Editor’s note: This is the first in a series by Rafael Alvarez examining the impacts of the Archdiocese of Baltimore closing dozens of parishes over the next year as it grapples with bankruptcy and shifting demographics. These articles won first place (Division C) in the Continuing Coverage category of the Maryland, Delaware, and D.C. Press Association’s 2024 Contest. Read the other parts of the series here and our other award-winning pieces here.
The Archdiocese of Baltimore has many reasons – unsentimental, calculated and driven by demographics – for cutting the number of parishes in and near the city by two-thirds, from 61 to 23.
The closings, including the historic parishes of St. Vincent de Paul, St. Wenceslaus and Saint Ann at Greenmount and 22nd, will begin around Thanksgiving and continue through early 2025.
“We don’t want any roofs caving in,” said archdiocese spokesman Christian Kendzierski, referencing the 1967 Lenten disaster at St. Rose of Lima just over the city line in Brooklyn Park. Heavy February snow caused the collapse the day after Ash Wednesday, injuring 48 and sending nine to the hospital, most of them children at the parish school.
The current roof at Saint Rose, along with the rest of its physical plant, is in fairly good shape compared to other churches on the goodbye list, which archdiocese officials say have generally suffered from “years of deferred maintenance.”
But the 110-year-old parish at the corner of 4th and Washburn is getting the ax nonetheless. A farewell Mass is expected to be held on Sunday, November 24, a week before the start of Advent.
St. Rose is closing because the number of people who attend weekly Mass has averaged about 70 in a building that holds 550. At the time of the roof collapse some 6,000 people were on its rolls.
The lack of attendance in the city “is glaring,” said Kendzierski, noting that the busiest parish in the Archdiocese – St. Mary’s in Annapolis – averages more than 3,000 people a week.
All of the booming parishes are in the suburbs and beyond, many serving descendants of families that began in the old city neighborhoods not long after coming to this country. It’s hard to deliver a product, however divine, when the bulk of your customers have died, moved or fallen away.
Beginning in the late 1960s, generations of Catholics have left in great numbers over personal choices and a variety of issues, most recently the widespread sexual abuse scandal and its attendant lawsuits.
The result is a fabled archdiocese – the first in the United States, founded in 1789 – on tenuous financial footing. The archdiocese declared bankruptcy in 2023. By this summer, more than 700 sexual abuse victims had filed claims.
The fate of the buildings the archdiocese is leaving behind is not yet known, many of them of great architectural and historic value.
The archdiocese is calling the realignment “Seek the City to Come,” a phrase from the Book of Hebrews. It has released a chart of the growth and decline of Catholicism in Baltimore: a mid-to-late 1950s peak followed by steady drop and the closing of parishes like Fourteen Holy Martyrs, founded in 1870 to serve the German population of southwest Baltimore. It closed in 1964.
The Baltimore attendance and participation figures align with Catholic statistics in other American cities.
“It used to be packed to the gills on Sunday,” said Linda Lamartina Cavanaugh, 83, married at St. Rose in 1961 to Joseph F. Cavanaugh, also 83, who was baptized there. “Years later we’d be at Mass on a Saturday night and prostitutes would be walking up and down the sidewalk right outside.”
When the couple had difficulty conceiving a child, Linda began a series of Novena prayers to the Virgin Mary in early 1963. Their first child, a daughter named Sharon, was born that December. Three more followed.
“I doubt that any of them [attends Mass] regularly,” said Linda, who attends with Joe and rarely misses.
Joe, a retired warehouseman, has weathered many setbacks at St. Rose, including an electrical fire at a church sponsored oyster roast in 1956 that took the life of ten women, including his mother, the former Stella Neff.
“I was 14,” said Joe of the Holy Name Society fire at the old Arundel Park hall, now Bingo World on Belle Grove Road. “My father died when I was nine.”
So indelibly Catholic is Joseph Francis Cavanaugh that he used to attend Saturday evening Mass at St. Rose and get up early on Sunday to take up the collection with the late Baltimore sportswriter John Steadman (1927-2001) at the Saint Jude Shrine near Lexington Market.
“Nothing,” said Cavanaugh, could persuade him to leave the church.
It’s a conviction shared with pre-Vatican II Catholics baptized before and during the Second World War II.
Bishop Bruce A. Lewandowski, the archdiocese vicar for Baltimore City and co-director of “Seek the City,” said it’s imperative for the Church to “get out from under the heavy weight of being in survival mode” in the city.
“We are not the church we were in the city 20, 30, 40 years ago,” he said. “What we have are remnants. If we don’t make the [hard] decisions the decisions will be made for us.”
More important than walking away from crumbling buildings and empty pews, said Bishop Lewandowski, is spreading the word that Jesus is the Messiah, to preach the gospel in the street and the living rooms of those – whether lapsed Catholics or the unchurched – who either don’t know or don’t care.
“We want to evangelize Baltimore City,” he said. In this, the bishop echoes Pope Francis who, just before he was elected to lead the Church in 2013, said, “The self-referential Church keeps Jesus Christ within and does not let Him come out.”
And then, the future pontiff added, “it gets sick…”
Forgetting history
The Archdiocese began “listening sessions” in late 2022 with parishes on the chopping block, discussions led by Bishop Lewandowski and a former staffer named Jeri Royale Byrd. Initially, St. Veronica’s, a historically Black parish in Cherry Hill was set to close and St. Rose would be saved.
