From the editors: This edition of ONE launches a special series of four articles highlighting CNEWA’s centennial. The series — which begins with the fallout throughout Europe and the Middle East after World War I and the establishment of the agency — will be assembled into a special commemorative book entitled, “A Century of Healing and Hope,” and published in 2027.
Catholic Near East Welfare Association has been building community for 100 years. This fellowship spans continents; bridges divisions in age, caste, class, color, income, language, politics, race and religion; and joins generations from among the living and from those who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith.
United in purpose, this CNEWA community advances the common good through the men and women of the Eastern churches: priests, religious and laity. Since their founding by the apostles, these communities of faith have formed the backbone and provided the lifeblood for so many who seek healing and hope with open hearts and minds throughout the Middle East, Northeast Africa, India and Eastern Europe.
This CNEWA fellowship has made a powerful impact on the people served by the Eastern churches, walking side by side with them in times troubled and tranquil; praying with them when they were attacked; comforting them when they grieved; feeding them when they hungered; bandaging them when they bled; sheltering them when they had lost all; rejoicing with them in life’s all too infrequent moments of joy and happiness.
Fueled by faith, vision and purpose, CNEWA’s mission is enlivened thanks to the prayerful generosity of generations of friends and benefactors, who without fail have responded — for 100 years — to answer that question put to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
- The early years: CNEWA is formed and reformed, 1917-1941
The story of CNEWA begins with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, tsarist Russian and Ottoman Turkish empires provoked by World War I. Much of southwest Asia — the “Near East” in the English of the time — and Central and Eastern Europe was caught up in the economic, humanitarian and sociopolitical tumult that followed.
More than a million ethnic Greeks — expelled from their homes in communities founded in Asia Minor by their ancestors more than 2,000 years earlier — sought refuge in Istanbul. Those ethnic Armenian and Assyro-Chaldean Christians, who had survived the genocidal death marches that followed their expulsion from their homes in 1915, sought refuge in what is now Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. Revolution, civil war and famine drove millions from the devastated lands of the former tsars to havens such as Berlin, Istanbul, Paris and Prague.
At the time considered the largest violent displacement of humanity ever, this postwar turmoil impacted the global Catholic community and moved its leaders and members to respond. They rallied support for the humanitarian and pastoral efforts directed by Pope Benedict XV (1914-1922) and Pope Pius XI (1922-1939), such as the Papal Relief Mission to Russia. Many of those who supported these papal initiatives were Catholics in the United States, including the founder of the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement, the Rev. Paul Wattson, a zealous advocate of church unity.
Moved by the pope’s appeals for help, Father Paul encouraged his supporters, mainly in the pages of his monthly magazine, The Lamp, to fund Greek Catholic Bishop George Calavassy and English military chaplain Msgr. Richard Barry-Doyle. Together, they worked among the tens of thousands of Armenians, Assyro-Chaldeans, Greeks and Russian refugees inundating Istanbul, which lies at the crossroads of Asia and Europe.
In December 1924, Father Paul, Msgr. Barry-Doyle and a group of prominent U.S. Catholic laymen established in Philadelphia “the Catholic Near East Welfare Association” to assist Bishop Calavassy’s work with the displaced Christians of the “Near East.” Msgr. Barry-Doyle stormed concert halls across the country — including Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall — with his “Call of the East,” entertaining audiences eager for news from the Old World and raising awareness and funds to help CNEWA address the needs of the displaced, particularly of orphaned children.
The activities of the “Children’s Crusader,” as Msgr. Barry-Doyle was called, complemented the work of a German Benedictine, Augustine von Galen. A scion of a prominent noble family, Father von Galen had traveled to North America in 1924 at the behest of the Holy See’s Sacred Congregation for the Eastern Church to raise the profile of Catholic Union, which advocated for the reunion of the Catholic and Orthodox churches promoted enthusiastically by popes Benedict XV and Pius XI.
Relief and reunion were not mutually exclusive and, on 11 March 1926, with the urging of members of the U.S. Catholic hierarchy (who were concerned with the flood of foreign clergy seeking funds from their parishioners), Pius XI consolidated these two organizations into one papal agency. This new papal organization retained the name, “Catholic Near East Welfare Association,” and the pontiff appointed Jesuit Father Edmund A. Walsh, who had led U.S. and papal famine relief efforts in Russia, its first president.
