On October 1, 2006, Ss. Peter & Paul Church celebrated its closing Mass, ending almost 100 years of service to Rochester, New York. It was enough to bring me to tears. Peter & Paul is one of the most beautiful churches I’ve ever seen. And it was the boyhood parish of my recently-deceased father.
The Pictures Tell the Story
My father grew up in the tough “Bull’s Head” neighborhood on Rochester’s West Side, practically in the shadow of Peter & Paul. Hardly a week of my childhood went by when he didn’t share some anecdote about his time there. One story that left my siblings and me in stitches concerned a nun threatened by a neighborhood punk. “I’ll plant you, Sister!” he reportedly taunted. The nun rolled up her sleeves and gave him the thrashing of his life. When she was done, she put her hands on her hips and told him to “Start planting.”
Dad was an altar boy at Peter & Paul in the early '50s, the parish’s zenith. He graduated from the parish grammar school maintained by the Sisters of Notre Dame in 1955. My mother keeps his now-tarnished school ring in a keepsake box, and an award for his altar boy service is displayed on my dresser. When his mother lay dying thirty-odd years ago, it was a priest from Peter & Paul who ran to her nearby home to give her last rites.
The church was the vision of Father Emil Gefell who served as its pastor for over forty years until his death in 1950. It was he who no doubt gave my father his First Communion. At its peak, Peter & Paul was home to seven Masses every Sunday and four each weekday. Tickets had to be issued for Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve to accommodate standing-room-only crowds of worshipers.
Today, the few Catholic families who still live near Peter & Paul aren’t enough to keep it afloat. In recent years it has become more a soup kitchen and museum than a place of worship. Like so many churches in the United States, it is largely a victim of the post-war exodus of urban Catholics to the suburbs. The story is told by the pictures on display for visitors. Photographs from the '50s are filled with families and children. Those taken in subsequent years show a dwindling number of generally older parishioners. Earlier this year Rochester’s Bishop Matthew Clark announced that the church would close as part of his ongoing consolidation effort. He initially gave Peter & Paul two years to find a buyer. It was recently announced that the church has been sold.
It Takes Your Breath Away
Perhaps due to embarrassment about his humble origins, never once in the nearly twenty years I spent in my father’s house did he take me to the place I had heard so much about. So when I had a chance to tour Peter & Paul on a trip home last spring, I decided to see it while I still could.
What I saw took my breath away. The view upon entering the church is stunning. Built in 1910-11, its style is Lombard-Romanesque, with a long, massive nave opening up to a broad, domed apse at the east end. You could spend hours “reading” this church. The top of the nave features nine ribs adorned with images of the angels, representing their nine choirs. The intact high altar and the nearby pieta date to the middle of the 19th century, having come from pre-existing churches on the site. To the left of the loft is a beautiful painting of a tiara-crowned Pope St. Gregory. Statues of the Twelve Apostles line the interior of the apse. When standing in this glorious space, one’s attention is inevitably drawn upward toward the gorgeous ceiling and the heaven beyond it. I've visited dozens of beautiful Catholic churches all across America. Peter & Paul is on a par with any of them.
One of the caretakers who led the tour told us that it was not until the 1960s and afterward that we learned that “church is about more than worship.” But our tour guide's forebears already knew that long before the 1960s. Judging by a dusty old bulletin from 1954, Peter & Paul was bustling with activity, from clothing collections for refugees to food drives for area families. In that same bulletin, parishioners were given “Ten Reasons for Daily Mass,” warned to stay away from an offensive Jane Russell movie called French Line, and advised to consider attending the Rochester Oratorio Society's production of Liszt's Christus. And above all, at the parish’s school, the Sisters of Notre Dame took poor Italian-speaking children of immigrants like my father — he spoke broken English until he attended Peter & Paul — and turned them into educated, productive citizens. “More than worship” indeed.
