The Archdiocese of Baltimore has pulled up anchor at Greenmount Avenue and 22nd street after 151 years. The last Mass at the fabled St. Ann church was celebrated and widely mourned on November 24.
“It’s a disaster to be put out of your church,” said Delores Annettie Moore, 75 and a member of St. Ann’s for the past 55 years. “Why is the laity carrying the brunt of the responsibility for the [Archdiocese’s] problems?
“We haven’t had our own pastor for years,” she said. “We’re not broke and we’ve sacrificed and tithed our share.”
St. Ann has been closed as part of the Archdiocese’s “Seek the City to Come” verdict, a two-year process of identifying vulnerable parishes. The decision resulted in 61 churches in and near Baltimore City cut to 23.
Along the Greenmount Avenue/York Road corridor the following churches have been closed: St. Ann, Blessed Sacrament, St. Pius X, and St. Mary of the Assumption in Govans. Pointing north outside of St. Ann before the penultimate Mass was held on November 17, Bobby Jackson, 72, said, “From here to the county line, it’s going to be a [Catholic] desert.”
Ms. Moore and others are not just angry that St. Ann has closed after more than a year of passionate and laborious appeals. She is offended that her church and St. Wenceslaus near Johns Hopkins Hospital will be folded into St. Francis Xavier.
Known as the first exclusively African-American Catholic church in the country, St. Francis is a mile away at the corner of Oliver and Caroline Streets. The injury is not the distance.
“For them to tell us that we have to go to St. Francis is an affront. We’ve sacrificed and done nothing but try to work with the archdiocese,” she said, noting that she’ll be joining St. Charles Borromeo parish near her home in Pikesville. “They pushed us aside.”
Worshippers at St. Francis Xavier apparently aren’t thrilled about being told what to do either.
“We can’t disregard the pain of it all – it’s depressing even for those whose churches aren’t closing,” said Howard Roberts, 65, a member St. Francis, a former coordinator of youth ministries in the city for the Archdiocese. “But moving isn’t the issue, it’s what we do when we get there.”
Early in the process – when the Archdiocese held “listening” sessions to hear what people had to say about the drastic cuts – Erich March wrote a letter to Bishop Bruce A. Lewandowski, who oversaw the process for Archbishop William E. Lori.
March is the patriarch of a prominent Baltimore funeral home family that has worshiped at St. Ann’s for generations. He has vague memories of attending Mass with his mother as a three-year-old and always sitting in the back of the once-Irish congregation.
“I later figured out why,” he said.
Early in the Seek campaign March wrote to Lewandowski, one of many letters the bishop received from parishioners.
“I told him that [sending] us to St. Francis Xavier wasn’t a good idea. I’m hearing that many of our members will not be going to St. Francis and may leave Catholicism altogether,” he said.
“They seem to think we’ll just merge and be happy, that all Black Catholics are the same,” said March, strongly considering returning to his Lutheran roots on his father’s side. “We’re not.”
Said Mary Sewell, a legacy parishioner who isn’t sure where she’ll go for worship now, “First I’m a Christian and then I’m a practicing Catholic. I don’t have to pray in an all-Black church.”
All of which is at odds with the Archdiocese’s efforts to promote evangelization after decades of plummeting membership.
“They don’t talk about people not going to Mass because they’re severely turned off by the sexual abuse scandal,” said Ralph Moore, a longtime lay leader at St. Ann and vocal critic of the Archdiocese and the Roman Catholic Church at large. Moore, a cradle Catholic, is also leaving the Church of Rome in disgust.
“We are sustainable”
Unlike many of the churches that have already closed or will be soon, St. Ann is financially healthy with a reported $917,000 in parish coffers. Much of that money came from the sale of the adjacent church school (which closed in 1974 and was once a shelter for men) to Mother Seton Academy, a non-archdiocesan middle school.
Mother Seton was able to buy the school in the early 2000s for a reported $750,000, much of it from a donation by Baltimore Ravens’ owner Steve Bisciotti. The interest on the parish bank account has been enough for St. Ann to keep going on its own.
“That’s one of the travesties here,” said March. “We’re sustainable.”
Before the sale of the school, where Cardinal Lawrence Sheehan (1898-1984) was a pupil in the first decade of the 20th century, the church roof needed repair. It was the mid-1990s and St. Ann was again threatened with closing. Ralph Moore and Erich March then led a “Pennies to Heaven” campaign, raising $30,000. The roof was fixed and the parish spared. Not this time.
Unique among other churches that are closing, the leaders of the “Save Saint Ann” committee offered to buy the property and the building, which apparently needs some HVAC work but otherwise is in pretty good shape.
When asked to respond to the many arguments the parish has made to stay open, the communications department of the Archdiocese directed Fishbowl questions to the closing decree posted on its website.
