page_title: Our Lady of Good Counsel Church (Moorestown, New Jersey)
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Our Lady of Good Counsel Church (Moorestown, New Jersey) / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Outside of Our Lady of Good Counsel Church, Moorestown, NJ
context_page_description: Our Lady of Good Counsel Roman Catholic Church is a church of the Catholic Diocese of Trenton in the Mid-Gothic Romanesque Revival style and is located at 42 West Main Street in Moorestown Township, New Jersey. While the title "Our Lady of Good Counsel" is generally applied to a painting showing Mary comforting the child Jesus the parish has adopted its name from another event—the wedding feast at Cana at which Mary gave the waiters the "good counsel" recorded in John 2:5 that they should "do whatever he [Jesus] tells you." The current church building is the oldest building in the downtown part of Moorestown, an area which, in 1990, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The outside of the church is marked by a 1,150 pound statue of Mary, holding the infant Jesus—placed there to mark the centenary of the church building. It was designed by Carl LaVitch of Pennsauken, N.J.
context_section_description: The parish grew out of a mission on the farm of a Catholic family which had settled in Fellowship, NJ in 1832; they established a mission chapel named “The Chapel of Our Lady and St. Patrick” at which Mass would sometimes be celebrated by priests traveling from the parish of Immaculate Conception in Camden, about ten miles to the southwest.   At that time, the parish was in the Philadelphia Diocese and, as the Catholic population of the area grew, Bishop John Neumann of the Philadelphia Diocese in 1852 ordered that Mass be celebrated at the chapel monthly.
  After a fire destroyed the chapel in 1866, a straw purchase (used because of the antipathy towards Catholics in the town at the time) gained the congregation the land for a new church on the main street of Moorestown and the building, a brick church, opened in 1867.  By 1879, the Bishop of Newark Michael Corrigan changed the status of the church from "mission church" to a parish—meaning it would be served by a resident priest.
  The current church, built of Stockton stone, was erected after the original structure was damaged in a wind storm in the early 1890s and was completed sixteen months after the cornerstone was laid on July 14, 1895.
caption: Outside of Our Lady of Good Counsel Church, Moorestown, NJ
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