On a Thursday afternoon in July 1936, Bishop Thomas E. Molloy of Brooklyn stood before more than 1,200 people on the grounds of the Cenacle retreat house in Lake Ronkonkoma, New York, and dedicated a new grotto — a stone structure fashioned after the famous shrine at Lourdes, France, where, in 1858, a young shepherdess named Bernadette Soubirous had reported visions of the Virgin Mary. (*16) Several monsignori were present. The Patchogue Advance covered the event the following day, noting the gift of the late George Duval of Brooklyn, the contract firms responsible for the cement and the excavating, the readiness of the Sisters of the Cenacle to welcome all who came. What the newspaper did not note — what no document would record — was the presence, somewhere among those twelve hundred, of one of the men who had built the thing.
His name was Maurice Joseph Fitzgerald. He had crossed the Atlantic a dozen years earlier with forty dollars in his pocket. He had spent the intervening years on these same grounds, shaping them — first as gardener, then as one of the men who helped raise this shrine from hollow earth to consecrated stone.
Maurice had been born on 11 July 1901 in Caherlevoy, Mountcollins, County Limerick, Ireland, the eldest son of Timothy Fitzgerald, a farmer, and Elizabeth Sheehy. (*1) The 1911 census recorded him there as a nine-year-old scholar — known to family and neighbors as Mossie — one of seven children in a household that also employed a sixteen-year-old domestic servant: a working farmhouse, full and close, at the edge of rural Limerick. (*2) Timothy Fitzgerald died in 1915, when Maurice was thirteen. In 1922, in the aftermath of Irish independence, Maurice served in the military. (*3) He was the first of his immediate family to leave for America.
The night before he departed, his neighbors and family gathered to see him off. Among them was his second cousin Jackie Lenihan — Jack Tom — then a boy of about thirteen. Before Maurice left Caherlevoy for the last time, he gave Jackie a bird in a cage. Jackie Lenihan was still carrying that memory in 2010, at the age of ninety-nine, when he recounted it to Terry Fitzgerald on a visit to Ireland. He called him Mossie. (*OA1)
In 1924, Maurice joined the wave of young Irish men and women crossing the Atlantic in those years, and boarded the SS Cedric at Cobh for the crossing to America.
He arrived in Boston on 31 August 1924. The passenger manifest recorded him: single, fair complexion, blue eyes, dark hair, five feet nine, carrying forty dollars. His destination was Lowell, Massachusetts, where his first cousin once-removed Thomas Lenihan had settled. His stated intention was to remain permanently. (*4)
The documentary record falls quiet for the years between Boston and Long Island, but by 1928 Maurice had found his way to Lake Ronkonkoma and to the Cenacle — a large retreat house and convent on forty-two acres of wooded ground overlooking a pond, run by the Sisters of the Cenacle. The property had originally been donated by the retired actress Maude Adams, and the sisters had maintained it for retreatants since the 1920s. (*H2) Brief notices in the Suffolk County News in 1928 place Maurice at the Cenacle, spending weekends with friends in Brooklyn and New York: "Morris Fitzgerald, of the Cenacle," the column called him — attending a friend's wedding in October, visiting friends in February, a man quietly building a life in his adopted county. (*6) (*7)
The Depression that arrived in 1929 tightened circumstances across Long Island, but the Cenacle's grounds provided the measure of stability that steady institutional work could offer. The 1930 census recorded Maurice as a twenty-eight-year-old laborer at the Cenacle, still single at the time the enumerator called. (*5)
The woman he would marry was already in New York. Mary Bridget Geary had been born in 1908 in Carna, County Galway, to John Geary and Bridget Lyden, known as Delia. In October 1923, when Mary was fifteen, her father brought her to New York — to his sisters, her aunts, who were already established there. She left behind, among other things, her baby sister Sarah, born that January. Sarah was nine months old when Mary sailed. It would be many years before the two sisters stood in the same room again. (*OA2)
Two months after the 1930 census, on 26 November 1930, Maurice and Mary married at the Church of St. Albert — a Belgian national parish established in 1916, at 433 West 47th Street in Manhattan — with his sister Mary and Mary's brother James Geary as witnesses. (*12) (*13) The bouquet Mary carried was borrowed from the photographer; there was no money for flowers in 1930.
