Closed churches, not faith, for sale
When St. Elizabeth of Hungary Roman Catholic Churchin 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 amajor 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-to-ceiling 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.