Long ago, when Baltimore was truly a Catholic city, Joseph Portera was an altar boy at Saint John the Baptist church near the Lexington Market, dutifully showing up for a Novena service every Wednesday and three times on Sunday when other boys were listening to the radio or playing ball.
The famiglia Portera lived in the 600 block of West Franklin Street and Joe walked to St. John’s for school and Mass.
“When they closed the [parish] school in 1951, I was the only altar boy left,” said Joe, a retired letter carrier and postal union official. “I served Mass until I was 18 years old.”
Now 84, he can still recite the Confiteor – the communal admission of sins “in thought, word and deed…by my most grievous fault” at the beginning of Mass – in Latin.
Joe’s mother, Mary Cannatella Portera was the longtime “church lady” at the Paca Street sanctuary, which in 1987 became independent from the Archdiocese as the Nationwide Center of Saint Jude Devotions, commonly known as the “Saint Jude Shrine.” The Pallottine Fathers, who served the church from its 1888 founding, own the property.
“I did everything but say Mass and hear confessions,” said Mary, who died in 2016 at 101. Her funeral was held at the church where she cooked dinner for the priests, laundered altar linens, greeted busloads of visitors with doughnuts and coffee and ran a gift shop that bears her name.
And each of her four children – Joseph and three sisters – were somehow put to work there as conscripted volunteers. Can you imagine?
“If Mom said it, you did it,” said Joe who, in his job as a postal union official, directed annual holiday food drives. “One Sunday when they changed the clocks, I missed Mass. I never missed it again.”
The area around Paca and Saratoga – anchored by bakeries, the Church and the produce trade at the Market – was one of several heavily Sicilian Italian enclaves in Baltimore from the late 19th century to the mid-1950s.
It was the glory days of Catholicism in Baltimore, the first archdiocese in the United States; the city of Teddy Roosevelt’s good friend Cardinal James Gibbons; indelibly Catholic from Govans to Pigtown and back again.
When a house went up for sale, classified newspaper ads identified the area as “Saint Dominic’s,” “Saint Rose of Lima,” “Saint Charles Borremeo,” back in the Fifties and Sixties when more than 200,000 Catholics lived within the city.
Vince Fava grew up working at Trinacria, his family’s 124-year-old Italian grocery two blocks from St. Jude.
“When I was a kid working here the store would be packed on Wednesday with all those Italians coming in after the Saint Jude novena,” said Fava, 60. “A lot of them would leave right after Communion to get here before the crowd.”
As the Sixties faded into the Seventies, he said, “families moved out to Catonsville and Harford County and they kept moving out from there. People got older, started to get sick and die. It all started to change.”
Indeed – aside from the names of Italian families on the back of pews sponsored years ago – Trinacria is the only visible reminder that the old neighborhood was once home to hundreds of Italian-Americans and the faith they brought from the old country.
Cultural changes, exacerbated by an epidemic of sexual abuse by priests, resulted in a plunge in Mass attendance that shows no sign of abating. A wave of expected lawsuits against the Archdiocese by abuse victims motivated Archbishop William E. Lori last year to place the organization in bankruptcy. As of earlier this month, an estimated 700 people had filed for compensation.
Baltimore’s observant Catholic population has plummeted to about 5,000 people attending Mass regularly. The decline accompanies a dramatic drop in the overall number of city residents. In the wake of this, the Archdiocese is closing 38 of 61 churches, most of them in the city and a few of them just over the line in Baltimore County.
A list of the landmark churches being shuttered – St. Vincent de Paul, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Gregory the Great and Corpus Christi among them – is nothing less than a trail of tears. To give the Archdiocese the benefit of the doubt, there aren’t many left to shed them.
When most other kids were copying their school reports out of the World Book Encyclopedia, Leo Ryan was consulting the Catholic Encyclopedia, a gift from his uncle, a priest. In 1972, he graduated from the Shrine of the Little Flower, a longtime anchor of the Herring Run area of Northeast Baltimore.
Known as “The Shrine” since it opened in 1926, the parish at Belair Road and Brendan Avenue is also closing. Taken with the dozens of others it “feels like a death,” said Ryan, adding that as one moves into old age such deaths – Memorial Stadium, Haussner’s, old sweethearts and close relatives – “become a companion.”
