THIS PRELATE INSPIRES ME SO MUCH

Visit of Bishop Timon, Bishop of Buffalo. This prelate inspires me so much that I shall not refuse his request.

Eugene de Mazenod’s Diary, 26 December 1849, EO XXII

Bishop John Timon was a Vincentian religious who had been a missionary in the south of the USA and in Texas. When the Diocese of Buffalo, in Western New York State, was established in 1847, it was he who was appointed its first bishop.

Two years earlier marked the beginning of the period of mass starvation in Ireland known as the “potato famine.” It had caused thousands of people to leave the country and move to England and the USA. Many came to Buffalo, where many Irish had already been settled for some 20 years.

“Here on Buffalo’s south side in an area known as the Old First Ward, where the great majority of the 6,300 Irish people in the city lived — along the docks, near the railroad terminal and the city’s rapidly expanding factories — Timon was a hero from the moment of his arrival. Isolated in the First Ward as much by choice as by prejudice, Buffalo’s Irish — very much like the Senecas earlier in the century — were separate and, as far as the rest of the city was concerned, largely invisible…

The Irish of Buffalo lived in large, extended families in small one-and-a-half- and two-story frame houses in the narrow, wind-swept streets just off Lake Erie in the south side of the city… Schools, churches, and homes shared the limited land area with breweries, grain elevators, railroad yards, and market places. Hemmed-in between the lake in the west, the small yet clearly defined central business district in the north, the railroad tracks in the east, and the Buffalo Creek in the south, Irish South Buffalo — Timon’s Buffalo — was densely packed. Irish people (particularly the men who lived in the several large boardinghouses in the neighborhood) were everywhere: on the streets, in the taverns, working hard at unskilled jobs along the docks and in the factories.

Within weeks after his arrival in 1847 . . . Timon moved the bishop’s see from St. Louis Church in Buffalo to a ramshackle wooden-frame Irish church on the fringes of the city’s Irish working-class neighborhood in the south part of the city […]. Thus, by the early 1850s, Bishop Timon had become completely identified with the working-class Irish neighborhood of South Buffalo.” (https://buffaloah.com/h/timon/timon.html)

It is easy to understand why Eugene was so inspired by Bishop John Timon!

REFLECTION

“We will let our lives be enriched by the poor and the marginalized as we work with them, for they can make us hear in new ways the Gospel we proclaim.” OMI Constitutions and Rules, Rule 8 a

“If you’re in trouble or hurt or need—go to poor people. They’re the ones that’ll help”  (John Steinbeck).