(Above: art warehouse for the diocese of Erfurt. This art warehouse currently is the storage center for around 2,000 works of art of the diocese of Erfurt, Germany, which either don’t have a place anymore in their parishes or where the churches in which they were located have been deconsacrated (photo 11.29.2022 © epd-bild/Steve Bauerschmidt )

Since the year 2000, the number of churches deconsecrated or torn down in certain German dioceses has reached two or even three figures. Author Gabriele Höfling asks what is to be done with, as she puts it, “pews, tabernacle and Co.”? Of course, according to this article, the art of the 19th century no longer accords with modern tastes. The same, however, seems to be true of the “art of the Council” dating to the 1960’s and 1970’s (when Catholic art was still being produced in significant quantities).

In some cases the artworks can be moved to another building in the same parish or even to a “private church.” Martina Außermeier of the Archdiocese of Munich art office reports (“with pride”) that: “we were just able to furnish a newly constructed private neo-gathic chapel more or lesss completely with used litugical objects and church furnishings.” Other art can be “recycled,” given – often free of charge – to new churches that are still being built in Eastern Europe or Africa.

Yet sometimes more imagination is required. Wooden objects can be burned in the paschal fire. Others can be placed in a coffin as “grave goods” (like in early medieval times): “such as a lectionary for a deceased reader.” Others are “upcycled.” Deconsecrated stone altars have been made into beautiful gravestones or headstones. A baptismal font has been refashioned as a fountain in a cemetary. Although “reverential, ” this takes a lot of time and expense and is not generally feasible. It seems that the dump may be the fate of art that cannot find another home or use.

The German dioceses are developing a central database of sacred objects. At this time it largely contains links to the relevant diocesan offices.

SOURCE: Höfling, Gabriele, “Von Upcycling bis Grabbeigabe: Was mit altem Kircheninventar passiert,” katholisch.de ( 3/28/2023)

Compare the same situation and function in the New York Archdiocese: Catholic “relics”

Report: the Church of St, Benedict the Moor has been sold. See my full description of this former parish, with photos, HERE.

A historic Hell’s Kitchen church which was the first Black Catholic parish north of the Mason-Dixon has been sold for $16 million, putting the future use of the 1869 building into question. First established as an act of reparation by a priest, the former St. Benedict the Moor building played a part in African-American history for decades, marking a time when Hell’s Kitchen was home to a large Black population before the growth of Harlem.

As first reported by Bisnow New York, the deconsecrated church at 342 W53rd Street between 8th and 9th Avenue and former rectory and parish buildings at 338 W53rd Street have been sold to billionaire developer Walter Wang. Publicly available New York County Supreme Court records show that the Archdiocese of New York sold the empty buildings to Wang’s JMM Charitable Foundation, a 501(c)(3) based in Los Angeles, California. Wang is the Taiwanese-American CEO of JM Eagle, the world’s largest manufacturer of plastic and PVC piping, while his wife, Shirley Wang is the CEO of Plastpro, a fiberglass door maker.

(The parish was originally in the Village. )

St Benedict’s move to Hell’s Kitchen cost $30,000, which the New York Sun of the time credited to fundraising by the pastor, Irish-born Reverend John E Burke, who was to stay its parish priest for decades. In 1903, he traveled to Rome, meeting Pope Pius X. Pioneering Black newspaper The Colored American, of Washington D.C., reported: “Father Burke, of the Catholic church of St Benedict, the Moor, brings back from Rome a special benediction from the new Pope, Pius the Tenth, for all the colored people of this country.” Four years later he was made the director-general of all Black parishes in the US.

The church became a center of African-American intellectual life, with a library dedicated to Black literature, a drama group performing Shakespeare and a weekly debating society dedicated to economic advancement. It had a parochial school beside the church, and a convent whose nuns ran an orphanage in Rye, Westchester. A 1911 book called Half a Man, about Black New Yorkers, said: “Only in this Catholic church does one find white and black in almost equal numbers worshipping side by side.

Beling, Sarah, “Historic Hell’s Kitchen Church — Home to First Black Catholic Parish in North — Sold for $16 Million,” w42st.com, 14/1/2023

(Above) Cardinal O’Connor at St Benedict the Moor. It had been a primarily “Hispanic” parish for decades prior to this event.