The U.S. bishops formally endorsed this new organization in September that year as “the sole instrumentality authorized to solicit funds for Catholic interests in those regions and shall be so recommended to the entire Catholic population of the United States.”
Quickly, the Jesuit went to work, building on the heightened profile of CNEWA raised by Msgr. Barry-Doyle and Atonement Father Paul Wattson. He launched the “One Million Dollar Fund,” focusing on dollar gifts from one million U.S. Catholic women, and reached that goal in little over a year. The funds collected supported Bishop Calavassy’s work with refugees, which had to move from volatile Istanbul to a more secure Athens; schools, orphanages and hospitals in Lebanon, Palestine and Syria; programs for Russian refugees in Belgium and Poland; and the work of the Holy See’s Congregation for the Eastern Church and the pontifical Oriental Institute and Russian College in Rome.
Emboldened by his fundraising and programmatic successes, Father Walsh planned an ambitious role for CNEWA as the Holy See’s central humanitarian relief agency — far beyond the original scope intended for it by the pope. His ambitions collapsed, however, with the October 1929 stock market crash in New York and the onset of the Great Depression.
By May 1931, as available funds in the United States evaporated, the Holy See reorganized CNEWA further, naming the archbishop of New York ex officio president, chair and treasurer, and charging him to name an executive officer among the diocesan clergy. CNEWA’s fundraising initiatives were curtailed, limited to the reception of a fraction of the annual World Mission Sunday collection, and its programming focused on the “spiritual ends and necessities” of the communities dependent on “the Sacred Congregation for the Eastern Church and the Pontifical Commission for Russia.”
With this restructuring, the original cast of CNEWA exited the stage, including Fathers Walsh and Wattson, and Patrick Cardinal Hayes of New York appointed Msgr. James B. O’Reilly to lead the agency. With these reduced circumstances, the New York priest guided CNEWA through the Depression and focused on maintaining the agency’s profile among U.S. Catholics as a resource on the Eastern churches by advertising in the Catholic press; sponsoring annual conferences on the Eastern churches at Fordham University; and bolstering priestly formation among the Eastern churches with a seminarian sponsorship program.
- The world explodes: CNEWA galvanizes worldwide Catholic aid, 1941-1966
In 1941, New York Archbishop Francis Joseph Spellman appointed Msgr. O’Reilly as pastor of “the Actor’s Chapel,” Manhattan’s Church of St. Malachy, and as CNEWA president installed a priest and social worker, Msgr. Bryan McEntegart, to charge the agency as its national secretary.
A noted child advocate, the Brooklyn-born priest (who later served as the ordinary of Brooklyn with the personal title of archbishop from 1957 to 1968) had assisted the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations as a member of the White House Committee on Child Welfare and later directed the Child Welfare League of America. His tenure at CNEWA was brief, however, with his appointment as bishop of Ogdensburg, New York, in 1943, where he also assumed the role as the founding executive director of War Relief Services, the refugee aid agency of the U.S. Catholic bishops, today known as Catholic Relief Services.
Regardless, Archbishop McEntegart’s legacy at CNEWA was in securing Msgr. Thomas J. McMahon as his assistant and later his successor.
With World War II winding down in Europe, CNEWA under Msgr. McMahon continued its course of advocacy and education until the legendary prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Eastern Church, Eugene Cardinal Tisserant, dispatched him to the Middle East in 1948 on a fact-finding mission for the Holy See. Violently, the Arab world had rejected the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the State of Israel, pitting Arabs and Jews in a decades-old conflict that has since destroyed generations of families and communities, and displaced millions.
“Every day of those four months among the Palestinian refugees was filled with sorrowful thoughts and even more sorrowful sights,” he later wrote after war plunged Palestine into chaos.
“From the day we landed at Haifa and began our treks through mud and snow in Israel, Arab Palestine, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt, our pilgrim’s progress was beset with tears. …
“Many thousands of little refugee kiddies are being safely sheltered in our schools and orphanages. One day we stood among four hundred of these. They had all fled miles on foot. The eyes of one little child of five still held terror …
“We knew that a heavy rain would spell death for the little babes or the beginning of an epidemic for all. Some of the babes would be placed at the doorstep of a convent or a foundling hospital, and mother church would repeat her age-old story of tender and loving care. … Everywhere the church was in evidence. …
“It is a lesson to the world that Palestine is a microcosm, the crossroads of the world, the capital of three religions, whose rights make it imperative that that land can never be exclusionist and that no solution can be lasting, if it obscures these indigenous rights.”
