Below is the address Father Michael Bruno, dean of seminarians at St. Joseph Seminary and College, delivered to attendees at the Cathedral Club of Brooklyn’s 125th-anniversary dinner on Feb. 6. 

Your Excellency Bishop [Robert] Brennan; Your Excellency Bishop [Nicholas] DiMarzio; Your Excellency Bishop [Octavio] Cisneros; reverend monsignors, fathers, and deacons; our distinguished honorees Chief John Chell and Mr. Joseph Rosato; distinguished members of the dais; officers and members of the Cathedral Club; and welcome guests. 

I am truly honored to be with you this evening, and having reviewed the list of past speakers and certainly looking around the room tonight, I confess in full voice those words of the centurion in the eighth chapter of Matthew’s gospel, “Non sum dignus” — “I am not worthy.”

I am most grateful, therefore, for Bishop Brennan’s invitation and the opportunity to address you this evening as the Cathedral Club marks its 125th anniversary. 

My hope is to trace with you briefly the providential journey of the club and help demonstrate the impact that this lay organization has had on the local Church of Brooklyn and also on the Catholic Church in the United States. 

While such a topic might seem at first glance like historical navel-gazing or an antiquarian exercise, we are reminded that Catholic organizations like the Cathedral Club engaged laymen and women 60 years before the Second Vatican Council affirmed the universal call to holiness and the work of all the baptized that “a more human manner of living is promoted in this earthly society” (“Lumen Gentium,” 41). 

It is no surprise, as well, that the experience of our predecessors bears some similarity to our present day, as we are called in this Jubilee Year of 2025 to recommit ourselves to build upon their labors in our support of what the “New York Freeman’s Journal” in 1871 called, “this earnest Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn” (Sharp, “History of the Diocese of Brooklyn Volume 1,” p. 1).

So, why a club, and why 1900? Just as we experienced numerous historical transitions at the turn of the millennium, Catholics, especially in King’s County, came of age at the turn of the last century. We need to recall that one-third of Brooklyn’s soldiers in the Union cause had been Irish and German Catholics (Sharp, p. 284). They had helped to hold Washington, D.C., after Bull Run, they had charged the Sunken Road in Antietam, and they famously held the Wheatfield at Gettysburg. The Irish brigade alone, the Fighting 69th, by the end of the war, had lost the greatest number of men killed or wounded of any New York regiment and was sixth in total losses among the entire Union Army (“The Union Army: A History of Military Affairs Vol. 2,” 1908). 

The mostly Irish Catholic 14th Regiment had left Brooklyn 1100 strong, but by war’s end, only 147 soldiers returned. German Catholics filled the ranks of the 22nd and 54th volunteer regiments, as well as Company A of the 3rd Infantry (Sharp, p. 285). Brooklyn Catholics had served with distinction as officers as well, like Colonel James Edward Mallon, who, after serving both in Antietam and Gettysburg, was killed in action at Bristoe Station, Virginia, and was brought home to Brooklyn to be buried with honors at Holy Cross Cemetery (New York Times Oct. 21, 1863). 

These Catholic patriots returning home began to establish themselves as lawyers, police officers, physicians, educators, financiers, writers, and business owners in the nation they helped to preserve and for which they had shed their blood. 

To advance the interests of their faith and their fellow Catholics, who were not often welcome in the public square, new societies and organizations were established: The Emerald Association (which would meet in the Cathedral Club headquarters for decades), the Ancient Order of Hibernians, The Ladies Catholic Benevolent Association, and the Knights of Columbus. Each sought to plant the faith in the nation they had defended, cultivate social bonds, and, here in Brooklyn, work for charitable aims in support of the immigrant diocese that then extended from Montague Street to Montauk. 

The recently ordained chancellor of the Diocese of Brooklyn and secretary to Bishop Charles McDonnell, Father George Mundelein, recognized a particular need to engage Catholic young adults (particularly the grandchildren of these Civil War Veterans) who were entering society and public life in a new century fraught with political and cultural turbulence at home and abroad. 

Mundelein could relate well to many of the first members he would recruit for the club, as he was the grandson of German immigrants and his maternal grandfather was killed in battle during the Civil War. For inspiration, Mundelein undoubtedly knew of the success of the Episcopalian Cathedral Club on Madison Street and Bedford Avenue, open since the 1880s. In this new Cathedral Club, Mundelein saw the opportunity to engage Catholic young people and cultivate a vibrant Catholic social and intellectual life spanning professional and political spheres. 

Beginning at St. John’s Chapel on Clermont and Greene Avenues, the club was led by its first president, Lewis Drummond, who was the son of former Secret Service Chief Andrew Lewis Drummond, who had protected both Presidents Harrison and Cleveland. Drummond was elected to lead the first slate of officers in the Spring of 1900 (“The Brooklyn Daily Eagle,” May 27, 1900). 

With their first club on Jefferson Avenue, the first activities of the young club were not surprisingly intramural activities and later traveling sports teams — billiards, pinochle (at which the future Card. Mundelein was apparently quite skilled), bowling, and track. The first advertised public event of this new club would be held on Nov. 22, 1900, a Euchre tournament and dance under the watchful eye of Bishop Charles McDonnell at the Pouch Mansion, 345 Clinton Ave. The prizes that night for the ladies included a set of bread-and-butter plates, opera glasses, and gloves, while the men competed for a pipe, glass tobacco jar, water jug, and corkscrew. And whenever Catholics are holding a good party, undoubtedly, as the Brooklyn Eagle reported, “many clergymen were present watching the progress of the games.” 