Requests to speak with Archdiocese chancellor Diana L. Barr, a doctor of canon law who worked closely with the Seek the City process and co-signed the appeal denial letter, did not get a response.
The question that persists among the public – and one that Dr. Barr is in a position to answer as the official who oversees parish financial “corporators” – is whether any money from the sale of closed churches might eventually help settle lawsuits from more than 900 sexual abuse victims — dating to the 1940s — that have bankrupted the Archdiocese.
“What would the Archdiocese gain by telling the truth about all of this?” asked March. “That they’re closing the churches because priests abused people?”
It’s a harsh and unproved assessment, one that the Archdiocese has consistently denied. Yet it persists. By canon law, whatever funds a parish has – like the nearly $1 million at St. Ann’s – follows a closed church to the one with which it will be merged. In this case, that is St. Francis Xavier.
Because the archdiocese owns the building and property, isn’t it possible, skeptics ask, that profits from a sale could go to the Archdiocese to use as it pleases?
“The assets and bank account of St. Ann [are] managed by the Archdiocese,” said Dana Moore, an attorney and wife of Ralph Moore, no relation to Delores Moore.
Along with Mary Sewell, Ralph and Delores traveled to Rome in 2023 for a cause dear to St. Ann. They went to plead the case for canonization of six Black American Catholics, Mother Mary Lange, founder of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, prominent among them.
One statistic that’s hard to debate is low weekly attendance, which according to the Archdiocese has averaged about 60 people, many coming from outside the immediate neighborhood. Twenty years ago, it said, a little more than 180 people were attending regularly. Thus the need for evangelization.
“We haven’t done as good a job at that as we should and we have plans” to do better, said March. “But help from the Archdiocese to do so has not been forthcoming.”
“I don’t want to bash the archdiocese,” said Dana Moore. “We appreciate the seriousness of the situation that the archdiocese finds itself in. But we believe St. Ann is an exception.”
And because it’s exceptional, said Ralph, “Just leave us alone and we’ll do fine.”
An anchor in front
St. Ann is the mother of the Virgin Mary and the patron saint of sailors. The 22nd street church named in her honor was built by a God-fearing, slave trading Irish-American sea captain in gratitude for the survival of his ship – the Baltimore Clipper Wanderer – during an 1833 gale off the coast of Vera Cruz. Captain William Kennedy, his wife Mary Ann Jenkins and the church’s first pastor – the Rev. William E. Bartlett – are buried below the main aisle.
The church is easy to find: The one with the big anchor out front. At some point, according to parish history, the anchor wound up at a city dump only to be rescued and returned.
A rescue for St. Ann, an oasis dispensing corporal acts of mercy in a badly blighted neighborhood, seems unlikely.
St. Ann was an Irish church during its first 100 years or so. Not only did Cardinal Sheehan learn his catechism at St. Ann but former Baltimore Oriole and Hall of Fame baseball manager John McGraw (1873-1934) lived next door and was married there.
Slowly, as Baltimore changed, the congregation changed along with it. For the past half-century it has been a vibrant African-American church ministering to the immediate neighborhood, Catholic and non-Catholic alike. Its members have gone from the back of the church to guiding the ship in one lifetime.
What now?
When the gatekeepers say no, if you’re sincere and audacious enough, you go to the king. In this case, Pope Francis, to whom the faithful of St. Ann will next take their cause.
“All we can do,” said Delores Moore, “is pray.”
About the series
Earlier installments in Rafael Alvarez’s “A City to Come” series include Anger and Acceptance at the Shrine of the Little Flower and “The Closing of St. Rose of Lima”.
Rafael Alvarez, a 1976 graduate of Mount St. Joseph High School in Irvington, is writing a book about the Rosary. If you have a good story about the Catholic prayer beads please contact him via orlo.leini@gmail.com
I suppose the question is how full are the individual church congregations and how vital is their programming ? Wouldn’t it be better to have full buildings with lots of events?
Very sad that the article ends with the idea of appealing to Pope Francis!
Pope Francis is probably busy most of the time denying he was complicit in Argentina’s “Dirty War” when he was a Jesuit big shot in Argentina.
Most American’s have never heard about the Dirty War. It went on in Chile too.
Military dictatorships in both countries would kidnap anyone they chose. They would torture them and dispose of their remains. Francis claims he knew little about what was going and that’s why he never took a stand against it.
Most of the hierarchy in the Church say that they accept Francis’ denial. Some don’t. If they bring the matter up in public they are excommunicated.
So sad some St. Ann’s parishioners think “…going to the King” will help.
The King is busy with his own personal problems.
Oh, and the sexual abuse law suits filed against the Catholic Church all over the world. Not just in the Archdiocese of Baltimore.