The Churches of New York LX: The Two Churches of Saint John II

St John Nepomucene
411 East 66th Street

If, leaving St. John the Martyr, we take a stroll south down Second Avenue and head over to First at East 66th Street, we find the second church dedicated to St. John of Nepomuk – St. John Nepomucene. Amid the undistinguished surroundings of commercial structures and second-rate modernistic apartment buildings St. John Nepomucene stands out like some apparition from another world – it would be more at home on the Dalmatian coast. The AIA guide speaks of a “wonderfully romantic paean to the Romanesque style.” 1) The seemingly weathered stone and brick facade conveys a feeling of the passage of long ages strange to the single minded commitment to modernity of at least the official and commercial New York. 2) And over everything there is an army of carved saints, animals, and monsters just like this church’s 12th century models.

This church of St. John of Nepomuk could not be more different in its history and appearance from St. John the Martyr to the north. St. John Nepomucene is still an active Slovak national pariah; St John the Martyr, Czech in origin, became long ago a “normal” territorial parish of the Archdiocese. St John Nepomucene is one of the most beautiful parish churches in Manhattan, lovingly maintained in excellent condition; St John the Martyr has had to make do with an adaptation of a Calvinist chapel made worse by crude post-Conciliar liturgical updating.

Now the first Slovak church in New York was St. Elizabeth of Hungary, founded in 1891. Its original location was on the Lower East Side. The congregation of St. John Nepomucene arose by division from this original parish in 1895. Some parishioners considered that St. Elizabeth’s had been taken over by “Eastern Slovaks” who had been politically “Magyarized.” Moreover, the Western Slovaks had difficulty understanding the dialect of the Eastern Slovaks. With the approval of the Archdiocese, the Western Slovaks established a second Slovak national parish in 1895 located in a former synagogue. 3) Like its sister parish of St. Elizabeth, it had acquired a new location (on East 57th Street) by 1911. This reflected the gradual migration in Manhattan of all Central European peoples (except the Poles) to the greater Yorkville area before the First World War. Finally, in 1925, the splendid new church was built.

The architect, John van Pelt, built this church almost as a twin of his church of the Guardian Angel in Chelsea.4) It is proof of the extraordinarily high standard of Catholic church architecture and ecclesiastical art in the 1920’s and 30’s – the “Silver Age” of the Archdiocese. For this was, after all, not the wealthiest parish of the Archdiocese.

Over the door is a bust of St. John Nepomucene of Bohemia admonishing us to silence. His legend is, of course, that he was martyred for refusing to disclose the Queen’s confession for King Wenceslaus (Wenzel, Vaclav). But he was no friar or hermit but the vicar general of the Prague archdiocese! In that official role he had courageously resisted the the worldly interventions of the royal court into the affairs of the Church – his martyrdom was also connected with that. One has to resist the temptation of making a comparison of his heroism in facing the forces of the “World” with the approach at “Ten-Eleven” in recent decades.

The interior, if less original than the facade, also impresses with its abundant, colorful decoration of paintings and stained glass windows. The latter treat subjects not often found in New York parish stained glass, like the presentation of the Virgin. The sanctuary with its baldachin and mosaics largely dates from a restoration in the 1950’s. A liturgical “updating,” including a freestanding altar, of the early 1970’s(?) was not disastrous.5)

St. John Nepomucene functions today as a mixed Slovak/English-spekaing parish. It was touching to hear one quiet afternoon in the nearly empty church a father teaching his young son to recite the sign of the cross in Slovak. Can it continue though? The parish has recently reduced the number of masses celebrated on Sunday because of declining attendance. And St. John Nepomucene stands just a few blocks south of the much larger church of St Catherine of Siena. We know how much diversity of culture and historical and artistic value count with the Archdiocese compared with numerical and financial criteria! I suspect that the strength of Slovak national feeling in the entire metropolitan area will be decisive if this church is to be preserved for future generations.

There is a fine parish WEBSITE.

1) Willensky, Elliot and White, Norval, AIA Guide to New York City at 396 (3rd Edition, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1988)

2) This is a deliberate effect created by the architect. one thinks of the “organic development” suggested by Goodhue at the church St. Vincent Ferrer. Dunlop, David W., From Abyssinian to Zion: a Guide to Manhattan’s Houses of Worship at 215 (Columbia University Press New York 2004)

3) The Church of St. Elizabeth of Hungary,at 13 (Taylor Publishing co., Dallas 1992); Shelley, Thomas J., The Archdiocese of New York: the Bicentennial History 1808-2008 at 244 (Editions du Signe, Strasbourg 2007). Fr. Shelley has written other works on the Slovaks of the Archdiocese.
4) Willensky, Op.Cit; Dunlop, Op. Cit..

5)http://www.stjohnnepomucene.org/our_parish.php