Maurice had declared his intention to become a citizen of the United States on 11 January 1929. By the time he filed his formal petition on 12 January 1934, he and Mary had three sons: John, Timothy, and Maurice Jr. The petition listed his continuous residence at the Cenacle since his arrival in 1924 and named two witnesses — Henry F. Verwilghen, a priest, and Patrick Rafferty, a laborer, both of the Cenacle — who could attest to his character and his presence. (*8) Rafferty had arrived from Maphoner, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, around 1922, two years ahead of Maurice. By 1930 the two men were living and working on the same grounds, sharing the same census page. Rafferty had married Frances Madeline Fish in Lake Ronkonkoma in April 1933. In their early family lives, the two households shared the same grounds. On 7 July 1934, the Supreme Court of Suffolk County made Maurice's citizenship official: Petition No. 2811. (*15)
Around 1935, the grotto project began.
The shrine was designed by architect Lucien Gaudreau of Baltimore and featured sculpture by John Early; the cement contract went to John Wild of Holbrook, and the excavating and landscape work to Charles Beck of Ronkonkoma. (*16) (*H1) But family oral tradition, preserved by Mary Bridget Geary Fitzgerald, places Maurice and Pat Rafferty among the men who performed the hands-on construction at the site: clearing brush, hauling stone, sand, and cement from road to worksite, and shaping the masonry core into cave-like forms — the arch, the niche for the statue of Our Lady, the steps and low walls where retreatants would one day kneel. (*16) The man who had sworn for Maurice's citizenship now worked alongside him in the mud and cement. For months, the future grotto was a worksite: digging, mixing, hauling, setting. Then the scaffolding came down.
On 23 July 1936, it was dedicated. The bishop blessed the stone. Twelve hundred people gathered. And Maurice Fitzgerald — who had mixed the concrete and set the approach paths and helped fashion the cave that faces heaven — was there, not as a named contributor, not as anyone whose presence the newspaper would mark, but as a man who had made what the bishop was blessing. (*16)
He had less than two years left.
By January 1938, a newspaper notice reported him confined to a hospital in New York, "formerly employed at the Cenacle" — the past tense marking the close of his working years on those grounds. (*17) The illness was actinomycosis of the sigmoid, a slow bacterial infection, compounded by cachexia. Family understanding held that it was connected to his work on the grounds — possibly to managing cattle, an exposure consistent with the disease: actinomycosis is well documented in cattle, and abdominal infection in humans from such contact or from contaminated soil was a recognized route. He lay at Misericordia Hospital at 531 East 86th Street in Manhattan. Mary and the three boys — John, six; Timothy, four; Maurice Jr., two — remained at the Cenacle property in Brookhaven, sixty-five miles from the man in the hospital bed.
While he was still hospitalized, on 21 September 1938, the Long Island Express came ashore at Bellport, approximately two miles from the Fitzgerald home — one of the most powerful hurricanes to strike the northeastern United States in the twentieth century. Maurice Sr. was in Manhattan, beyond reach of the storm and beyond reach of his family. Family memory holds that Mary searched for her eldest son John in the wind and rain; that Maurice Jr., barely two years old, would carry the terror of that day for the rest of his life — even in his early eighties, he could still recall it clearly. (*34)
Eight days later, on 29 September 1938, Maurice Joseph Fitzgerald died at Misericordia Hospital. He was thirty-seven years old, fourteen months into his illness. (*18) The requiem mass was said at St. Jerome's R.C. church in New York. The Mid-Island Mail's obituary on 5 October described him as a native of County Limerick who had come to America thirteen years before and spent the last eleven years on the Cenacle grounds — a member of St. Joseph's Holy Name Society at the Lake, survived by his wife, his three sons, his brother Timothy of Lake Ronkonkoma, his sister Mrs. Mary Gilligan of the Bronx, and his mother, Elizabeth Fitzgerald, still living in County Limerick. (*23) He was buried at St. Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx on 1 October 1938, section 15, range 16, grave 65. (*22)
The grotto stood for decades after him. By the 1950s it appeared on postcards: "Our Lady of Lourdes Grotto, Lake Ronkonkoma, L.I., N.Y." — thousands of retreatants kneeling at the stone cave near the water, leaving flowers and candles, unaware of the men who had made it. Of Maurice's siblings, roughly half had made it to America before the Depression tightened the immigration rules and closed the door for any interested in emigrating — his youngest brother Jim among those left on the Irish side of that line. Elizabeth Fitzgerald outlived her son by almost ten years, dying in Limerick in 1947. On a family trip to Ireland in 1977, some of Maurice's siblings were still there to be met.
In 2011, Terry Fitzgerald reached out to Pat Rafferty's granddaughter Kathleen. Her reply was this: "Thank you for sending me a message about our grandfathers, just like you I never got to meet my grandfather — he died when my mother was only five. I would love it if you could send me anything about my grandfather's accomplishments." (*OA3) Two men built the grotto. Neither of their grandchildren knew them.
