Before a Secondhand Altar

As City Parishes Close, Their Artifacts Find New Life in the Suburbs

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Adding Ambience
Across the country, changing Catholic demographics have caused scores of new churches to be built, many with stained glass, altars and other ornaments rescued from churches in closing parishes.

For the first 20 years of his life, the Rev. William P. Saunders recited the Lord's Prayer in a church intended to be a Catholic school gymnasium. Although surrounded by cold, cinder-block walls, he found solace in the hand-carved crucifix and statues of Mary and Saint Joseph. When he became a priest, he vowed that if he ever built a church, it would be grand -- rimmed with Gothic arches and filled with breathtaking works of art.

In January, the 49-year-old pastor unlocked the heavy doors for the dedication of Northern Virginia's newest Catholic church. Outside, it's a contemporary building, Gothic style with galvanized aluminum spires rising above rows upon rows of Potomac Falls' tan and brick townhouses.

Inside, century-old stained-glass windows project kaleidoscopes of gold and crimson on African ribbon-stripe mahogany pews, an ornately carved, white marble altar crowns the sanctuary and pristine marble angels offer holy water to all who enter.

To design Our Lady of Hope, Saunders enlisted help from architects, one of whom is his brother, a Springfield-based designer of modern schools and sports facilities. To furnish it, he combed the remnants of last century's churches.

In the past 20 years, hundreds of America's first-generation Catholic churches have closed because of dwindling attendance and a shrinking number of pastors. The European ethnic communities that erected proud cathedrals to mark their arrival in the New World moved to the suburbs. Decades later, the things they left behind -- their rose windows and well-worn kneelers -- are forming a second wave of suburbanization, finding new homes in the churches of their descendants.

"While people can move, buildings really can't, so there are tons of gorgeous buildings in places that are pretty much vacant," said Mary Gautier, senior researcher at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University. Until the Vatican can find "a sky hook to move the churches intact," she said, parishioners have to settle for salvaging them in "bits and pieces."

In the past three years, the Boston area has closed 60 parishes in which low attendance at Mass could not justify high insurance or heating costs. The St. Louis area has lost more than 20 parishes, as have the vanishing farm towns of North Dakota. Catholics in aging neighborhoods are learning to extract huge marble altars and remove stained-glass windows -- pane by pane -- and send them to subdivisions in the Sunbelt.

Increasingly, religious works are finding their way to Northern Virginia, where 100,000 Catholics have moved since 1995 in search of jobs, said Soren Johnson, spokesman for the Arlington Diocese.

Our Lady of Hope formed as a parish in 2000 with 300 families meeting for Mass in a high school gym. When the new church opened this winter, it became home to 1,300 families.

On a recent weekday morning, construction workers applied finishing touches to the sanctuary, installed wooden screens in the confessional rooms and sanded the edges of white marble panels for a tall back altar that once adorned a convent outside Buffalo before the aging sisters downsized to a smaller facility with an infirmary.

Saunders, a Springfield native, circled the airy room, delighting in the details of the art he had spent years acquiring. He noticed the veins in Christ's arms in a window above the choir loft that had been salvaged from a German parish in Elmyra, N.Y., and he stopped in front of a statue of Saint Joseph with the baby Jesus, taken from an earthquake-damaged building in San Francisco, admiring each hand-crafted toenail.

"The person who made this has a great love," Saunders said. "They don't make churches like this anymore."