Historic church in Bethlehem being sold to group of former parishioners, who pledge to restore it
St. Joseph’s, a Catholic church in south Bethlehem at the center of a bitter dispute when the Diocese of Allentown closed it 16 years ago, is being sold to a nonprofit group created by former parishioners.
The twin-steepled stone church on East Fifth Street, which for years could only be used for funerals of former members and for an annual Mass on its patron’s feast day, will become the property of the Society of St. Joseph of Bethlehem.
“Our vision is to maintain the religious identity and use of St. Joseph’s Church as a sacred place of worship, honor its heritage, and preserve it as an example of the role immigrants and ethnic churches played
in our city’s history,” the nonprofit said in a post on its Facebook page.
“We look forward to restoring the church building and finding new ways for St. Joseph’s Chapel and our Society to become active participants in the community.”
The post did not say how much the nonprofit is paying or how much it expects to spend on the major repairs that prompted the Diocese of Allentown to put the building up for sale last year.
Stephen Antalics, who led the movement to save St. Joseph’s after its 2008 closure and is serving as a consultant to the nonprofit, said the city has inspected the building and the sale “is pretty much a done deal,” though paperwork still must be signed.
Diocese spokesperson Lina Tavarez confirmed that the sale is expected to be complete in the next week. She said more information will be provided once it is done.
The sale is deeply gratifying for Antalics, who clashed fiercely with former Bishop Edward Cullen over the church — once calling the prelate out for closing churches while owning Jersey Shore properties worth millions.
The longtime Lehigh University professor, now 95, has long vowed that his funeral will be held at St. Joseph’s, which his father, a Slovenian immigrant, helped build.
St. Joseph’s needs major repairs, including to crumbling exterior stonework that has been covered for years by protective scaffolding.
The historic Slovenian ethnic parish was founded in 1914, one of many ethnic churches built to serve immigrants who flooded the region in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
While the Mass was celebrated in Latin in those days, the Hungarian, Polish, Italian, German and other non-English speaking faithful needed priests to hear confessions and deliver sermons in native tongues.
As time passed and immigrants assimilated into an English-speaking base, the ethnic churches persisted, despite many of them operating just doors apart from one another.
The diocese was able to sustain them until demographic changes — the shifting of populations from city to suburb, and a precipitous decline in priestly vocations in the last five decades — made it untenable.
St. Joseph was closed in a 2008 restructuring in which the diocese shuttered or consolidated about a third of its parishes.
The diocese said the consolidation was necessary because of a shortage of priests in the counties it serves — Berks, Carbon, Lehigh, Northampton and Schuylkill.
St. Joseph’s and four other churches in south Bethlehem were merged to form Incarnation of Our Lord parish at the former Ss. Cyril and Methodius.
St. Joseph’s parishioners appealed the closing to the Vatican and, in 2011, won a partial victory, retaining the right to use the building for Mass every March 19 — the Feast of St. Joseph — and for funerals.
Yet upkeep of the structure became too costly for the diocese, which announced in January 2023 it would sell the building.
Two months later, parishioners created the nonprofit society to raise money to buy and restore the building.