Before a Secondhand Altar

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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 help shopping, Saunders contracted with a Phoenix-based dealer who found him a series of Life of Christ windows in Upstate New York, and Sacred Spaces Liturgical Design, a company with offices in Alexandria, Italy and Poland, which found his Stations of the Cross at St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Harlem.

The archdiocese of New York was unwilling to sell them, but Saunders was so moved by the vivid scenes of Christ carrying his cross to Calvary that the company got permission to recast them -- a job requiring five people, including a Texas-based artist who traveled to New York in the middle of the winter to make the molds, pitching two plastic tents with electric heaters in the shuttered church. The cost: $60,000.

The original stations remain in New York and probably will be placed in a church in that area, said archdiocese spokesman Joseph Zwilling. Several statues from St. Thomas have been moved to other churches in Harlem, where former parishioners can visit them, a tactic some dioceses use to keep their members close to cherished works.

Occasionally, parishes update their members on farther-flung destinations so that someone making a trip to an area, be it Florida or Las Vegas, can stop in and offer a prayer to their favorite statue of the Blessed Mother or Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost things.

And for a few families, the works have followed them across generations and state lines.

When the church bells ring at the end of Sunday Mass at Our Lady of Hope, parishioner Nicholas Macioce thinks of his father, who heard those very chimes the day he was baptized at Our Lady Help of Christians in Pittsburgh.

The son of Italian immigrants, Macioce's dad attended all-Latin services in the Italian neighborhood until the first grade, when his family moved outside the city lines.

For Macioce, the bells are more than beautiful. They're a connection to his father and, he says, "a connection to the history of the church."