One hundred and fifty years ago this year, Philip McDonald was born in County Cavan, Ireland, at a time worse than any other in the long-haul hurting of that little island. He was born shortly after the Great Hunger when a million people starved to death, their mouths green from the grass when they died. Another million struggled to emigrate to the U.S. and many died on the “coffin” ships upon the sea. The tragedy is called the Great Hunger because when the potato crop, which was the sole sustenance of the people, failed for several years, the British Empire continued shipping thousands of tons of meat and cereals from Ireland to England and elsewhere. The book on this by Thomas Keneally, who also wrote Schindler’s List, is entitled The Great Shame. And so it was that in 1856, little Philip’s father left for the U.S. in search for work. One year later, he died in New Orleans. Shortly afterwards his wife left little Philip with his grandparents and settled in Philadelphia. Several factors including the Civil War prevented her return. Eventually, she married John Beatty of Germantown and gave birth to six sons.
When Philip was twelve, a cousin brought him to Germantown to meet his mother whom he didn’t know, not to mention her husband and their six sons. Unhappy, he soon dropped out of school and became an apprentice to a stonemason who taught him how to lay stone. Then Philip taught his six brothers to lay stone. Ground was broken for the building of Sacred Heart Church in Camden on May 20, 1886. The Trenton brownstone, quarried in Lambertville, NJ was barged down the Delaware and hauled by horses to Broadway and Ferry. Then, Philip McDonald and his six brothers built Sacred Heart in nine months. The first Mass was offered on March 7, 1886. A sacred span of creativity in all human history. In the case of Sacred Heart, it was a miracle in the noble work of building a church...probably unequaled in the U.S. So today, Sacred Heart Church in Camden, NJ, more than any other is a shrine to human labor, the right to it and the glory of it.