Quickly growing and needing a bigger space, the club moved its headquarters to Vanderbilt and Greene Avenues. To help afford the move, it sponsored in Winter 1902 the “first barn dance ever held in Brooklyn” (“The Brooklyn Daily Eagle,” Jan. 26, 1902). Once again, at the Pouch Mansion, where a hay loft was set up and farming instruments were scattered around (minus the livestock). 

The big debate of the night recorded in the papers was whether there should be a well and bucket of water or lemonade. The former was chosen, as the Brooklyn Eagle made clear, because “a well of lemonade is seldom encountered in the country.” Quite avant-garde for the time, men were to report in duck trousers and dark coats, and the ladies in similar country wear “to resemble city folk who are temporarily staying in the country,” as the invitation read.

These social activities, however, would soon be transformed by a graver purpose, as by 1917, the Cathedral Club would see 45 of its members serve in Europe during the First World War, and fundraisers were now held to support these troops and the Knights of Columbus, who were providing for the needs of Catholic Soldiers throughout Europe. The club raised in January 1917 alone, $1500, which today would be $31,500, to support their comrades at arms (“Brooklyn Daily Eagle,” Jan. 5, 1918). 

Click the image below to view the full timeline in the Feb. 22 edition of The Tablet.

What we are doing tonight stems from the 25th anniversary of the Club in 1925, when the Hotel St. George was rented out to host a gala dinner of 1,500 guests honoring now-Cardinal George Mundelein, archbishop of Chicago, who had the year prior been raised to the Sacred College (“The Chat,” Jan 24, 1925). 

At that event, Mayor William Collins would speak out against the anti-Catholic activities of the Klu Klux Klan, who were active in accosting Catholics throughout Long Island, and the Mayor assured that “if a man is a good Catholic, he must be a good American.” The mayor’s comments remind us how, three years later, Msgr. Bernard Quinn opened The Little Flower Orphanage for African American children in Wading River, New York, only to see it burned down twice by the Klan. The third time, he would build it back in brick, remaining steadfast and determined to see the project completed in the face of such hostility and hatred. 

The fact that political figures would soon seek out the Cathedral Club dinner as a chance to engage Catholic voters and Catholics in public life is not a coincidence, as many of the first members of the club would become influential members of the New York State Bar, and also among the first Catholics to serve prominently in the state and federal judiciary. 

Members included prominent attorneys like John Kuhn, Edward Connelly, and William Moyles (who also founded the Catholic Lawyers Guild in Brooklyn); Leo Hickey, who in 1934 was appointed by President Roosevelt as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York; and Mayor William O’Dwyer, New York City’s 100th mayor, elected Brooklyn district attorney in 1939 and later Mayor in 1946. 

No surprise, therefore, that mayors, governors, justices, congressmen, senators, vice presidents, and two future presidents — John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson — would address the Cathedral Club at its annual gala, laying out domestic and foreign policy concerns, but also seeing this organization as a way to speak to the Catholic members of the electorate both locally and nationally. 

For over a century, therefore, the microphone of this gala has amplified the issues of U.S. war efforts, the threats of the Cold War, Civil Rights, Catholic education, urban planning, national social and economic reform, and most especially, the important role of Catholics in public life. 

Might I suggest, therefore, that you, the members of the Cathedral Club, are the recipients of an important patrimony and tradition of faith and leadership. As the Second Vatican Council made clear in its 1965 “Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity,” in your professions and daily responsibilities, you are called both to promote “the common good and at the same time prepare the way for the Gospel” (“Apostolicam Actuositatem,” p. 14).

As a result, I would propose to you that Cardinal Mundelein’s vision for the Cathedral Club has not been fulfilled by the prominent political and ecclesial leaders that have addressed this annual gala. Rather, it has been fulfilled because you, the membership of the Cathedral Club, are carrying on a proud legacy of bringing what Mundelein called the “Catholic spirit” to public and intellectual life in service and leadership to the diocese, to the community, and to the nation. 

Indeed, in founding this club, Mundelein responded to the need he saw of connecting his own generation and their children to the practice of the faith and to each other. That call is no less relevant today. Perhaps, therefore, in this Jubilee Year of 2025 dedicated to hope, the Cathedral Club is being invited to look around again to find, in the midst of an often disparate and fragmented culture, ways of reconnecting Catholic young people coming of age today to their faith and to each other, and promoting the “Catholic spirit” in public life. 

As we mark this milestone of 125 years, my prayer is that the press will not comment on whether there should be a well of lemonade or water (like that wild barn dance at the Pouch Mansion in 1902) but that another speaker will stand here at a future anniversary gala and remark how the Cathedral Club in this era built up the Church in Brooklyn and Queens, helped to serve the most needy and vulnerable in our midst, and so led others to drink not from a well of lemonade but that spring of living water that wells up to eternal life, who is Jesus Christ, Our Lord. 

God bless you all!