As the KIng of Siam said.

(February 15, 2023 – Manhattan, NY) – The Office of the Superintendent of Schools of the Archdiocese of New York today announced 12 Catholic schools will cease operations at the end of the 2022-23 academic year. Four schools will merge into two. (The Announcement is HERE)

• Academy of St. Paul & St. Ann, Manhattan
• Ascension School, Manhattan
• Guardian Angel School, Manhattan
• Holy Family School, Bronx
• Immaculate Conception School, Manhattan
• Immaculate Conception School, 760 E Gun Hill Rd, Bronx*
• Our Lady Queen of Martyrs, Manhattan
• Santa Maria School, Bronx
• St. Angela Merici School, Bronx
• St. Brendan School, Bronx
• St. Christopher School, Staten Island
• St. Margaret Mary School, Bronx

• St. Francis Xavier, Bronx, will merge with St. Clare of Assisi.
• St. Gabriel School, Bronx, will merge with St. Margaret of Cortona.

EV Grieve reports on the closing of Immaculate Conception School:

The school dates to 1864 (find a PDF with history here), part of the Immaculate Conception church when it was at 505 E. 14th St. The (original -SC) church, on the north side of 14th, was demolished in the 1940s to make way for Stuy Town. 
The school’s current building was completed in 1945. Per Wikipedia: 

In 1943 the parish took over the chapel and hospital buildings now known as Church of the Immaculate Conception and Clergy Houses, completed in 1896 to designs by Barney and Chapman and formerly owned by Grace Church. This existing facility was expanded with a four-story brick convent and parochial school at 415-419 E. 13th St. and 414-416 E. 14th St. … and completed in 1945.

(Immaculate Conception School) is the last Catholic grade school (serving students K-8) in the East Village. The archdiocese shut down St. Brigid School, founded in 1856, at the end of the 2018-2019 school year.  

On Guardian Angel School:

Guardian Angel, nearly 123 years old and the last Catholic elementary School left in Chelsea, will shut down at the end of the current academic year as part of a new rounds of closures announced by the Archdiocese of New York last week.

“It feels like one of the cornerstones of Chelsea is going to be gone,” said Eddie Edmonds, 58 the oldest of five siblings who graduated from there.

Kelly, Keith J., “Guardian Angel, the Last Catholic Elementary School in Chelsea, to Close,” The Spirit, 19/2/2023

On Ascension School:

Parents of children at Ascension were stunned and disappointed that the 126 year old school will be no more. A school originally opened on West 107th in 1897, the same year that the largely working class German immigrants had built the Ascension Church. The opening of the churtch meant that Mass no longer had to be celebrated in the basement of the massive Lion Bre(w)ery, that once occupied six sity blocks in the neighborhood. In its heyday, the parish boasted 10,000 parishioners and the school that had 1,100 students with the boys taught by the Christian Brothers and the girls taught by the Sisters of Charity. At the end, it had less than 290 students. Still the end sent shock waves through the community.

Kay Bontempo, “Parents Stunned as 126-year-old Ascension School Slated to Close,” The Spirit, 17/2/2023

St. Paul and St. Ann Academy:

St Joseph’s in the Village makes it to Vatican News! The parish is run by the Dominicans – obviously having the right connections helps getting noticed!

St. Joseph Church set to open first Perpetual Adoration Chapel in New York

How can we otherwise explain how planning a minor chapel merits the attention of the Vatican? I also am not totally sure if this is the “first perpetual adoration chapel” in Manhattan – see here.

I have previouly described the history of St Joseph’s and the state of the Catholic Chaplaincy at NYU as it existed up to 2016 HERE. Whatever else we think of it, the promotion of Eucharistic adoration is a far cry from the practices of the ideologies that once dominated at St. Joseph’s. (Of course, nowadays a growing number of New York City parishes have taken up the progressive causes once championed at St. Joseph’s.) Yet what is the intention behind establishing this chapel? The chapel is promoted as a place to encounter God and “meet Jesus.” But this can be done in any church or really anywhere. There is no discussion of the specific reason why one would visit a chapel for eucharistic adoration – is this knowledge assumed to exist among the faithful today?

