The Churches of New York LIII: A Church of the Poor

 

 

St. Veronica

153 Christopher Street

 

Christopher Street nowadays seems like a calm, even sedate neighborhood – like much of Greenwich Village, a residential oasis in the midst of the big city. On a westward stroll towards the Hudson River the visitor encounters only a few relics – in one sleazy stretch – of the former wild lifestyle that flourished here. And there are even fewer reminders of Christopher Street’s more distant past as a grimy commercial and transportation center. It seems that Christopher Street has become like many other streets in New York – or have many other neighborhoods  become like Christopher Street? In any case, the visitor eventually encounters  – somewhat surprisingly – on the north side of the street the  red brick façade of a church decorated with white stone facing and surmounted by two steeples. This is the former parish of St. Veronica in the West Village, now a mission of St. Bernard’s/Our Lady of Guadalupe on West 14^th street.

 

Certain Catholic parishes of New York in the entire course of their history never seem to have made the leap to bourgeois respectability, let alone wealth. One thinks of such “churches of the poor” as St. Mary’s, St. Teresa, Our Lady of Sorrows, or the Church of the Nativity. So it is with St. Veronica. St. Veronica parish was founded in 1887, carved out of St. Joseph’s parish in Greenwich Village. At that time the village was a crowded Catholic area. Archbishop Farley saw the need for a new parish in the West Village. Fr. Satler, the pastor of St. Joseph’s, however, vehemently resisted this idea. Thomas Shelley tells this amusing anecdote. On a visit to the Village Archbishop Farley was discussing the matter with Fr. Satler who claimed that there were few or no Catholics within the bounds of othe proposed new St. Veronica parish. Well then, said the Archbishop, we will assign an even bigger portion of your parish’s territory to St. Veronica to make up the difference! At that the pastor of St. Joseph’s quickly changed his mind and agreed to the originally proposed boundaries of St. Veronica. 1)

 

As noted, St. Veronica’s has always been a poor parish. The original parishioners were longshoreman and laborers in the businesses and docks of the Hudson River. They were mainly Irish. The church building was begun in 1890. It was not finished until 1903. In 1908 it is recorded that half the parishioners were unemployed. 2) Yet the parish continued to grow and by 1913 was only slightly smaller in population (7000 souls) than its mother parish of St. Joseph’s. By then it had a school with some 1400 students. St. Veronica’s sponsored all the vast panoply of organizations that a typical New York parish supported at that period. We see evidence of this in the church: the plaques commemorating the early pastors and the many men – mainly Irish – who served and died in the Great War. Gene Tunney, the famous heavyweight boxer was a member of St. Veronica’s and had graduated from its school. 4)

“Like most Irish immigrant parents in the West Village, John and Mary Tunney were both religious and strict. In the cramped quarters of the Tunney household, grace was said before all meals, and each of the six children was required to kneel at their bedsides and recite the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary before going to sleep. Sundays, the family went to church together at St. Veronica’s, which-like many Catholic churches of the era-had been built through the largesse of its relatively poor parishioners and street fairs between 1890, when the lower church was built, and 1903, when the upper church opened its doors to what by then had become an astonishingly large congregation of about six thousand, mostly all of them Irish. The parochial school associated with St. Veronica’s, like other parochial schools at the time, was both free and very strict. “I would estimate that at least three mornings a week the good brothers [at St. Veronica’s School] would rap me on the knuckles for being late to school after my work at the butcher shop,” Gene Tunney was to say years later.” Yet Gene was no Neanderthal: “Young Tunney’s evident penchant for learning and the inordinate time he spent in the school library, much of it poring over books on Greek and Roman history, cast him as something of a prig to many of his classmates, who, like Tunney, were from poor families, and who, unlike Tunney, found school boring.” 5)

There remained among the local population of the Village lingering, distant memories of the old St. Veronica’s parish. Memories, which dated back to a time in which the poverty of a parish was not an indictment or an invitation to restructure the parish out of existence. Many years ago near NYU I had a conversation with an elderly lady who, I believe, had been a resident of the Village her entire life. She spoke of how the Catholics of that part of the city admired the longshoremen of St. Veronica’s and the fervor of prayer there. They gave heroic witness to the faith despite great economic hardship.

 

That Catholic ethnic milieu and that working class society disappeared long ago. By the nineteen-seventies Christopher St. had undergone one of the most radical cultural changes of any neighborhood in the city, even the country. It had become the national center of American homosexualism. It was a nonstop carnival. No parish in the city, not even Holy Cross on West 42nd St.,  faced such a hostile, challenging environment. And by the 1970s, the Catholic population of the Village as a whole  – and not just that of St. Veronica’s parish –  continued its precipitous decline. We suspect too, that there was little or no effort made to reach out to the new inhabitants, however difficult that mission would be . By 2007, St. Veronica had been downgraded to a mission of Our Lady of Guadalupe and has been threatened with closure ever since.

