New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Closed churches, not faith, for sale
Selling properties a difficult but necessary process
When St. Elizabeth of Hungary Roman Catholic Church in Branford closed in June 2017, it was a kind of death for Andrea Duffy, and the grieving was difficult. But she moved on to St. Mary Church, one of the other two churches in the newly formed St. John Bosco Parish, and became a trustee and member of the Parish Council.
“It’s not just what the church does for you. You have to join the church and be a part of it,” said Duffy, who had been a member of St. Elizabeth for about 15 years after moving from West Haven to Branford.
“I wrestled for a while and I realized my faith was not in a building,” she said.
So now that her former church, which she can see on her neighborhood walks, is being sold, there is more acceptance of “the inevitable.”
When the Archdiocese of Hartford instituted a major restructuring plan in June 2017, reducing the number of parishes from 212 to 127, including 59 new parishes formed by merging others, 26 churches were left dark, available for weddings and funerals but not for regular Masses. Now the archdiocese is selling those buildings to other congregations or even nonreligious uses.
St. Paul Church on First Avenue in West Haven, closed when the parish merged with St. Lawrence and St. Louis to form St. John XXIII Parish, is being sold to the University of New Haven. UNH is conducting an environmental review before the sale is closed and has not decided how it will use the property, said university spokeswoman Lyn Chamberlin in an email, but she said UNH has no plans to raze the church.
“It is important for us to continue to invest in the neighborhood surrounding our main campus,” said UNH President Steven Kaplan in a release
when the sale agreement was announced in November.
But the closing of a long-beloved church means its former members no longer will be able to worship in the sanctuary where they were married, where their children were baptized and received their first Holy Communion, where their parents and spouses were memorialized before being sent to their final resting place.
“It was very hard when the sanctuary light was blown out and the doors were closed for good,” said Duffy, whose husband’s funeral was held at St. Elizabeth’s in 2011. “Our last Mass there was June 25, 2017. It’s a grief. It’s the grieving process, just like when you lose a close family member.” Later that year, “Father (Daniel) Keefe was kind enough to have a healing Mass for the people of St. Elizabeth’s,” with a “mingling of holy water into one bowl” from the closed church and the two remaining parish churches, St. Mary and St. Therese.
But the Mass was celebrated at St. Mary in the center of town, not at St. Elizabeth, with its floor-toceiling windows looking out on the natural world.
“I thought that when we closed the church that was the funeral, and I realized that wasn’t. That was the death.” The healing service served as a funeral. Its expected sale — the buyer has not been revealed because the sale hasn’t closed — is easier for Duffy to deal with. “You know that time goes on and it’s now just a building,” she said.
Pope Francis, however, emphasized the special nature of closed churches in a letter to those attending an International Conference on Cultural Heritage in November, titled “Doesn’t God Dwell Here Anymore?” “The common sense of the faithful perceives for the environments and objects destined for worship the permanence of a kind of imprint that does not end even after they have lost that role,” Francis wrote to those wrestling with what to do with buildings that are no longer in use.
The Rev. Daniel Keefe, pastor of St. John Bosco, said in an email that he had not been familiar with St. Elizabeth’s parishioners before the merger. “Their reaction to it being closed (not sold) was, understandably, very emotional,” he wrote. “Yet, the majority accepted it as a necessity, and joined the new parish of St. John Bosco. Many of the former St. Elizabeth parishioners now have an active role in the many ministries of St. John Bosco and have embraced
the new parish.”
Removing religious objects
When a church is closed, it is not just a matter of locking the doors. It must be deconsecrated, with special prayers and all religious items removed — the altar, relics, statues and vestments. If the baptismal font is not removable, it must be destroyed, according to Paul Connery, director of property and assets for the Archdiocese of Hartford. The stainedglass windows may remain if the building will continue to be used as a church but, if not, anything showing a religious scene must be removed.
While the archdiocese is overseeing sale of the properties, which may include rectories, schools, convents and land, proceeds will go to the parish, Connery said. Any sale must be approved by the archdiocese’s Finance Council and Archdiocesan Consultors, a group of priests who report to Archbishop Leonard Blair.
“Most of these properties are owned specifically by these parishes,” Connery said. “My role in this department is to be an adviser, facilitator. … We want to make sure that they follow the proper civil and canon law processes.”
Churches may be sold for use as schools and other “profane” purposes — “profane” as in “secular,” the opposite of “sacred” — but not for a “sordid use,” Connery said.
“We do sell churches to real estate developers, so they are for-profit, but we certainly put restrictions to the degree that we legally can to make sure they are not used in ways that are antithetical to our Catholic Church beliefs,” Connery said. “It would be nice for sure if a church were sold to another church. It’s not a Catholic church anymore.”
He said that restrictions the archdiocese may put on a sale will not last indefinitely. But, he said, “most of these buildings have zoning issues anyway. A lot of them are in residential areas so they’re not going to turn them into a supermarket.”
One of the first churches to be sold was St. Brendan on Whalley Avenue in New Haven. The parish had merged with St. Aedan on Fountain Street before the archdiocesan-wide plan went into effect and the property, including a school, was bought by a Chabad-Lubavitch boys’ rabbinic school, Yeshivas Beis Dovid Shlomo.