In contrast, nebulous psychological benefits are cited:

Such an intimate and quiet place might appear opposite to the busy and striving nature of New York. However, according to Fr. Boniface, “what keeps us striving is the natural human impulse for happiness. Striving for whatever we think will make us happy, which is holiness.”

“What we are hoping here is that people will encounter what brings peace to their souls, a place where they can find the ultimate consummation of their own desires.”

Security is a most important concern here.:

Much effort was spent on security planning. “Because this is the middle of Manhattan, you can’t just leave an open door. People will come to the parish office, and we will issue them a key card that will grant them access so that we can control who is in there, and people can feel safe as they enter the chapel,” Fr. Boniface explained.

Vatican News adds this advertisement at the bottom of the report:

YOUR CONTRIBUTION FOR A GREAT MISSION:
SUPPORT US IN BRINGING THE POPE’S WORDS INTO EVERY HOME

The totalitarian drift of the Vatican becomes clearer with every day.

From the Our Old House Facebook Page (2/18/2023):

“We recently closed on this 1890 Catholic Church that we plan to renovate into our dream home! We plan to go all out with the gothic style and want to incorporate a medieval theme as well. It’s about 4000sqft and we are going to keep it an open space. It’s going to be a lot of work but we cannot wait to restore this beautiful church!!”

Sandro Magister reports on the ever-growing problem of using Catholic churches – once the clergy and faithful are gone:

Closed Churches. Two Criteria for Their Best Reuse

Here are excepts with my commentary.

More than attacks, thousands of churches in Europe suffer from abandonment. With ever fewer Catholics at Mass, they find themselves empty. And so they are being closed. In Germany, in Holland, in Belgium, the figures are dizzying. But in Italy as well there is a growing number of churches in disuse. 

(In Italy), at least, the churches are not state but ecclesiastical property, and therefore enjoy spontaneous and lasting protection on the part of their respective diocesan and parish communities. (Is this intending to be humorous? In the US, where the Church, in various forms, owns its own properties, such protection has been nonexistent. Indeed, it is largely because of state ownership (where such regimes prevail) and state-imposed restrictions that the Catholic architectural heritage has been preserved.)

But when these communities dwindle and disappear, for their respective churches it is the end. They are at serious risk of going under and ending up on the market, perhaps turned into supermarkets or dance halls, or in any case into something contrary to the purposes for which they arose.

(Again, speaking for the US experience, the churches are at risk even if the “communities” still exist. For one thing, all properties are de facto exposed to the financial problems of the entire diocese and its insatiable need for funds.)

A conference at the Vatican issued recommendations in 2016 for the disposal of such churches:

(The conference) produced “guidelines” advising against “commercial reuse for speculative aims,” and instead encouraged “reuse for aims of solidarity,” with “cultural or social” purposes: museums, conference halls, bookshops, libraries, archives, art studios, Caritas centers, clinics, soup kitchens, and more. Still leaving the option of “transformation into private homes” in the case of “more modest buildings with no architectural value.”

In the same vein, Giuliano Zanchi, a priest from Bergamo, professor of theology and a “great expert on art and themes on the border between aesthetics and the sacred” has now made his suggestions.

 (T)here are two criteria that Zanchi suggests be followed in the reuse of churches that have ceased to be such but want to “relaunch themselves in civil life with the function of cultural crossroads and spiritual threshold.”

The first criterion, he writes, is that which “harnesses the artistic dignity normally connected to historical sacred buildings…..”

There is in fact today a “social sect of art, which has its shrines, its liturgies, its priests, its myths, its sacraments, its pilgrimages, and its holy days of obligation,” which in turn, together with music, cinema, literature, “delimit a rather hospitable space of a common and shared ‘pensiveness’.”

The historic precincts of many religious buildings no longer functioning as places of the liturgy have all the qualities to be able to accommodate these social needs so deeply rooted,  and to bid to act as a true crossroads of a ‘cultural fraternity’ in which to enliven, in debate, in encounter, in plurality, in hospitality, a common sense of the human.”

(So, henceforth Catholic Churches will function as museums and cult locations for the “social sect of art.”)

The second criteron, according to Zanchi:

consists in “that typical need of the contemporary city” to have liminal areas, thresholds, “capable of steering toward the profound and the transcendent, which in the absence of anything else are identified in theaters, museums, libraries, and other places of non-utilitarian ulteriority.”

