It was the last day of the annual novena at Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Newark’s Ironbound. Four men hoisted up a statue of the Virgin Mother onto their shoulders and carried her into the street as fireworks sparked and crackled. Behind the procession trailed a hundred congregants who walked around Independence Park holding candles, praying, and singing hymns.
This century-old tradition dates back to the earliest days of this Italian-American congregation when it was founded 134 years ago in a church building that still stands at 180 Edison Place. A parochial school once accompanied the church, built by Mother Francesca Cabrini, but it was demolished for the construction of Penn Station, which began in 1929.
Today, on a triangular sliver of land where the school once stood sits a statue of Mother Cabrini, who was the first U.S. citizen to become a saint. This monument, sculpted by Italian master Francesco Miozzo in the 1950s, has become the subject of tension ever since the City Council discussed moving it in April. North Ward Councilman Anibal Ramos revealed a plan to move it to a small plaza in front of St. Francis Xavier Church where one of two statues representing Christopher Columbus stood before it was torn down in 2020.
“We have been working with our improvement district to create what will hopefully be an immigrant plaza in front of St. Francis Church,” Ramos said. “And we’d love for Mother Cabrini, who is the patron saint of immigrants to be properly housed there as opposed to an abandoned lot near Newark Penn Station that is rarely upkept.”
Few would disagree the park where the Cabrini statue is located has been neglected. The lack of streetlights and police presence have made this public square a meeting place for vagrants and drug users.
Historian Michael Immerso, who authored a book called Newark’s Little Italy about the city’s former First Ward, said he agrees with Ramos’s assessment that the statue deserves a better location. “The statue isn’t in a place that has the kind of attention it should,” Immerso said. “We don’t want to honor figures in a way that doesn’t draw positive attention to them – if that’s the starting point, I don’t have a problem with it.”
However, Eric Lavin, a pastoral associate of Mount Carmel and Ironbound native, wondered why the city can’t leave the statue where it is and instead spend money on the park as it did in other rundown public spaces. Nearby Peter Francisco Park, which saw a renovation recently, is now luminous at night with strands of bistro lights and new metal gates that prevent it from becoming an open-air drug market. Lavin believes that the city’s investment in that park “pushed the problems” over to Mother Cabrini Park, Lavin said.
“My preference is for the statue to remain where it is,” Lavin said. “I’d much rather keep her in that public sphere — that statue should make you ask questions about why it’s there and what her message was.”
One obvious difference between Peter Francisco Park and Mother Cabrini Park is that one is named for a man of Portuguese descent, a history shared by the district’s Councilman Silva. The other is named after an Italian-American, a once-politically powerful bloc in the city that was decimated – not by White flight, which is a common misconception, but by a series of urban renewal projects. The first was the construction of Penn Station, which caused Italian-Americans to flee to the South Ironbound. But the true death knell was the midcentury construction of I-280 and the Columbus Homes housing projects that leveled the First Ward.
“It’s gone,” Regina Oliveira, a parishioner at Mount Carmel, said about how much of her community’s heritage remains in the city. “It’s been gone for a long time.”
Oliveira, 64, was washing dishes in the basement at Mount Carmel’s school at 269 Oliver Street, where churchgoers convened for coffee and dessert on the last night of the novena. Oliveira, who lives on Jackson Street, was part of the exodus to the Ironbound. Oliveira shares the opinion with Immerso and Lavin that, if the statue has to be moved, it should be moved to Our Lady of Mount Carmel instead of to the North Ward.
“She needs to come home,” Oliveira said. “Nowhere else in Newark does she have the ties that we do.”
Not long before Monsignor Joseph Ambrosio’s death in 2020, the priest built an altar to Mother Cabrini inside Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The intention was to create a following, called a devotion, around her.
“We’ve been trying to build a devotion around Mother Cabrini,” said Rev. Danny Rodrigues, Ambrosio’s successor. “There are still many families in the parish that have either the parents or grandparents that were taught by Mother Cabrini.”
Joseph Mennella, 78, from Mount Carmel, said the silver lining about this “delicate war” over the statue – especially in a year in which a movie came out about her life – is that many Newarkers are learning about Mother Cabrini and her life’s work.
“Old-timers have photos and statues of her in our homes – this neighborhood, more than any in Newark, had the most devotion to her,” said Mennella, who noted the statue was paid for with donations from Mount Carmel and residents in the South Ironbound neighborhood.
The reach that Mother Cabrini had during her lifetime cannot be overstated. Between 1889, when Pope Leo XIII sent her to the United States, and 1917, the year of her death, Cabrini’s order of nuns built 67 orphanages, schools, and hospitals as far away as Brazil.
Lavin prefers to believe that the current controversy around Mother Cabrini wasn’t meant as a slight. “A lack of education about Mother Cabrini is what got us to this point as well,” he said. “Working for a Catholic church, we always preach mercy, kindness, forgiveness, so I want to give people the benefit of doubt.”
