Catholic Archives to hold exhibit in Greenville Feb. 24

The Archives of the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington will present a special exhibit in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the diocese’s founding. The exhibit will take place from 12 to 3 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 24, in the Family Center of Saint Joseph on the Brandywine Church in Greenville. It is free and open to the public. Featured items will include documents going back to the 1600s when the first Catholic Europeans arrived in present-day Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Artifacts to be displayed include the Sayer Chalice, a recusant chalice from as early as 1640 used at Saint Joseph Church in Cordova, Md.; the Saint Pius X Chalice, first use by St. Pius X in 1910, given to Monsignor John J. Lynch (1881-1955) by his family; the original and a replica of the 1868 Charter of the Diocese of Wilmington; a letter from Saint John Neumann (1811-60); a card from Saint (Mother) Teresa of Calcutta (1910-97); Bishop Thomas A. Becker’s (1832-99) diary from 1868; and various bishop’s rings, miters, croziers and pectoral crosses, historic chalices, reliquaries, pyx and documents. Items from the historic Saint Joseph on the Brandywine Parish Archive also will be on display.

“The Archives exhibit at Convocation 150 in Ocean City, Md., received such a positive response in November that we decided to offer another exhibit for the 150th anniversary celebration in the northern part of the diocese,” said Susan Kirk Ryan, Diocese of Wilmington archivist. “Because our archives headquarters is located on the campus of Saint Joseph on the Brandywine, we are able to offer a much larger exhibit in the nearby Saint Joseph on the Brandywine Family Center. We are very excited to be able to present so many historic treasures of the diocese, some exhibited for the first time in public.”

The Catholic Diocese of Wilmington was established in 1868 and comprises 56 parishes, 18 missions and 36 schools serving the State of Delaware and the nine counties of Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

For more information, go to www.cdow.org.