 

Yet St. Veronica’s struggled on. And partial recovery came in the form of the Ecuadorian community that had been ejected from St. Ann parish when Cardinal Egan demolished it. The Archdiocese offered the Ecuadorians a new home at St. Veronica’s. Given the condition of the church at that time, this was not at all a benevolent gesture! Yet the Ecuadorians made their way west bearing with them their elaborate glass and gold reliquary of our Lady of Quinche, patroness of Ecuador. And in the course of time the neighborhood of the parish changed once again: the homosexual scene moved further north to Chelsea. Christopher Street became one more placid residential street (if such a thing is possible in the Village).

 

The austere red brick façade of St. Veronica’s testifies to the limited financial resources of the parish and seems a little out of place for a church completed in 1903, when New York parishes were reveling in French cathedrals, Byzantine domes and Venetian Palazzi. The coarser appearance of St. Veronica’s seems to hark back to the prior “Victorian” age. Of course, this church, although it was completed in 1903, had actually been started many years earlier. But even with these reservations, we cannot deny that the modestly dimensioned façade with its white facing and twin towers does create a certain presence in the midst of the nondescript low rise buildings of Christopher Street.

 

 

The interior comes as a great surprise. Instead of the expected Gothic basilica one encounters a rectangular, almost centralized space. The interior makes up in height for the limited available floor space: the ceilings are crowned by a series of skylights. And there are two balconies, not just one. Hidden away in the first balcony is a “Shrine to the Victims of AIDS” from 1992 – mainly a set of plaques bearing the names of the deceased. It is a typical gesture of the Cardinal O’Connor years: perhaps well-intentioned but without any further significance or follow-up.

The “Shrine to the Victims of Aids.”

 

Undoubtedly, thanks to the care of the Ecuadorians, the condition of the church has drastically improved. The interior is gaily painted. This includes frescoes of somewhat indifferent quality. One wonders if this art is at least partially original or if the same artists who have left their mark at St. Bernard’s or at Sacred Heart were also active here. The artistic standard of other decorations, however, is very respectable indeed. The stained glass, if not of the absolute highest quality, is nevertheless very fine and extremely well preserved. The statues and the altars show that those early parishioners had made some great sacrifices to acquire the finest adornments for their church. From the look of the main altar the last major decorative work in the church was done in the 1920s. The Council has let its scars, such as the sawing off the altar from the reredos. Mercifully, however, because of this parish’s poverty, very little more could be done. St. Veronica’s was spared the wholesale puritanical destruction that took place at nearby St. Joseph’s in the 1970’s.

(Above) The unusual dimensions of St. Veronica’s require the “stacking” of windows and stations of the cross (the latter all gathered in two locations)

The patroness of the parish.

(Above) The coat of arms of Archbishop Farley ( Archbishop of New York 1902-1918). In the sources i have consulted the shield is azure not gules as here (Below) The coat of arms of Pope Leo XIII (Pope 1878-1903).

 

The Ecuadorians – because they have little money – have obviously spent a lot of time and effort to restoring this church. They had made similar efforts in the past at St. Ann’s – one hopes that the fate of their new parish will not be the same. In this church the banks of (real) votive candles are kept burning. And there are many devotions- culminating in that of Our Lady of Quinche, patroness of Ecuador. Despite the small size of this parish, true fervor is evident.

Our Lady of Quinche.

 

The community recognizes that a purely Ecuadorian congregation is insufficient to support a parish on the island of Manhattan and is currently trying to attract more parishioners. One problem definitely seems to be the limited time the parish is open. Just a block to the east is the entrance to the PATH train. I don’t see why this parish could not be “repurposed” as a minor commuter church if it were open at the right times and if an advertisement made the PATH commuters aware of what exist one block to the West. And should I not suggest, as a traditionalist, that the restoration of the Extraordinary form on at least a partial basis might go far in attracting a more “diverse” congregation?

 

 

 

 

1)   Thomas J. Shelley, Greenwich Village Catholics: St. Joseph’s Church and the Evolution of an Urban Faith Community 1829-2002 (The Catholic University Press, Washington, D.C. 2003) at 106-107.

2)   Shelley, op.cit at 107-108.

3)   The Catholic Church in the United States of America, Vol. 3 at 378-79. (New York, The Catholic Editing Company, 1914)

4)   http://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-1903-church-of-st-veronica-no-153.html

5) Jack Kavanaugh, Tunney, (2006) http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/books/chapters/1203-1st-cava.html?pagewanted=print&_r=0