About two miles north of St. Rose, Saint Veronica is one of three churches on the south Baltimore peninsula, the third being St. Athanasius in Curtis Bay into which St. Rose will be folded.
Bishop Lewandowski said the archdiocese was quite unprepared when it went to St. Veronica to float the idea of closing. “We never should have suggested it,” he said. “We didn’t know our history.”
Doretha Middleton Barnes, a cradle Catholic turning 92 this month, lived that history beginning with her baptism at a nearby parish, St. Adalbert in Wagner’s Point, founded in 1907 and closed in 1967. At the time her family was living in Fairfield, a southside shipbuilding and factory neighborhood that, like Wagner’s Point, barely exists today.
Barnes was 15 when St. Veronica was founded in 1947. Before the current sanctuary was dedicated in 1955, the parish held Mass in a tavern that also served as the rectory; the neighborhood movie theater – The Hill; and a public housing community center.
Told they would be closed, the congregation was adamant that they wouldn’t go backward and gave the archdiocese an earful.
Said Doretha’s good friend and fellow parishioner Frances Weems Pressbery: “We spilled the facts and it was very intense. We told them how deeply embedded we were in the neighborhood, the services we provide [to Catholics and non-Catholics] and how there’s no other Black Catholic church” anywhere close.
While Black Catholics have worshiped in Baltimore since the 17th century (and the first order of African-American nuns in the U.S., the Oblates Sisters of Providence, was founded here in 1829), they didn’t fare any better in the Church than they did in the rest of American society.
The Archdiocese website asserts that Baltimore’s fifth Archbishop Samuel Eccleston (1801-1851) “had no use for religious women of color and suggested that the Oblates return to the world and find employment in the better households of Maryland. The women opted to remain women religious.”
It was a time – and a very long time at that – when Black Catholics were forced to observe the laws of segregation and sit in the balcony or the rear.
As a child in the early 20th century, Barnes sat in the back of the church with her parents – “I accepted it,” she said, “because that’s where my parents sat” – but never encountered overt racism from the Polish and German parishioners at St. Adalbert.
She did experience an affront at St. Rose decades later while preparing to get married, a slight that made her grateful for St. Veronica from that moment on.
“It’s when I really started feeling like a second-class citizen of the Catholic church,” she said. “I got engaged in February of 1955 and the pastor of St. Adalbert [Rev. Charles Kotlarz, 1875-1955] had just died,” she said. “They sent a priest from St. Rose. He told me to take my [pre-marital] instruction at St. Veronica’s.”
At St. Veronica, she studied with the Rev. Charles T. Coughlin, a Jesuit. Father Coughlin, she said, told her, “‘You will also get married here’ and I felt welcome. I felt attached.”
And never let go.
Plenty of tears
St. Athanasius on Prudence Street in Curtis Bay was founded in 1891 on a hill overlooking the Baltimore harbor and heavy waterfront industry. It holds 350 people and, according to the archdiocese, averages about 240 for Mass on Saturday evenings and Sunday morning.
If the bulk of the St. Rose community joins the Curtis Bay church (instead of migrating to Saint Philip Neri in nearby Linthicum), St. Athanasius would be close to capacity each week. The archdiocese currently lists St. Athanasius and St. Rose as a single parish. A new name, if there will be one, has not been released.
“I’ll be joining the [music ministry] at St. Athanasius where they have an organist and a professional cantor,” said guitarist Frank Bahus, 60, whose children graduated from the St. Rose parish school, which closed in 2010 for lack of attendance.
“There’s been plenty of tears and we’ve lost some folks,” said Bahus. “To be told we would stay open and then we wouldn’t [has] had a profound effect on a lot of our older parishioners.
Beginning Sunday, December 1, Joe and Linda Cavanaugh will be attending St. Athanasius with a handful of friends. Joe’s not sure how many others will make the switch a mile-and-a-half away but he doubts it will be very many.
“There’s going to be a lot of empty churches,” he said of the closings. “And a lot of vandalism.”
Rafael Alvarez was baptized into the Roman Catholic faith at St. Clement in Lansdowne in 1958. He graduated Mount Saint Joseph High School in 1976 and Loyola College of Baltimore in 1980. Has your parish been closed? Email Alvarez and tell him about it: orlo.leini@gmail.com
St. Athanasius continues its evolution as the Curtis Bay parish for many different ethnic groups and peoples. Originally starting as a Irish Catholic hub, it was eventually attended in great number by Polish and other Slavic faithful who bought the homes and worked nearby. The first Polish pastor of St. Athanasius is buried at St. Stanislaus Cemetery on the north side of the harbor in Graceland Park. And for roughly 90 years the Polish American orbit within the Curtis Bay/Wagners Point area was throbbing with activity as its residents built businesses in the Patapsco-Pennington corridor and contributed to the strength of Baltimore as a whole.
It was stated in the article about St. Rose of Lima that it is across the city line in Brooklyn Park. That is not correct. I grew up in Brooklyn and it is in Brooklyn!
I grew up with both Joe and the brothers of his wife, saw Joe lose his Mother in the Oyster Roast fire. converted to Catholicism and went to Saint Rose as a teen ager. it is sad to see my history leave. religion in the Baltimore area has to come back. Brooklyn has lost a major part of it’s history
Rafael: while nostalgia is lovely, how about looking at the destruction of very young lives caused by the Catholic church and its’ priests. I have absolutely zero sympathy for the closing of the shrine and its partners in heinous crimes.