 “In our cities, which remain mercilessly horizontal even when they build skyscrapers that defy the heavens, there is a need for spaces that can be traversed as ‘spiritual thresholds’ and embody a vertical impulse even when they remain hidden on the ground floors of urban life.”

We cannot say that any of this typically European, Roman Catholic gibberish makes sense or imposes any real restrictions on anyone regarding the future use of former churches. What is clear, however, is the Church’s acceptance of the elimination of Christianity from modern society, as vividly symbolized by the closing of Catholic churches. The decline of Catholic practice is silently assumed to be an unalterable fact of life. In place of Christianity, secular functions are acknowledged that provide psychological benefits to the man of today (the “sect of art,” a “common sense of the human,” a “shared pensiveness” and “spiritual thresholds” that embody a “vertical impulse.”) Moreover, this psychological and emotional assistance is apparently viewed as an adequate substitute for the Christian cult previously practiced in these buildings. And are we not forced to conclude that the Catholic Church already sees its own primary role as providing such benefits (the “field hospital” of Pope Francis)? Did not the great Christian writer Novalis in 1800 denounce “pious” contemporaries for whom the Christian religion was “dope.” (emotional and psycholgical comfort). Such a “religion” is doomed to extinction. By actually endorsing such principles, the Catholic Church acquiesces in its own marginalization – and eventual elimination – from the world of modernity.

(Above) The Interior of the Church of Notre Dame (2008)

We have now received more detailed information about what is going on near Columbia University.

Columbia University, one of the premiere institutions among the Ivies, now has a proper Catholic center. 

The Thomas Merton Institute for Catholic Life had a “soft opening” at the upper Manhattan campus this week, as the center continues to finish construction. 

Named for who is most likely Columbia University’s best-known Catholic convert, the Merton Institute is being constructed at the Church of Notre Dame. 

Columbia Catholic Ministry is planning a grand opening of the Merton Institute for later this semester, when the space is better furnished, said CCM co-president Joel Kattady.

Merton Institute President Brian McAuliffe, a Columbia alumnus, estimates it will take $10 million to finish the Institute, which still requires further construction and furnishing. McAuliffe anticipates that successful alumni fundraising will meet this need.

“So much about the living of the Catholic faith goes beyond worship,” said Fr. Roger Landry, the chaplain to the Merton Institute and Columbia’s Catholic religious life adviser. Fr. Landry arrived at Columbia last year after serving at the Holy See Mission to the United Nations.

Source: Columbia University gets its own Catholic Center (2/16/2023)

And the website of Corpus Christi parish(“Masks requested, please“) – until now silent on all these developments swirling about it – has posted this:

It’s official: Corpus Christi and Notre Dame have merged into one parish.  We are called, quite simply, the Parish of Corpus Christi and Notre Dame.  We are one territorial parish, whose boundaries extend from 110th Street to 125th Street, and from Morningside Drive to the Hudson River.  We remain two church sites, Corpus Christi on 121st Street and Notre Dame on 114th Street.  According to Cardinal Dolan’s decree, Corpus Christi is the parish church, housing the rectory, office, and all parish records (including those of Notre Dame and St. Vincent de Paul).  Notre Dame will continue to serve the community as it has been, as the center of French-language Catholicism in New York City as well as a center for Columbia Catholic Ministry (under the aegis of the Thomas Merton Institute for Catholic Life, who are in the process of transforming the Notre Dame rectory for this purpose).

In the coming weeks, Archdiocesan officials will help us to form a new civil corporation.  This will mean appointing trustees and setting up a new finance council and parish council.  We are a diverse parish and I intend to have qualified representation from across the community in these councils.

CORPUS CHRISTI AND NOTRE DAME CATHOLIC PARISH NEW YORK CITY

So many questions are still unanswered. It takes $10 million to renovate a rectory? Who will own the renovated rectory? Is Fr. Landry now at least de facto the Catholic chaplain of Columbia University? Is Notre Dame church once again the center of the Columbia chaplaincy? Is anything going to be done to the magnificent church itself? Will the Thomas Merton Institute be transparent on the details of Thomas Merton’s life in the 1960’s? We will have to see!

