the nation in mid-October when New York’s Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, and other financial institutions, collapsed setting off one of the most severe economic crisis in United States history. The Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case that Mr. Scott, a runaway slave, could not bring suit to claim his freedom in a slave-free state. It was argued that he was a “non-citizen” and had no legal standing. Further, as a man of African origins, he could not bring suit in a federal court. James Buchanan, the President of the United States, supported the decision. Buchanan and Franklin Pierce were both President in 1857. Abraham Lincoln and the “Emancipation Proclamation” were still six years away (1863).

In 1857, His Holiness Pope Pius IX (known as Pio Nono), was in the ninth year of a long thirty-two year pontificate. It was Pius IX who erected the Diocese of Alton, Illinois (comprised of the fifty-six counties in the southern half of Illinois) on January 9, 1857. He appointed the Rt. Reverend Henry Damien Junker, DD, a priest of Dayton, Ohio as the first Bishop and designated the Church of Saints Peter and aul in Alton as the Cathedral. Bishop Junker vigorously promoted the spiritual growth of the new Diocese. When he died in 1868, the number of parishes had increased to seventy-seven.  One of those parishes was Saint Joseph Parish in Olney.

It was not until thirty years later that His Holiness Pope Leo XIII (known as “Leo the Great”) divided the Diocese of Alton on January 9, 1887 and erected the Diocese of Belleville, assigning it the twenty-eight southernmost counties, appointing The Most Reverend John Janssen as the First Bishop (Alton was later suppressed and incorporated into the Diocese of Springfield.) Thus, your Parish is thirty years older than the Diocese of Belleville, which is only one hundred and twenty years old. (We will celebrate our one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary in 2012.

It was Bishop Junker who appointed Father Laughren as your founding Pastor. He celebrated the first Mass in the home of the O’Donnell family on West North Avenue. He also built your first church in 1861. Your school, staffed by the Ursuline Sisters and opened in 1907, is celebrating its centennial this year. Thirty years after the school opened construction began on the present St. Joseph Church, which was dedicated by my predecessor, Bishop Henry J. Althoff on Thanksgiving Day, 1938. To this day generations have been nourished on the Body and Blood of Christ in this House of Worship. 1857-2007: one hundred and fifty years. How long is that? Not long in the eternal mind of God who dwells in unapproachable Light! But for frail human beings it is long enough.