A New Beginning

Saint Joseph’s College celebrated its reemergence on September 2, 1889, as it had marked its opening nearly forty years before, with a Mass of the Holy Ghost. At 8:30 that morning some seventy-seven boys marched from the newly completed college building to the adjacent Church of the Gesù;, with bells pealing in celebration from the twin towers. Entering the Gesù, the students could not help feeling dwarfed by its cavernous proportions.¹ This massive church and surrounding property would be home to Saint Joseph’s College for the next four decades. Here the college would survive and lay the basis for future successes in Philadelphia.

Among the most important reasons for the survival of Saint Joseph’s College in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the growing prosperity of its host city, including many of its Catholics; an increased stress among the faithful and their leaders on the desirability of Catholic schools; and the financial support that the Jesuits drew from the Gesù parish, despite the great expense of building the church. Even more than three decades earlier, when Saint Joseph’s had started on Willing’s Alley, Philadelphia was a large and complex industrial center that concentrated on finished goods more than on heavy industry. Philadelphia produced more textiles and railroad locomotives than any other city in the United States, and was also known for its saws, ship building, sugar and oil refineries. Other Philadelphia establishments turned out brooms, umbrellas, surgical instruments, watches, carriages, wheelbarrows, paper boxes, cigars, pharmaceuticals, soaps, ice cream, dentures, and bathroom fixtures....

Order book

Back to Saint Joseph's University Press