I have been to New York for baseball twice before. In 1988 I stopped to see another classmate and planned on just staying overnight on my way to see my sister, who at the time lived in Rhode Island. When I got there, he told me that he had tickets for a game at the old Yankee Stadium. Then in 2004, I took a week to tour New York while getting to see the Mets at Shea Stadium. This year I am going to do some more touring. I will see three Yankees games at the new Yankee Stadium and three Mets games at Citi Field.
So since this is a vacation reflection, let me just give you a trivia question. Do you know why New York is called “the Big Apple”? One theory is that the Latin word for apple is malus. Malus is also a Latin word that means evil. At a time when our nation was still mostly rural, many people looked at the big cities as places full of evil and temptation. And since New York was the biggest city, it was also the biggest source of temptation. Thus it became known as the big malus, the Big Apple.
That same bit of trivia should also explain why our image of Adam and Eve generally has them eating an apple. The book of Genesis does not specify a particular type of fruit from the tree in the center of the garden. But since they gave in to the temptation of the serpent, they brought evil upon themselves. The apple then became a good visual reminder of what they had done.
All of this has nothing to do with the apples that are on the handles of the doors of our church. Those refer to the idea that our patron, Saint Malachy, had helped his people during a famine by planting apple trees, making him Ireland’s version of Johnny Appleseed. Notice that the statue of St. Malachy in our church shows him holding an apple. I do sometimes tell people that there is a different reason for that symbolism. I said that the architect had planned a church with a lot of windows, but he suspected that someday there would be a pastor whose preference of computers would lead him to use an Apple instead of a Windows computer. (No, I am not being paid for that advertisement.)
I hope that little bit of trivia about “the Big Apple” does not get you worried about what I am doing while in New York City. Rather than looking for any sort of temptation, I will see such things as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ellis Island, and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Of course I will also be watching the Mets and the Yankees .
Father H
