A bald-headed priest of a certain age wears a scarlet cape and sits nervously on a donkey in the 3800 block of Frederick Avenue in Irvington.
Father Mike Murphy isn’t crazy about the idea but it’s all in a day’s work, the day being Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week culminating this weekend on Easter Sunday. The holiest day on the Christian calendar, it commemorates the mystery of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead.
Told and retold and told again for millenia as the “Passion of the Christ,” the tale hit the big screen over Easter 1965 in The Greatest Story Ever Told starring Max Von Sydow as Jesus and, in his last role, Claude Rains as Herod. My Polish grandmother, union seamstress Anna Potter Jones of St. Casimir’s in old Canton, took a bus downtown to see the film at the Town Theater (now the Everyman) on Fayette Street.
I didn’t go with her (she probably took one of my older cousins) but vividly remember the oversized glossy program she brought home from the show, widely considered a flop. The most astute takeaway of the original came from the Apostle Paul around 55 CE when he wrote: “If Christ has not been raised [our] faith is in vain.”
Like Jesus entering Jerusalem astride a humble ass, Father Mike was surrounded last week by a crowd waving fronds of palm. As the beast made its way along an asphalt driveway toward the magnificent sanctuary of St. Joseph’s Monastery, he joked: “Don’t yell, ‘Crucify him!'”
Except for a few Missionaries of Charity (Mother Teresa’s order) keeping an eye on a group of kids, the comment was met with smiles. The real deal more than 2,000 years ago was no laughing matter [unless you were a Roman soldier] as it preceded Christ’s brutal death on the cross. We know it as Good Friday, observed today.
The word “good” applied to the torture and murder of an innocent man comes from an old definition of the word “holy.” Christ’s death at about three in the afternoon (when the Earth was said to quake) was observed with such solemnity in old Catholic Baltimore that my mother remembered not being able to listen to the radio or make a ruckus when she was a kid.
Father Mike, 62, has been pastor of “the Monastery” for the past dozen years and, with a wink to his own childhood in the parish, revived the tradition of a priest riding a donkey through a part of the church grounds called “the Grove.”
The parish was founded by the Passionist Order at the end of the Civil War and the congregation – originally Irish and German and still largely white – continually outgrew its surroundings. The current edifice was built with tons of marble from Carrara, Italy and dedicated in 1932. It is a house of faith worthy of the capitals of Europe.
The Passionists called their residences for priests and religious brothers “monasteries” despite little or no similarity to more traditional communities of monks living in cells. The last Passionate priest in Irvington, Father Thomas McCann (1938-2023), left in 2014. Father Mike, an Archdiocesan priest, followed.
He attended the long-closed Monastery grade school, was an altar boy there and graduated from Mt. St. Joseph High School across the street in 1982. He taught at St. Joe for 30 years and served as the school’s chaplain before being assigned to the Monastery.
“He’s a neighborhood guy, really well liked,” said James Dickerson, who like Father Mike, attended both the Monastery to Mt. St. Joseph High. “I send him a check every month.”
It was Father Mike, along with a determined team of parishioners, who resurrected the parish when it was on the knife’s edge of Archdiocese closings in 2024.
Originally one of more than 35 parishes set for closing in the “Seek the City to Come” reconfiguration – a plan that shuttered churches in or near Baltimore City by two-thirds – the Monastery survived as a “worship site.”
It was twinned with Our Lady of Victory two miles away on Wilkens Avenue. Just over the city line, OLV is one of the places where the Missionaries of Charity nuns serve immigrants and the poor.
After scores of meetings, letters and strategy, the Monastery evaded the outcome that felled other historic churches – all of whom also fought to varying degrees for survival – like St. Ann’s at 22nd and Greenmount, the Shrine of the Little Flower on Belair Road and St. Rose of Lima in Brooklyn.
“They had us slated to be closed, it was very close,” said Father Mike. “The final plan had us, St. Benedict’s and Transfiguration closing and becoming part of Our Lady of Victory.”
St. Benedict, also in southwest Baltimore, suffered from an alleged financial/sexual scandal involving its last pastor, a crisis viewed by many parishioners as a convenient excuse for closure. Transfiguration, formerly St. Jerome on Scott Street in Pigtown, is currently for sale.
Seek the City to Come, which moved forward in fits and starts for about two years, was overseen by Bishop Bruce A. Lewandowski at the behest of Baltimore Archbishop William E. Lori.
After finishing the work of shrinking the Catholic footprint in Baltimore to meet dwindling church membership across the city, Lewandowski was promoted last year to lead the Diocese of Providence, Rhode Island.
Sheila O’Doherty Kurth grew up in the 600 block of Brisbane Road within walking distance of the Monastery, where she graduated in 1972 before attending Mergenthaler. She was part of the group that worked to keep the doors open and, like most Monastery parishioners, lives outside the city, in her case Halethorpe.
Kurth, her children and grandchildren were all baptized in the parish. “This is home,” she said, sitting in a pew after a recent Mass. “We were on the chopping block and we fought to keep it open. There were a lot of meetings and a lot of tears.”
Like Father Mike, she believes that the Monastery fared better than other churches because their arguments were “compassionate” to the bind the archdiocese was in, one mirrored in once Catholic strongholds across the country.
It also helped that the parish is financially stable with monthly collections averaging close to $40,000, according to Father Mike, enough to pay winter heating bills of up to $9,000 a month for the 25,000 square foot sanctuary.
At the Monastery grade school, Sheila was one of the good kids and you can tell from her smile and disposition that she’s still a good person. Her classmate Joe Asberry? By his own admission, not so much.
“I was kind of a trouble maker when I was little,” said Asberry, a 67-year-old native of Yale Heights now living in Columbia, Maryland. “But I’d always fold my hands later and say a prayer that I was sorry.”
I went to high school with Asberry at Mt. St. Joe. He was a kid with blonde hair as straight as a curtain that fell well past his shoulders and saw just about every 1970s rock act that came through town.
“Everybody went to church,” said Asberry. Though the pews were crowded with his neighbors and classmates, the mischievous Joey – despite being an altar boy – wasn’t always among them.
“We’d have to go to 9 a.m. Mass so I’d get up real early and get dressed, sneak out the kitchen door and go to the playground,” he said. “My parents would cruise the alleys looking for me and find me on the swingset or the monkey bars. I’d cry and get in the car.”
When Asberry did show up for church he wasn’t exactly paying attention to the gospel. “My [late] brother John and I would bring baseball cards and sit in the back and make fun of people to make each other laugh.”
Yet, to this day, Asberry remains indelibly Catholic and practices one of the bedrock beliefs of the faith, one grounded in the message of Easter: Like the risen Christ, those who have passed away are not gone forever and one day we will be with them again.
“I always bought into it and I’m glad I did,” he said. “Every night I say goodnight to the people in my family who have died.”
Rafael Alvarez is the author of First & Forever: A People’s History of the Archdiocese of Baltimore. He has been writing about “Seek the City to Come” since 2024. Alvarez can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com
