The year was 1894. It was the year Thomas Edison opened America's first cinema, the Kinetoscope, in New York. War broke out between China and Japan. In France, Capt. Alfred Dreyfuss was convicted on a false treason charge. "Coxey's Army" of the unemployed marched on Washington. President Grover Cleveland was halfway through the second of his two discontinuous terms as President of the United States. It was two years after the quadricentennial of Columbus' discovery of America. Major league baseball was rapidly establishing itself as the "national pastime" with the current National League champion, Baltimore, beating out the teams from Brooklyn, New York, and Boston.

The City of Greater New York did not yet exist, awaiting its creation in 1898 by the merger of the cities of New York, Brooklyn, and Long Island City, the county of Richmond, and the towns of Flatbush, New Utrecht, and Gravesend in Kings County and Flushing, Jamaica, Newtown, and the part of the town of Hempstead known as Rockaway in Queens Count . And in May of that year, Bishop Charles McDonnell, the second bishop of Brooklyn, established our parish, the second of the Queens parishes he founded. We take for granted the existence of our parish as it is now. But Woodside, Queens, and the Catholic Church itself were very different entities in the nineteenth century and earlier. We need to look at history to understand better how we got here.