MBS Nativity

The Nativity scene that has graced the Rectory lawn in the Christmas season these past few years is a Most Blessed Sacrament Parish artifact with important St. Francis de Sales connections

The two-dimensional relief-carved Holy Family sculptures were commissioned by longtime MBS pastor, Father John Newns, in 1991. Aileen McGovern, wife of artist Bob McGovern, recalls that Father Newns “was renovating, and had old pews,” and that wood was used for the carvings. An accounting sheet lists these as MBS Upper Church pews, but the Lower Church was deconsecrated in 1987, and its furnishings put in storage, so that is also possible. In any case, Aileen recalls that “we chipped a lot of chewing gum off them” so the DNA of MBS – and generations of its young parishioners — is deeply embedded in that old oak.

The DNA of St. Francis de Sales Parish was in the blood of the artist, Bob McGovern, who was born into our parish in 1933, and whose family lived at 1239 Hansen St.  Bob attended the parish school, and was one of “Dooner’s Crooners” (Boys Choir under Choirmaster Albert Dooner). De Sales was central to his early development. Interviewing him in 2001, Robert Wuthnow wrote that “McGovern was still young when he recognized what he now calls ‘the double-edged scary and comforting business of spirituality’…the comforting part appeared in the daily and weekly religious rituals” that appealed to his poetic side – and SFDS had many of those. The scary side came in moments such as when “he remembers the nuns making him write ’I won’t talk in line’ in his notebook a thousand times, then going out in the rain, dropping his notebook, and seeing the words, written in soluble ink, disappear…” McGovern admitted to being a poor student at De Sales, more interested in art than academics. Monsignor Francis Carbine observes that McGovern’s artistic poetic sensibilities showed early at home: “As a young boy in the 1940’s, he drew a giant ear in chalk on Hansen Street in West Philadelphia. Next came a Christmas crèche made from wood of orange crates and grape boxes…”

In 1947, at age 16, McGovern was struck with Polio and life instantly changed. Then attending West Philadelphia Public High School, he had to drop out and be tutored at home, “but through a state disability program was soon able to attend art school. ‘It was magical.’” Sally Downey reported that “He was encouraged to pursue his art and, while wearing full braces on both legs and using crutches, he commuted from his home to the Philadelphia College of Art, now the University of the Arts. Later he learned to drive a car with hand controls. After graduating from what is now the University of Arts, he was invited to join the faculty. For the next 43 years, he taught freshmen drawing and design as well as printmaking and other courses until retiring in 1999”

Bob continued to live in the neighborhood as an adult. Parishioner John Deady recalls visiting him at his parents’ house, at 4807 Kingsessing, where “he must have had a studio upstairs. I remember staying in the living room with his parents” while he printed an artwork. “Felt badly as I believe he was wearing braces and had to go up and down the stairs.” After Bob married Beverly at SFDS in 1963, the young McGoverns moved into the apartment house then owned by the Parish, on 47^th Street between the convent and the Little School. Later, they moved to a more accessible place with a studio in Narberth – where Bob stayed after Beverly died and he married Aileen (also at SFDS!) in 1971. Bob and Aileen ultimately became members of both St Malachy and St, Margaret of Antioch in Narberth, so they had many church connections.

When Bob McGovern passed away in 2011, Lou Baldwin wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer: “So vast a number of McGovern’s woodcarvings, sculptures, wood and linoleum cuts, paintings and watercolors adorn churches, institutions and major museums in the Philadelphia Archdiocese and across the country (and Father Eric’s office) that his epitaph could well imitate that of Sir Christopher Wren in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London: ‘If you seek his monument look around you.’’” We are privileged to be a part of his story.

Bob McGovern

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Miracle at MBS

You may know Saint John Neumann (whose statue is in the former confessional by the door to the sacristy), as a hometown saint, but were you aware that a member of Most Blessed Sacrament Parish had a direct role in his canonization?

The story began in 1962, when a five-year-old boy named Michael Flanigan reportedly “bumped his shin against the doorstep of his parents’ home in West Philadelphia.” The MBS 1976 Diamond Jubilee Book notes that the family were “members of Most Blessed Sacrament Parish who resided at 5612 Beaumont Avenue” and explained that when the boy’s injuries didn’t heal, and he was admitted to Misericordia Hospital, “Doctors discovered that the injury had resulted in a form of bone infection. The boy underwent two operations. During the second operation a cancerous growth was discovered in the injured leg and it eventually spread into the child’s both lungs and lower jawbone. The boy was treated with radiation and drug therapy but these proved too toxic and the treatments were discontinued, at which time his condition worsened.”

“The boy’s parents took their son to the Blessed John Neumann Shrine at Fifth Street and Girard Avenue in July, 1963, and relic of the saintly fourth Bishop of Philadelphia were applied to the afflicted parts of his body. The symptoms disappeared in December of that year. The family and close friends considered the cure miraculous. Twelve years later, in December, 1975, the medical board of the Sacred Congregation of the Saints in Rome ruled that the cure had no ‘natural medical or scientific’ explanation, and the validation of the cure was submitted along with a petition to the Congregation to consider the canonization of Blessed John Neumann. The family now resides at Villas, near Wildwood, N.J.”

A decade later, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that “When Pope Paul VI convened canonization ceremonies for St. John Neumann in 1977, Michael Flanigan was one of the first invited to make the trip to Rome. When the young man and the Pope met, the pontiff embraced him and asked, ‘Please pray for me.’”

Sadly, in October, 1986, Michael Flanigan – age 29 and married with two children – died suddenly one morning after complaining of sharp back pains.  “Family members said he had been well and had had no medical problems since his bout with cancer” but his hour had come.

So who is the saint he helped to canonize?

St. John Neumann (confusingly, a different saint from British John Henry Newman with a w, after whom College Newman Centers are named) was an immigrant from Bohemia (Czech Republic), who became the fourth Bishop of Philadelphia in 1852, founded the first Catholic diocesan school system in the United States, and died in 1860.

Saint John Neumann’s road to sainthood was not straightforward: known as a “quiet, simple man who…devoted more time to tending the sick and teaching children than he did to diocesan affairs,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that his “91-year journey to sainthood was interrupted” in 1912, when it was decided that Bishop Neumann’s quiet steadfastness was not “heroic” enough to merit sainthood. Eventually, in 1921, Pope Benedict XV changed the definition of “heroism,” proclaiming that “Works, even the most simple, performed with constant perfection in the midst of inevitable difficulties, spell heroism in any servant of God,” and declared John Neumann “venerable.” He was beatified by Pope Paul VI during the Second Vatican Council on October 13, 1963, and canonized on June 19, 1977.

Today, the National Shrine of St. John Neumann, with his remains visible below the altar stone, can be visited at 1019 North 5th Street.  Invoked as the patron of sick children and immigrants, his feast day is January 5 (Curiously, our statue, which is typical, looks very different from his actual photos – take a look!).