St. Brigid’s blues

After a ceremony in front of the church, piper John Maynard led several hundred people around the square and into the center of the park where a growing crowd heard speeches, prayers and poetry, as well as Latin and traditional Irish music.
Locals handed out leaflets calling for the “preservation and restoration of St. Brigid’s as a working church and immigrant history museum.”
A carnival atmosphere prevailed in the sunshine, but one placard summed up the current mood of the parishioners: “Just as Jesus was betrayed, the parishioners of St. Brigid’s have been betrayed.”
The parishioners had raised just under $100,000, which independent assessors said would go much of the way toward repairing a cracked back wall in the 1848 church.
The locals won support for their campaign from leading New York City preservationists, but archdiocese officials said that re-opening the church would cost too much.
“It’s not like any other church,” said County Waterford native Jim Power, listening to the speeches.
“It’s a priceless past that has to be preserved. The Irish saved this country at Gettysburg. We need the Irish now to save this church,” added Power, a mosaic artist.
“Bono and the big Irish bands should get involved,” he said.
In a speech to the crowd, novelist Peter Quinn referred to some of that history. “One million died and two million left Ireland during the Famine. The first thing they did in New York was build that church; they didn’t build a memorial at Battery Park.”
He added later. “This was the first place they came to. Not Castle Garden, not Ellis Island [which were opened in 1856 and 1892].”
In Ireland, Quinn told the crowd, Catholics couldn’t build churches, just chapels, but in a Protestant-dominated America they asserted themselves. “St. Brigid’s was a statement that this would be a multicultural nation.
“Think of the baptisms there, the funerals, the weddings,” said Quinn whose paternal grandparents were married and whose father was baptized in the church. “Think of the mothers and fathers who prayed in St. Brigid’s during every war for their children away at war.
“To rip that church out is to destroy the tapestry of New York, to spit on the history of generations of immigrants,” Quinn said.
He added that such churches were landmarks and milestones in a pilgrimage of a community. And in the Catholic church’s community of saints, Quinn said, there was a “bond between the living and the dead.”
The crowd listened intently to the novelist’s account of St. Brigid’s history, but when he used more specifically Catholic themes and imagery, it became more voluble and interrupted him often with applause.
St. Brigid’s was a mainly Irish church for more than 50 years; other immigrant groups followed. Then, Puerto Rican migrants came to the community in the post-World War II era, and close-knit and devout multigenerational families from that community have been leading the current campaign.
The Rev. Frank Scanlon, a former pastor of St. Brigid’s now at St. Columba’s on 23rd Street, told the crowd: “The church belongs not just to those who sit in the pews, but to everyone who lives in the neighborhood. To take that away from the community would be a sin.”
He said that those who said parishioners can go to worship on 10th or 3rd or 12th Streets or on Grand didn’t understand. “The church is here for a purpose,” Scanlon said.
Asked if he thought St. Brigid’s could be saved, the priest said: “It’ll be quite a fight, but I’m hopeful that people will come to their senses.”
When he arrived at the park, Scanlon was greeted warmly by scores of his former parishioners, who seemed buoyed by his support.
As he was leaving, Edwin Torres showed the priest pictorial reminders of St. Brigid’s striking interiors, which have been allowed, according to campaigners, to fall into a state of disrepair or simply plundered.
“It’s a crime, a sin,” Scanlon told him, shaking his head.
From the dais, Torres told the crowd how County Tipperary-born architect Patrick Keely, who went on to build 600 churches in America, laid the first foundation stone in 1848, and that the church was completed in just 15 months. The work of stain-glass artists in Paris was imported, as were materials from Bavaria. Torres also recounted how sculpted faces of some of the Irish shipwrights who built the church adorn its pillars.
Talking about the past few years, he said “there was a sense of community and togetherness, unprecedented at St. Brigid’s.”
Cardinal Egan closed St. Brigid’s in 2001 citing safety concerns (though locals have said it’s since been rented out for film shoots). Last year, the parishioners were told to leave a local community hall where Mass was being said and to worship at other churches.
As reported in this newspaper recently, the archdiocese turned down an anonymous financial offer to save the 157-year-old structure from destruction.
Activists and preservationists have alleged that that the policy of a cash-strapped archdiocese is to aggressively maximize real estate return without taking local conditions or St. Brigid’s history into account.
Anthony Feliciano, the Democratic district leader, said: “The church is still a non-profit organization.” But he said he and other people of faith felt that the archdiocese was “forgetting the church’s mission to serve the poor.”
Rosie Mendez, a city council candidate and an active St. Brigid’s parishioner, recalled that when there were riots in bad times, the homeless and others found shelter in the church.
On the question of whether St. Brigid’s had a future, she said later: “You have to believe.”
Addressing a broader issue, she said: “The contradictions are just getting louder. The church is going to keep losing people.”
City councilwoman and borough president candidate Margarita Lopez said that back in the 1970s, only the Catholic Church stood by the community when all other institutions had abandoned it. The police refused to effectively counter drug traffickers, the fire department wouldn’t put out fires, and the powerful pursued a long-term goal of gentrification. Now that the community has built a safe community, retaining its diversity, “the Catholic church is leaving us.”
The symbolism of losing St. Brigid’s, and the perceived selling out of the church to real estate interests, is enormous, parishioner Carolyn Ratcliffe told the Echo. “This was always a low-income neighborhood, but a safe, family-orientated one, until the late 1960s. Then came drugs,” she said.
It was and is a home to thousands of artists, writers and poets, she said. (At the rally, campaigner Roland Legiardi-Laura read “Weather near St. Brigid’s Steeples” by Irish-American poet and resident Frank O’Hara. The steeples came down about a year or two after the poem was written in the early 1960s.)
“My community is still here,” said the Waterford-born Power about the neighborhood’s artists.
“It remains one of the most mixed communities in America. One of the newest groups are people from Azerbaijan, for example,” said Ratcliffe,
She added that many newer Catholics in the neighborhood, such as those with roots in Mexico, weren’t evident at the rally because they work on Saturdays or because of fear.
But she also pointed to a recent article in the New York Times in which a writer who’d turned 30 said he felt old in a community dominated by single people under 25 paying enormous rents.
“There’s a sense that that mix is being threatened,” Ratcliffe said. “That it won’t be a community any more for artists, or immigrants, or families.”