Churches that have gone on to non-religious uses include St. Margaret of Scotland Church in Waterbury, which was sold to the Brass City Charter School, Connery said, with the church planned for use as an auditorium. And the city of East Hartford bought Blessed Sacrament Church for use as a senior center. “We have another potential sale where they might turn it into a museum,” Connery said. Among other properties sold are the rectory of St. Therese Church in Branford on Acorn Road, which was sold to a private party as a residence.
Location and condition
But most organizations seeking to buy closed churches are faith groups, said Dave Melillo, a senior commercial associate with H. Pearce Commercial Real Estate, which is acting as agent for the Archdiocese of Hartford and the Diocese of Bridgeport. He said selling a church is not very different from selling commercial properties.
“It comes down to location and condition. There’s no magic to it,” Melillo said. “You’re certainly more limited in your pool of buyers. The majority of inquiries are from other religious organizations or educational organizations. We’re busy. We’re showing them often.”
He said many of those interested are from ethnic churches looking for a larger space, although many don’t have the financial resources to buy a large church.
St. Ann Church, 930 Dixwell Ave., Hamden, and St. John the Baptist, 786 Dixwell Ave., New Haven, are for sale as the result of four parishes merging into one, named Christ the Bread of Life. While St. Ann Church is still on the market, its parish center on Jones Road was sold to a West Haven congregation, Comunidad Cristiana de Restauracion a las Naciones, Melillo said.
However, that sale displaced a congregatoin that had been meeting in the parish center, Bethcar Fellowship Church, which now is meeting at a “transitional location,” First Calvary Church at 605 Dixwell Ave., New Haven, according to its website. Pastors for those two congregations could not be reached.
St. Anthony on North Main Street in Ansonia, which closed in 2015, before the archdiocese’s merger plan, was sold in September to Abundant Life Ministries, according to the city assessor’s web page.
Other churches the archdiocese has designated for sale include St. Clare in East Haven, Church of the Epiphany in Cheshire, and St. Mary of Czestochowa and Sacred Heart in Torrington.
Connery said his job is satisfying and challenging. “This process, it’s going to keep going. That’s the reality,” he said. “There are more churches that are going to close over time. It is unfortunate. People are sad when their church closes. … A lot of these churches are late 1800, early 1900 churches, a lot of these are immigrant churches. We don’t have enough priests to cover the number of parishes.”
In the Diocese of Norwich, spokesman Wayne Gignac said the only church in the diocese for sale is the former Sacred Heart Church in
Vernon.
A more piecemeal process
Connery’s counterpart in the Diocese of Bridgeport is Anne McCrory, chief legal and real estate officer. “They’re way ahead of us in the sale of churches, for sure, because we haven’t done the same consolidation of church as they have,” McCrory said of the archdiocese. “We’ve done things a little more piecemeal here.”
One church that is in the process of being sold is Our Lady of Pompeii of the Holy Rosary, informally called Holy Rosary, which is one of three churches the diocese closed in 2012, out of 16 in the city. “That was a church that was what we call suppressed canonically in 2012,” McCrory said. The others were St. Raphael and St. Ambrose.
“We have a contract for sale” of Holy Rosary, she said. “I’m reluctant to say that it’s going to happen, but we’re hopeful.”
Holy Rosary is listed as part of the East Bridgeport Historic District and was founded at the turn of the 20th century by Italian immigrants, although the current building was built in 1930, McCrory said. It was an “ethnic parish as opposed to a territorial one” so it drew Italian immigrants from all over the area.
“For many years, Holy Rosary held Italian Mass in addition to English,” McCrory said. However, “it had lost … its ethnicity many years ago.”
When a territorial parish closes, “its crystal clear. The assets, the liabilities and the people are divided up,” she said. “The problem with an ethnic parish is there isn’t any territorial breakup. The diocese by default kind of has to take responsibility for what happens there.”
Another church that the diocese may have a buyer for is St. John Nepomucene at Brooks and Jane streets on Bridgeport’s East Side. Closed in 1991, the church fell into disrepair. “We preserved both the rear altar, the actual altar itself, because it had a relic in it, side railings in addition to of course the windows and the statues,” McCrory said.
Despite its dilapidated condition, the diocese hopes to have a buyer, because other potential sales have fallen through, McCrory said. “What you get in the urban areas are popup churches,” she said. “They’re great and they’re wonderful people, but they don’t generally have any money.”
She said in selling a closed church Bishop Frank Caggiano is “always looking for some sort of ministry that would be complementary to the mission of the church,” such as a monastery. On the other hand, “I have seen some interesting restaurants that have resulted from churches” in other parts of the country, McCrory said.
She said the model established under former Bishop William Lori was to keep the closed church available to former parishioners for a period of time, perhaps as a chapel. Lori “felt there needed to be a period of transition,” she said. “It’s pretty luxurious in the current environment to be able to do that.”
The Archdiocese of Hartford has also allowed closed churches to be used for weddings and funerals until they’re sold.