Clergy & Staff

Rev. Raymond M. Rafferty has been pastor of Corpus Christi Church since 1998. Since his ordination at St. Joseph’s Seminary in 1966, Father Rafferty has served as assistant and pastor in several NYC churches and as director of New York University’s Catholic Center. He has even served as pastor for the English-speaking Church of Our Savior in The Hague, Netherlands.

Along the way, he was the youngest president of the Senate of Priests of the New York Archdiocese and the President of the New City Library. He is deeply involved in community affairs, particularly as an active member of the Board of Directors of Community Impact at Columbia University and of the Morningside Area Alliance, and can often be found at the educational, cultural, and religious institutions of Morningside Heights. Corpus Christi’s Young Adult Group and the Lenten Sunday Vespers program are just two of the additions he has made to the Church’s array of services.

Besides pastoring, he enjoys visits to his beloved Metropolitan Opera, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Frick Collection.

Msgr. Kevin Sullivan has been executive director of Catholic Charities here since 2001, after serving with that organization for more than seventeen years. After the attacks on Sept. 11, he was elected chairperson of the 9/11 United Services Group, established to coordinate help for victims and their families.

Msgr. Sullivan was born in the Bronx and raised in Yonkers. After studying at Cathedral College and St. Joseph's Seminary, he was ordained in 1976. Since then he has completed advanced degrees in public administration at Columbia University and New York University and frequently teaches courses in nonprofit management at Notre Dame.

Fr. Wizeman outside the Slipper Chapel at the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, England

Click here for sermons by

Fr. Wizeman.

+ Fr. Wizeman died July 18, 2010.

May he rest in peace.

Fr. William Wizeman, s.j., grew up on a dairy farm in Palmyra, New York, near Rochester, one of seven children. After attending Fordham University, he entered the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1987 and was ordained in 1998 at St. Ignatius Loyola Church here.

Past service includes teaching at Loyola School in New York City and working in parishes in England and Nigeria, as a hospital chaplain, and with the homeless and mentally disabled.

Fr. Wizeman's doctorate in theology at Oxford University focused on the Protestant and Catholic Reformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His interests include the spirituality, music, and painting of the medieval, renaissance, and romantic periods and nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature.

Recent Publications:

"The Virgin Mary in the Reign of Mary Tudor," in Studies in Church History: The Church and Mary, ed. Robert Swanson, Boydell & Brewer, 2004, pp. 239-248.

"The Pope, the Saints, and the Dead: Uniformity of Doctrine in Carraza's Catechismo and the Printed Works of the Marian Theologians," in Reforming Catholicism in the England of Mary Tudor: The Achievement of Friar Bartolomé Carranza, ed. John Edwards and Ronald Truman, Ashgate, 2005.

"The Theology and Spirituality of a Marian Bishop: The Pastoral and Polemical Sermons of Thomas Watson," in The Church of Mary Tudor, ed. Eamon Duffy, Ashgate, 2005.

The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor's Church: Catholic Christendom, 1300-1700, Ashgate, 2006. Click here for more information.

"Martyrs and Anti-Martyrs in Mary Tudor's Church," in Martyrs and Martyrdom in Early Modern England, ed. Thomas Freeman and Thomas Mayer, Boydell & Brewer, 2007.

"Re-Imagining the Marian Catholic Church," Recusant History, Vol. 28, No. 3 (May 2007), pp. 353-364.