STM celebrates one-hundred years of Catholic chaplaincy at Yale University beginning this fall.  This celebration includes a series of archival exhibits in Riggs Study throughout the year, focusing on STM's one-hundred years of Catholic ministry throughout the decades. Exhibits will be paired with a blog each month. Be sure to read along and come visit Riggs Study throughout the school year!

On May 31, 1922, T. Lawrason Riggs had an appointment at Woodbridge Hall. This appointment was with then Yale University President James Rowland Angell. At the end of the interview, Riggs left Woodbridge Hall the first Catholic Chaplain at Yale University. He would start his ministry to Yale students the fall of 1922. As he recorded in his diary, a small five-line-a-day notebook he kept from 1922 to 1926: “…I took the afternoon train to New Haven and, after supper at the Williams’s with Baldy, had a historic interview with Pres. Angell—when he finally reached Woodbridge Hall. He talked of other matters for some time, but was very cordial and sympathetic when the subject of my next year’s activity was brought up…”

Fr. Riggs’s first semester as Yale’s Catholic chaplain officially began in October of 1922. At the time, Yale was undergoing a transformation from the time Riggs had attended as a graduate. From only a handful of Catholics in 1910, Yale College now had three-hundred undergraduates who identified as Catholic—a national influx that occurred at places of higher education after World War I. In his diary from that year, he records his first meeting with nine undergraduates and two alumni on October 2, 1922, to plan out the year ahead over dinner. Just a week later, on October 9, Fr. Riggs hosted the very first meeting of Yale’s Catholic Club at 7:00. One-hundred-and-twenty-five undergraduates attended and Fr. Riggs announced the Catholic instruction classes he would be teaching for the semester. According to his diary, he attended a Ukrainian concert on campus afterwards.

Riggs’s diary entry from October 9th is a perfect example of how Fr. Riggs choose to pursue his first year of ministry on Yale’s campus. He taught an instructional class on the Catholic Mass and the Medieval Papacy at Dwight Hall—then Yale University’s library, Sterling Memorial Library wasn’t built and opened until 1931. He also made sure to be visible at Yale events around campus. Like the Ukrainian concert he attended after his first Catholic Club meeting, Riggs took advantage of the social and intellectual life a university town provides: he attended concerts, lectures and football games—especially when Yale played Harvard or Princeton. He also frequented Mory’s, who had recently moved to their current location on York Street. Weekly, he could be found having tea at the Elizabethan Club, spending time at Scroll & Key, or attending a play or a smoker put on by Yale Dramat—three organizations he was also a member of as an undergraduate.

Hospitality was also an important part of his first year of ministry. He met with Catholic students for lunch and dinner at his home—in a Gothic Revival cottage—on Whitney Avenue. This was the site of many afternoons and evenings where undergraduates could freely talk about their faith on a campus where Protestant Christianity was the majority. He also enjoyed bearing witness to non-Catholic students who were interested in Catholicism or skeptical. At his dinners and lunches, he was always happy to engage in theology debates or, show off his extensive collection of Catholic rare books and art.

The highlight of his first semester was organizing and celebrating a corporate communion at St. Mary’s on Hillhouse in New Haven. As he recorded in his diary that day on December 8th: “The corporate communion at the 7 o’clock mass was most success-ful. I said mass and the Dominicans gave communion. Apparently there were well over a hundred Yale men, some sixty of whom breakfasted at Mory’s afterwards.”

Most successful, indeed. By December 1922, Fr. Riggs had begun a ministry that engaged Catholic students both intellectually and socially—a pattern that would serve him well through the rest of the 20s and into the 1930s, as he began to prepare to move the crux of Yale’s Catholic campus life from his home to a place located on campus.

Come visit Riggs Study throughout the month of October and learn what Catholic chaplaincy at Yale was like in 1922 or view the exhibit online.

You can learn more about Fr. Riggs from the QR code under his portrait in the Riggs Study or by viewing it online.

Works Referenced:

Alegi, Peter. “A History of Catholicism at Yale to 1943.” Department Essay in American Studies. Yale University, 1956.

Kelley, Mather. Yale: A History. Revised Edition. Yale University Press, 1999.

Riggs, T. Lawrason. Diary: 1922-1926. The Riggs Family Papers. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.