In 2009, Terry Fitzgerald returned to Long Island for the death of Timothy — Maurice's middle son, her father's brother. Timothy was interred at St. Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx, section 15, range 16, grave 65, beside his father. Somewhere in that same period, going through the house, Terry found a cache of documents in the bottom of the linen closet. Those documents sent her to the Cenacle grounds — to the grotto Maurice and Pat Rafferty had built more than seventy years before. The original retreat house was eventually demolished in the early 2000s; the grotto's memory persisted in local histories and family stories long after. The bishop who dedicated it named the donor. The newspaper named the contractors. No one named Maurice Fitzgerald. But the stone held — and in the hands that shaped it, so did he.
Sources
1. Vital Records — Civil Registration of Births, Abbeyfeale District, Limerick; entry no. 31, Maurice Fitzgerald, born 11 July 1901; IrishGenealogy.ie.
2. Census Records — Ireland Census 1911, house 22, Caherlevoy, Mountcollins, Limerick; census.nationalarchives.ie.
3. Military Records — Irish Military Archives; records referencing Maurice Fitzgerald; militaryarchives.ie.
4. Passenger Records — Massachusetts Passenger and Crew Lists, 1820–1963; NARA RG 85, Series T843, Roll 292; Ancestry.com.
5. Census Records — United States Federal Census 1930; Brookhaven, Suffolk, New York; FHL microfilm 2341384; Ancestry.com.
6. Newspaper Records — Suffolk County News, 24 Feb 1928, Lake Ronkonkoma column.
7. Newspaper Records — Suffolk County News (Sayville), 19 Oct 1928, p. 13.
8. Naturalization Records — New York County Naturalization Records, 1791–1980; FamilySearch ark:/61903/1:1:7D1Z-JHT2. Note: Witness name confirmed as Patrick Rafferty upon review of original document image; earlier transcription in error.
12. Vital Records — New York, New York, Extracted Marriage Index, 1866–1937; Ancestry.com.
13. Vital Records — NYC Municipal Archives Historical Vital Records; entry for Maurice Fitzgerald and Mary Geary marriage 1930.
15. Naturalization Records — Suffolk County, Court Orders Dec 1929–Dec 1949; FamilySearch.
16. Newspaper Records — Patchogue Advance, 24 Jul 1936, p. 7. Note: Family oral tradition, passed down by Mary Bridget Geary Fitzgerald, holds that Maurice Fitzgerald and his colleague Pat Rafferty were among the team of workers who built the grotto. Maurice's specific contribution is attested through family memory rather than documentary record.
17. Newspaper Records — The County Review, 27 Jan 1938, p. 14.
18. Vital Records — New York City Municipal Deaths, 1795–1949; FamilySearch ark:/61903/1:1:2W23-FZC.
22. Vital Records — New York, New York, Index to Death Certificates, 1862–1948; NYC Dept. of Records; Ancestry.com.
23. Newspaper Records — "Maurice Fitzgerald," obituary, Mid-Island Mail, 5 Oct 1938, p. 15; NYS Historic Newspapers.
34. Newspaper Records — Daily News, 23 Sep 1938; Long Island Express Hurricane; newspapers.com.
H1. Historical Research — "The Grotto at the Ronkonkoma Cenacle," Lake Ronkonkoma History, Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/LakeRonkonkomaHistory/posts/the-grotto-at-the-ronkonkoma-cenaclethe-grotto-at-the-cenacle-was-modeled-after-/2345508715492228/; cited in research documents compiled by Terry Fitzgerald, April 2026.
H2. Historical Research — "Sisters of the Cenacle," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisters_of_the_Cenacle; and New York Times, 27 March 2011; cited in research documents compiled by Terry Fitzgerald, April 2026.
OA1. Oral Account — Jack (Jackie) Lenihan, age 99, to Terry Fitzgerald, Ireland, 2010. Lenihan was Maurice Fitzgerald's second cousin and was present at his going-away party the night before his departure for America in 1924.
OA2. Family Knowledge — Background on Mary Bridget Geary Fitzgerald, as known to Terry Fitzgerald.
OA3. Personal Correspondence — Kathleen [Rafferty], to Terry Fitzgerald, 2011, regarding their grandfathers' shared history at the Cenacle.
About the Author
I'm Terry Fitzgerald, raised in the United States with deep family roots in Ireland and a lifelong pull toward understanding where I come from. My paternal grandfather, Maurice Fitzgerald, died when my father was only two, leaving his story largely untold. I wrote this to preserve his memory and to give voice to a man known mostly through absence. The grotto he built nearly a century ago still stands today, a quiet but enduring reminder of the legacy he left behind.