A faithful Catholic who sent all of his children to parochial school, Ryan worships closer to his Towson home but now and again goes back to the old neighborhood for Mass.
“There’s maybe 15 people there,” he said of the large sanctuary. “How do you pay the electric bill? You can’t keep these places open as monuments.”
When Baltimore was indelibly Catholic, attorney and Beatles scholar Frank G. Lidinsky was growing up at 921 North Linwood Avenue near Eager Street. It wasn’t enough to be Catholic to attend St. Wenceslaus neighborhood school, he said, your bloodline had to go back to old Bohemia.
“At school we went to daily Mass and I remember my family said the rosary at the dining room table together about three times a week,” said Lidinsky. “We said it during the [1962] Cuban Missile Crisis, praying while listening to President Kennedy’s speech on the radio.”
Saint Wenceslaus, built in 1872, is where members of Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Charity ministered to victims of AIDS in the early 1990s. Less than a mile from Johns Hopkins Hospital, it is also on the dark list.
Who wants to bet a crab cake that Hopkins will eventually take control of the property?
The Archdiocese has called this extreme pruning “Seek the City to Come,” a bit of PR woo-woo that makes no literal sense.
In 1994, the late and much respected Sun religion reporter Frank P.L. Somerville covered an early round of closings by the Archdiocese.
Just a few churches were cut loose. One was Holy Redeemer Chapel on Oldham Street in Greektown where I used to walk my grandmother to Mass each week after the Second Vatican Council.
I’m still in the neighborhood and, driving by, I look at the spot where a statue of the Virgin Mary once stood, one of the first things dispatched by the Protestant congregation who acquired the property.
Thirty years ago, Somerville quoted the Rev. Sylvester Peterka, then the pastor of Immaculate Conception at Mosher Street and Druid Hill Avenue in West Baltimore, who argued that St. Ann’s Church at 22nd and Greenmount deserved a pardon.
Said Peterka, “Sections of the city … cry out for a church.”
The lament in those neighborhoods has bloomed anew as both St. Ann’s and Immaculate Conception are set to be closed.
The city to come?
What has the Archdiocese left us to seek? Long-dead grandparents? School-teacher nuns like Sister Mary Pamphilia, known to bring a parrot into her Highlandtown classroom? The volunteer Little League coach, usually the father of a classmate, who practiced patience when we swung three times and missed three times?
Ghosts.
What does Joe have in common with Vince Fava, Leo Ryan and Frank Lidinsky besides their abiding Catholicism? They all left the city a long time ago.
Rafael Alvarez graduated from Mt. St. Joseph High School in 1976 and Loyola College of Baltimore in 1980. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com
Our Lady of Lourdes church was closed in the early 1990s. Opened in 1920, my mother and her sister went to school there, my parents were married there in 1946, my six older siblings were baptized, schooled and confirmed in that building. My father’s huge concelebrated funeral mass was held there 50 years ago this year.
The school closed in the very early 1970s. I never attended that school. I began first grade at Corpus Cristi, them St. Thomas Aquinas, then St. Charles Borromeo in Pikesville and finally Cardinal Gibbons for high school. All of those schools are closed.
As the Sixties faded into the Seventies, he said, “families moved out to Catonsville and Harford County and they kept moving out from there. People got older, started to get sick and die. It all started to change.”
As if it was some random event. No. It was purposeful. Ethnic cleansing, funded with our own tax dollars and aided and abetted by elite foundation-funded NGOs. Nothing to do with urban renewal, hygiene, or blight. Everything to do with breaking up these communities. Read The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing by E. Michael Jones.
The Church should have fought back. It didn’t. Too many wimps not wanting to be called racist. Now look at the result: Bombed out city, gay pedo priests, no leadership, no community.
Thank you Mr. Alvarrez.
I am not Catholic, and yet these stories tug at my heart. Such precious times within these church walls ….
Baltimore was once called the ‘City of Churches’ and the sky line still boasts many spires, signaling that here, one may find, peace, guidance and God. I remember the 60’s and 70’s as being a horrible time for historic preservation and a time when religion was pooh poohed. Look at us now. As Rev. Peterka is quoted, “Sections of the city….cry out for a church. I don’t live in the city but I still support the church where I was married and my children were baptised. If there is ANY way we can reverse this trend, we need to try.