RIVERDALE — The legacy of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, a lay order dedicated to education since the 17th century, is enshrined at the archives of an institution they founded in the Bronx in the 1850s.
As a result, Manhattan University — formerly known as Manhattan College — has accrued a vast archive of historical documents and artifacts from the order’s districts throughout the United States.
Amy Surak, the university’s director of archives and special collections, oversees all of it. So, in 20 years as the only full-time archivist at this hilly campus, she occasionally encounters something new.
A couple of months ago, she opened a small rectangular box filled with zip-locked specimen bags containing the relics of various saints.
“I’m sure there’s like 60 or more just in here,” Surak said while picking through the box. “I don’t know who’s all in here because I haven’t had time to inventory it.”
Labels on the bags, marked with black Sharpie, speak for themselves. They include, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, St. Pope Pius X, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and Sts. Peter and Paul.
Surak said the archives already contained about 640 such relics before she found this latest batch in a group of items waiting to be cataloged. That is because the university has been designated the future center of the lay order’s archives in the United States.
Relics routinely come to the archives after the closure of facilities operated by the lay order, also known as the Christian Brothers, the De La Salle Christian Brothers, or the Lasallian Brothers.
One such relic, a piece of bone from St. John Baptiste de La Salle, is in a heavy, cross-shaped reliquary. He is the patron saint of teachers, having founded the Brothers of the Christian Schools in 1680 in France.
Surak said she knows of no other college or university with such an enormous collection of relics that deserve to be seen and venerated again. To that end, university officials are exploring ways to incorporate a large reliquary to display the relics in an upcoming renovation of the chapel on campus.
Surak said the relics couldn’t all be displayed at once, so they would be rotated through the reliquary.
“It is going to give us the opportunity to put these in there on a repeating basis so that they can be venerated as they should,” she said. “They absolutely shouldn’t be in a specimen bag in a box.”
The archives also accept artifacts that aren’t holy relics but still relate to the Christian Brothers’ history.
She showed another box that held a small leather pouch used by a Lasallian brother who was a medic on the battlefields of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). The same box held a chunk of brick from a school building and a first-generation lightbulb from the 1800s.
In 1851, the brothers began teaching boys at the first Catholic school in the Diocese of Brooklyn — St. James School on Jay Street. In 1933, it moved to Claremont Avenue in the Fort Greene neighborhood and became Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, which the order still directs.
Surak said she gets about a dozen emails each month from people who have been cleaning out a deceased relative’s keepsakes and finding items from a Lasallian school, like Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School.
“They don’t want to throw it away,” she said. “So, we’re the solution — a happy solution.”
While safeguarding the relics, Surak said she also looks for opportunities to share them before the new reliquary opens. For example, people enrolled in religious studies classes can see them by appointment.
Meanwhile, she is prompt to open unmarked boxes, searching for relics to be inventoried into the collection.
“At least they’re being safely kept,” Surak said. “I do want to make sure that they’re preserved. So that’s how I feel good about it.”