For the feast of Candlemas, February 2: mass, blessing of the candles and procession at the historic church of the Transfiguration on Mott Street.

(Above) Interior of the Church of St Columba (2013).

On January 1, 2023, the Archdiocese announced (look under “decrees”) yet more church closings and mergers. The announcement was made in the dark of night: Catholic New York, as of late last year, of course doesn’t exist anymore. Six Manhattan parishes were affected. The decrees are effective immediately.

I do not know much about the parishes of Our Lady Queen of Martyrs and Saint Jude, North Manhattan, which are to be merged. We have, however, previously reported on three other churches which are scheduled to be sold or merged. 

Merger of the parishes of Corpus Christi and Notre Dame,  with Corpus Christi remaining as the main “worship center.”  Notre Dame is one of the most impressive Catholic sanctuaries in New York. Up to 2011, the parish was in flourishing condition under the administration of Polish Dominicans – at which time it also functioned as the chaplaincy for Columbia University. The order was then forced out in that year by the archbishop for undisclosed reasons.

 As is his prerogative, the archbishop hinted at but did not state the reasons for the friars’ departure. He mentioned money, that Notre Dame was in the red, although the books are closed and so it’s hard to guess how much of that debt the Dominicans inherited from a costly and controversial renovation project undertaken during the parish’s previous administration. (this involved adapting the sanctuary to Vatican II – SC)

And so the breakup of the Catholic intellectual community that the Polish Dominicans gave so much life to had already begun. The apostles had Jesus for three years. We had the Polish Dominicans for all of eight, and, for five of those, the Polish Dominicans in conversation with Dulles and Neuhaus. We never wanted any of them to leave. But God called them home”some to be with him and, in the case of the friars, some to their temporal home, Poland”leaving those of us left behind to mourn the loss of a Catholic culture such as we had never known and are unlikely to experience again unless we cultivate our memories of it and let them shape our effort to reconstitute it somehow. 1)

After the closing of St. Vincent de Paul parish in 2013, Notre Dame was designated as the new parish in Manhattan for French-speaking Catholics. 2) The merger decree doesn’t mention this or the status of Notre Dame as the local Lourdes shrine.

Relegation (i.e., designation for sale) of the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Presumably, this is the old church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which had been merged into St Bernard’s parish in 2003. Our Lady of Guadalupe was the first Spanish-speaking Catholic parish in Manhattan.  The parish is now called Our Lady of Guadalupe at St. Bernard’s – the old church functioned, I believe, as a parish center. I cannot find any reference to this decree on the parish bulletin of Our Lady of Guadalupe/St. Bernard’s.

 

Relegation(i.e., designation for sale) of the Church of St Columba. This is one of the most historic, originally Irish, churches in Manhattan. As I wrote in 2013:

We have seen how St Columba parish was founded in the dramatic 1840’s and its modest church erected so rapidly thereafter. It was little more than an expanded chapel – a large hall. We can now understand why the construction of the church of St Bridget in 1848 was greeted with such enthusiasm. Next to St Columba, the church of St Bridget appears grand, spacious, airy – and built in a proper Catholic Gothic style! But the curious thing is that despite its limitations of style and size the church of St Columba was never replaced. It survives to this day as one of the earliest structures built specifically as a Catholic church.

(Above and below) St. Columba in 2013 (The former parish school is on the right)

As in the past, the Archdiocesan decrees contain “boilerplate” rejecting in advance all arguments based on aesthetic or historical significance:

Whereas, the Church is not an archeological Museum,

(citing a statement by Pope John XXIII in an entirely different context). 

The process of Archdiocesan decomposition continues unabated.

1. Frankovich, Nicholas, “When the Polish Dominicans Left Morningside Heights,” First Things, (9/2/2011)

2. Kwasi Gyamfi Asiedu, “French Mass unites parishioners” The Columbian, (3/19/2022)

Last year The New York Times featured an article on the Archdiocese’s disposition of the contents of closed New York Churches:

Gill, John Freeman, “These Churches Have Been Closed, but Their Artifacts Live On,” Tne New York Times, December 24, 2021 (1)

IN this report we encounter “artifacts” (the reporter’s term) from several churches on which we ourselves have reported over the years. We provide links to the relevant articles.

