Some notable June events around Holy Name Province include:
One Year Ago
June 14, 2013 — St. Francis of Assisi Church on Long Beach Island, N.J.,reopened nearly eight months after Hurricane Sandy damaged the building and much of the surrounding area. (An account of the storm and the months that followed, written by then-pastor Stephen Kluge, OFM, appears in this newsletter.)
June 20, 2013 — The Provincial Council announced the postulant level formation program would move to Holy Name College, Silver Spring, Md. (The first postulant class to live there recently completed its academic year.)
Five Years Ago
June 14, 2009 — A portion of Thieriot Avenue in Bronx, N.Y., was renamed “Franciscan Way” to honor the Franciscans’ long service to Holy Cross Church there. (The friars staffed Holy Cross from 1921 to 2008.)
10 Years Ago
June 9-12, 2004 — More than 100 friars and 300 partners-in-ministry participated in the “Franciscan Response to Globalization” assembly at Siena College in Loudonville, N.Y. (Last week, the friars met on the Siena campus for their chapter.)
June 19, 2004 — 60 years after the liberation of Cherbourg in Normandy, France, during World War II, Dominic Ternan, OFM, who was killed in battle there, was honored by the local French community. During the ceremony, a monument dedicated to his memory was placed at the gates of the Chateau de Sevigny. (Dominic died there June 19, 1944, when his battalion, part of the 315th Infantry Regiment, encountered heavy enemy machine-gun fire. Almost everyone was hit except Dominic, who, thinking the firing had stopped, ran to a wounded sergeant lying in a ditch. A German sniper shot Dominic and he died immediately. The sergeant survived.)
20 Years Ago
June 4, 1994 — The first class of novices to take up residence at St. Francis Novitiate in Providence, R.I., professed first vows there. (Members of that class included Todd Carpenter, OFM, James Sabak, OFM, and Brian Smail, OFM.)
30 Years Ago
June 13, 1984 — The Province’s Gumma Mission in Japan became a dependent custody of the newly formed Japanese Province. (Holy Name Province still has a presence in Japan, with friars ministering at the Franciscan Chapel Center in Tokyo and elsewhere.)
— Compiled by Maria Hayes