“During those months at the close of 1948 and the beginning of 1949,” Msgr. McMahon later concluded, “as I helped the bishops and a thousand priests and sisters for the relief of the Middle East, I could see the absolute need for a special Pontifical Mission for Palestine, coordinating the efforts of the whole Catholic world. … This had been the idea of the Holy Father and all those around him.”
One of those around the pope was Msgr. Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, who had organized and directed Pope Pius XII’s refugee relief efforts during World War II. At a November 1948 meeting, where the idea of a papal mission to Palestine was discussed, Msgr. Montini penciled the name of Msgr. McMahon as the candidate to lead such an agency.
When Msgr. McMahon returned to the Holy Land in the spring of 1949, he did so not only as national secretary of CNEWA, but also as the papally appointed president of Pontifical Mission for Palestine, which the Holy See had entrusted to CNEWA for its administration and direction.
“It has been decided,” wrote Cardinal Tisserant in a directive dated 18 June 1948, “to bring together under the Pontifical Mission, operating in the Holy Land, all those organizations and associations which are engaged in activities concerning the East, and which are scattered throughout many countries of Europe and other continents.”
Immediately, Msgr. McMahon formed seven local committees in those areas where more than 700,000 Arab Palestinians had found refuge: the West Bank, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel and Gaza. These committees included papal delegates, bishops, clergy, laity and leaders of Catholic social service organizations. In Beirut — then accessible to the West and to the refugees affected by the violence — he set up the field operations center for the new Pontifical Mission for Palestine. Together, with local volunteers and CNEWA colleagues in New York, Msgr. McMahon began coordinating the activities of global and national organizations ministering to the needs of three-quarters of a million refugees — more than half of whom were under the age of 15.
Partners in these relief efforts included the emergency relief fund of the U.S. Catholic bishops, U.S. National Catholic Welfare Conference, U.S. National Council of Catholic Women, Catholic Medical Mission Board, Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. Religious communities for men, particularly the friars of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, and religious communities of women working in the region, joined Pontifical Mission for Palestine in its service to the refugees. CNEWA/Pontifical Mission for Palestine also developed a strong working relationship with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), founded in December 1949.
“In the field, Msgr. McMahon was responsible for distributing goods and services to an exhausted refugee population,” wrote Peg Maron, a member of the editorial team of this magazine, in the July-August 2001 edition. “He excelled in organizing resources to erect housing, schools, clinics and churches for the refugees. He had extensive correspondence with the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine and two secretaries general of the United Nations: Trygve Lie and Dag Hammarskjold.”
Manuel Abu Issa, who carried out the field operations of Pontifical Mission for Palestine in Jerusalem, remembered going out to the field every day and “visiting refugees in the camps set up by the United Nations. We would distribute wheat, rice, barley and sometimes sugar. We were always in the field,” he said, “and always pressed to do more.”
Ten years after the start of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Msgr. McMahon’s successor, Msgr. Peter P. Tuohy, reported that, in a nine-year period, Pontifical Mission for Palestine had released more than $34 million in food, clothing, medicine and services; distributed more than 8,000 tons of food, 6,000 tons of clothing and 55 tons of medical supplies from 273 centers to an estimated 425,000 refugees, nearly half of the refugee population; sheltered some 20,000 people and educated more than 34,000 children in 343 schools.
“Your name,” wrote Cardinal Tisserant to Msgr. McMahon upon the latter’s retirement in March 1955, “is held in grateful memory by thousands of refugees from Palestine, who without your timely and effective intervention would have been lost.” The exhausted priest died on 6 December 1956, at the age of 47.
Nevertheless, the work continued with Msgr. Tuohy, declaring in November 1955 that “until the resolutions of the United Nations are implemented, the church shall continue her worldwide aid to refugees. … We shall continue this relief assistance until justice and charity have been rendered to every single Palestinian refugee.”
A decade later, and with no resolution in the Holy Land in sight, the leadership of CNEWA transitioned the programmatic activities of Pontifical Mission for Palestine throughout the Middle East from emergency, crisis relief, to more sustainable, long-term initiatives:
“If you want to help a man,” wrote Carol Hunnybun, a 20-year veteran of Pontifical Mission in Beirut and Jerusalem, “you don’t buy him apples; you help him plant an apple tree.”
Read the next installment in the June issue.