First, St. Lucy’s in East Harlem:

“This is my last Mother Cabrini,” Mr. Amatrudo (the manager of the warehouse)said, resting his palm on the head of a waist-high plaster statue of the canonized Italian-American nun Frances Xavier Cabrini, rescued from St. Lucy’s Church in East Harlem after the church’s deconsecration in 2017.

(Above) This statue of the pieta was in the Church of St. Lucy in East Harlem (photo taken December 2014); (below) a pieta identified in the article as having been removed from St. Lucy’s in the Archdiocesan “Patrimony Warehouse” in December 2021 ( but repainted? or with a newer overpainting stripped off?).

Then, there is the grandiose former parish of All Saints, Harlem:

“Two of the most striking items in the warehouse are a pair of white-marble angels that once flanked the high altar at the Church of All Saints, on Madison Avenue and 129th Street. The splendid Italian Gothic Revival-style church, built starting in the 1880s after designs by the architect James Renwick Jr., is sometimes called the St. Patrick’s of Harlem — a reference to St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, which Mr. Renwick also designed. All Saints is a city landmark, a designation that protects its exterior, but not its interior.”

All Saints was deconsecrated in 2017

“Workers disassembled the great marble altar with power saws fitted with masonry blades. To reach the clerestory windows high above the pews, some four stories of scaffolding were erected inside the church, and most of the stained-glass windows were taken out — over the objections of preservationists — and replaced with clear glass. The city Landmarks Preservation Commission approved the removal of stained glass and exterior sculptural masonry associated with religious imagery.“

“The altar and stained glass now reside in the warehouse. The 16-foot-high gilded crucifix is stored in crated sections, Jesus lying akimbo in the garage.”

“The church’s richly carved pews, among the city’s most elaborate, went to a church in Chicago. And marble statues of Joseph and Mary landed in Bridgeport, Conn. (The All Saints complex, which includes an attached parish school and parish house, was sold in March for $10.85 million to the developer CSC Coliving. A modernization of the school and conversion of the church into a school auditorium, designed by Tang Studio Architect, is underway, and the Capital Preparatory Harlem Charter School plans to move into the two buildings next fall on a long-term lease.)”

(Above) The crucifix high above the main altar of All Saints (photo taken 2012): (below) as packed away in the warehouse (December 2021 photo).

Then, there is the parish of St Thomas the Apostle, Harlem:

“In 2008, some 30 stained-glass windows from the imposing neo-Gothic Church of St. Thomas the Apostle on West 118th Street in Harlem, designed by the Mayer of Munich studio in Germany, were removed and reconditioned after a preservation campaign failed. Those windows were later installed upstate, in the new Saint Kateri Tekakwitha Church, in LaGrangeville. Other windows went to St. Brigid’s Church in the East Village. And last year, 14 smaller windows from St. Thomas depicting angels were shipped to a church in Taiwan. (As for the 1907 church complex of St. Thomas the Apostle, it was sold to Artimus Construction for $6 million in 2012; the church was truncated, and its remaining front portion now serves as a vaulted event space called Harlem Parish.)”

Mr Zwilling, the Archdiocesan spokesman, repeats mantra-like, everything he has been saying for years:

“Our churches, beautiful as they are, are not built as museums — they’re built to serve the spiritual, the pastoral, the faith needs of the community,”

Mr. Zwilling does not explain why the closing of parishes (and schools, and Catholic residences) has to be repeated again and again. Nor does he enumerate the “spritual, pastoral and faith benefits” so far achieved by Making all Things New (the last big restucturing push). The Times reporter is not inclined to press him on such things. Nor does he comment on the apparently disproportionate impact of these closures on the churches of Harlem (and, I should add, of other poorer areas of the city). The reporter duly notes on the margin the objections of preservationists (he doesn’t mention the parishioners). But what significance do their views have? After all, according To Mr. Zwilling, the works of art assembled (in “museums”) over generations are:

“artifacts that ‘help tell the story of the history of a church that is important to people who, back when the church was being built, contributed either monetarily or through their labor…’”

Yes, these “historical artifacts” were once important to those people who built these churches – but no longer are to us. In this manner, the great artistic heritage of the Catholic people of New York is appropriated by the Archdiocese and scattered all over the world.

1. Just in time for Christmas!