Few Catholics are privileged to receive sacraments in a church like this anymore. We have traded heavenly cathedrals for barns in the suburbs. We have given up majestic organs, Gregorian Chant, and Byrd's “Mass for Five Voices” for guitar-strumming “family masses” with saccharine tunes. The jamboree atmosphere that too often characterizes Mass these days would be grotesquely out of place at Peter & Paul. One man on my tour said, “It’s so spiritually uplifting. Why don’t we build churches like this anymore?” No one could really answer him.
There was a time when the sheer beauty of Catholicism — its liturgies, teachings, and churches — was enough to attract converts. Knocking on doors was unnecessary. Philosophy’s three “transcendentals” — beauty, truth, and goodness — all had a home in the Catholic Church. But many in the Church lost sight of those three values in the confusion that followed Vatican II. We’ve made progress since then in restoring a healthy appreciation for goodness, and truth has been served by the return to doctrinally-sound catechesis. But beauty, essential to truth and goodness, has proved elusive. Perhaps that is why Pope Benedict made a point of reminding us, in the recently-released Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, that our priceless heritage of Catholic art and architecture communicates to us just as readily as do spoken or written words, that beauty is merely truth reflected.
What Does the Future Hold for Peter & Paul?
Until recently, the Diocese of Rochester was distressingly silent about that. For the first two weeks of October, a diocesan spokesman repeatedly declined to name the new owner of the church until the sale was finalized. That is reasonable enough, but he also declined to identify the new owner’s affiliation or denomination. He told me only that it would remain “a house of worship.” Even the question, “Is the new owner a Christian community with sacraments recognized by the Catholic Church?” went unanswered. Likewise, Catholic Exchange's John Morales called with similar questions and was given no relevant information.
(Hear John Morales discuss these issues with the author on the CE Today Podcast. No special equipment needed. Click here to listen.)
Finally, perhaps in response to our questions, the diocesan newspaper posted an article dated October 14 concerning the closing Mass. It mentioned almost in passing that Peter & Paul will soon be “St. Mark's Coptic Church.” In fact, the article indicates that a Coptic priest attended the closing Mass and was “hugged” by parishioners exiting the church. So why the runaround from the diocesan spokesmen? And while the denomination of the new owner does come as something of a relief — Coptic Christians boast both valid sacraments and apostolic succession — one can't help but think that more could have been done to keep the church in Roman Catholic hands.
For instance, when I asked diocesan representatives whether they had contacted the Fraternal Society of St. Peter, the fastest-growing order of priests in the Church, whose dedication to the Tridentine Rite has led them to buy, restore, and maintain churches in “rough neighborhoods” like Bull’s Head, they told me they had never heard of the group. Moreover, Bishop Clark gave the church two years to be sold; why did he not leave the sale of the church open longer to secure a Roman Catholic buyer? Why not at least let the full two year-period run its course?
There is also the decision to close and sell the church in the first place.
Until last year's announced consolidation, four parishes served the area. Peter & Paul is one of three churches to close during the past year.
The spokesman told me that in choosing another church to be the site of the new consolidated parish, the diocese cited the need to “avoid costly repairs and maintenance” so that scarce funds would be available to enhance other important diocesan activities. The diocese is doing wonderful work ministering to the poor in this troubled part of my home town. God bless them for it. But is not preserving beautiful treasures for worship part of the Church’s ministry? Do not the poor deserve beauty in their midst? I have no doubt that it would cost more to maintain Peter & Paul, but wouldn’t protecting this unique, indescribably beautiful church be worth the extra funds in the long run?
So in the end, concerned Catholics were left with needless anxiety caused by diocesan stonewalling and the Church as a whole was left with fewer cultural assets to accomplish her mission. The late Pope John Paul II once said, quoting Dostoyevsky, “Beauty will save the world!” With the loss of Peter & Paul, the Church will have less of it at her disposal.
© Copyright 2006 Catholic Exchange
Rich Leonardi, publisher of the blog Ten Reasons, writes from Cincinnati, Ohio.
