Dear Friends:

OUR MONASTERY CRYPT: One of the treasures of this monastery is the crypt. Lately, people are asking me to give a tour of the crypt. When the Passionists first built the church, they were in their thirties in the 1850’s.  A number of young men, especially a lot of Germans from the families that lived in Birmingham, became Passionists. There were some Irish, too. As soon as the monastery opened, they started a novitiate where young men could be trained to be Passionists. One of these seminarians, originally from Ireland, Ignatius Meara, had been a vowed Passionist for a year when he contracted Tuberculosis. He died at the age of 19 in 1863. He was first Passionist to die in the new world. They buried him in a vault in the floor of the sanctuary of the church.  That was the Italian custom. Some years later after 8 burials, we were told by the city we could no longer bury people in the floor of the sanctuary.  We built a crypt under the monastery chapel and transferred 8 sets of remains there and used it until 1893 when the city told us to bury our dead in a cemetery. We have been doing that and there are about 125 or so Passionist priests and brothers in the cemetery next to this church. Around 1980, we were told that the crypt could again be used with sealed coffins. There are now about 50 buried in the crypt.  The founders of the monastery are there and also the remains of 3 Passionist bishops. All three I knew. Bishop Cuthbert O’Gara, whom I met in N.J. as a 7th grader, when he had come back from nearly 5 years in a communist jail in China. The bishops who ordained me as a deacon and a priest are there – Quentin and Reginald. The crypt is fascinating. It has relics of the saints, a book in which is the actual writing of St. Paul of the Cross, the Passionist sign that St. Paul wore on his habit., artifacts from our Passionist Bishops are displayed as well as vestments from the Czar’s chapel in St. Petersburg, Russia.  Come visit it and see all this and more! ...