Photo of the Day: Altar Display, St. Cecilia Church, Englewood NJ

I took the image accompanying this post at the Christmas vigil service at my longtime spiritual home, St. Cecilia Roman Catholic Church in Englewood, NJ.

Photo of the Day: St. Andrew Kim Taegon Statue, St. Raphael's Church, Long Island City, NY

 

A post of mine earlier this month briefly summarized the history of St. Raphael's Church, a mainstay of Long Island City, NY for 140 years. But I left for a later date a discussion of the white statue in front of the church honoring St. Andrew Kim Taegon, a source of great interest and pride for the parish, especially its Korean congregants.

The son of Christian converts, St. Andrew studied in Macao before his 1845 ordination as a Roman Catholic priest—Korea’s first. He did not last long, falling victim to persecution by the Josean dynasty. He was only 25 when he was beheaded for his evangelism efforts a year later. Religious freedom would not be granted in Korea until 1883.

Fr. Andrew, together with 102 other Korean martyrs, was canonized by Pope John Paul II on a trip to the nation in 1984. He is now the patron saint of Korean clergy.

Photo of the Day: St. Raphael's Church, Long Island City, NY

Over a month ago, I happened to be walking in Long Island City when I spotted from afar the spire, 150 feet high, of what turned out to be St. Raphael Catholic Church.

Though the parish was founded in 1865, it wasn’t until 20 years later that the current brick-and-sandstone structure was completed. The demographics of the parish—largely Irish and German immigrants in its early years—have changed markedly. Estimates for language speakers are one-third each now for English, Spanish, and Korean.

Photo of the Day: Grotto, Church of Notre Dame, Morningside Heights, NYC

A couple of weeks ago, at lunch with three college friends, I heard about the Church of Notre Dame. With most of my activities confined to the cluster of buildings around the central quadrangle of Columbia University in my college days decades ago, I never had occasion to see what this Roman Catholic Church just off the campus was like.

So, 46 years after coming to Morningside Heights, I decided to rectify the omission. At the time of the day when I passed by, the church was closed, but I was able to take this photo of its picturesque grotto.

The grotto began life as a chapel in 1910. The architectural firm Dans and Otto developed both the chapel and a replica of the grotto where the Virgin Mary appeared to St. Bernadette of Lourdes in France in 1858.

Soon, a larger church needed to be built—an expansion carried out by another architectural firm, Cross and Cross. But the grotto remains standing behind the church’s main altar, a continuing reminder of the first altar and chapel at the Church of Notre Dame.

Photo of the Day: Christmas at St. Cecilia’s Church, Englewood NJ

Yesterday I attended a Christmas vigil Mass at my parish church, St. Cecilia’s in Bergen County, NJ. For me and my family—as well as, I suspect, for more than a few of my readers—this venerable, beautiful building holds a lifetime of memories.

Those memories continued to warm my heart even on a hideously cold day outside.

Photo of the Day: Church of the Ascension, New Milford, NJ

I took this photo the other day while driving through New Milford, a town several miles from where I live in Bergen County, NJ. The Church of the Ascension began with the suburban migration from New York City early in the post-WWII period, and the need to Archdiocese of Newark’s need to accommodate this influx.

In 1953, Ascension Mission Church was formally established as a canonical parish. A fundraising drive led to groundbreaking for a complex consisting of church, rectory, convent and elementary school in 1957, with the first mass held in the church itself in February 1958. 

Photo of the Day: Church of St. Anthony, Nanuet NY

 

A week ago, while driving around in Rockland County, I was struck by the sight of an imposing Roman Catholic church. The Church of St. Anthony in Nanuet is a shrine church in honor of St. Anthony of Padua—a 13^th-century Franciscan known during his lifetime for his extraordinary skill as a speaker, and since his canonization just a year after his death as the patron saint for the recovery of lost items.

St. Anthony’s was founded in 1899 as a mission of St. Paul’s in Congers. The first, wooden church, built in Bardonia, burned in 1912. Four years later the first services were held in the basement of the new fieldstone structure in Nanuet. In 1920, enough had been built on the site for a semi-dedication to be held, using the cornerstone from the original church in Bardonia.

Photo of the Day: Creche, Reformed Church, Oradell NJ

Over time, my fascination with Nativity scenes has increased markedly. In recent years, I have taken to photograph outdoor examples of these tableaus.

So it was yesterday, when I saw the one accompanying this post, outside the Reformed Church of Oradell, several miles from where I live in Bergen County, NJ.

All over the world, people continue to celebrate births as miraculous signs of joy and hope. The birth of Jesus in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago was even more so—an act of faith by Mary in bearing this child under unusual and strained circumstances, and an act of faith by God that human beings, despite their history and tendency towards sin, were worth such a dramatic divine intervention in earthly affairs.

Photo of the Day: First United Methodist Church, Westfield NJ

In late October, while I was down for the afternoon in Westfield, NJ, an affluent suburb of New York, my eyes were drawn to First United Methodist Church, so much so that I took this picture. Even in this bustling downtown, near a railroad underpass, this structure commands attention as it overlooks the intersection of North Avenue West and East Broad Street.

But it’s not just because it’s on a slight rise over the traffic. This Greek Revival structure has, in its present form, stood on this spot since 1968. It replaced another building for this faith community that had lasted 92 years.

Photo of the Day: St. Joseph's Church, Hackensack NJ

This afternoon, I took this photograph of this church at the corner of Hudson Street and Henry Place in Hackensack, a few miles from where I live in Bergen County, NJ. St. Joseph’s has been around since Christmas 1909, when its first Mass was celebrated.

Befitting the parish’s origins as a house of worship for Polish immigrants, Mass continues to be held in that language at 7 pm on Tuesday and Friday and 11 am Sunday.

Photo of the Day: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Englewood NJ

I took the attached photo in the first week of December, on an extended walk around my hometown of Englewood.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—i.e., the Mormon Church—opened a facility elsewhere in Englewood in 2001, but this faith community required a new location because of inadequate parking and an expanded congregation. The site in this picture, on East Forest Avenue, was dedicated in 2012 and opened a couple of years later.

The meetinghouse is environmentally friendly, including energy-efficient rooftop gardens, a recycling system that reduces wastewater, and advanced control systems for lighting and thermal comfort. Its members come not just from Englewood, but also Englewood Cliffs, Teaneck, Hackensack, Fort Lee, Bogota, Leonia and Ridgefield Park.

Photo of the Day: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple, Oak Park, IL

It’s one of the astonishing facts of American creativity that in the first decade of the 20^th century, Oak Park, Ill.—a community of only 10,000 at the time—would house two geniuses who, by making a virtue of simplicity, transformed the world’s culture. One was Nobel Literature laureate Ernest Hemingway, then only a child. The other was the adult architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Visitors to the town can still see a number of homes that Wright designed when he started his practice. But a structure of a different kind is Unity Temple, which I visited—and photographed—while vacationing in the Chicago area in October 2004.

This building was brought to my attention by Jim Stewart’s “10 Sacred Sites in America Worth Seeing” post on “The Discoverer” blog. I have my issues with his list (not a single Catholic church on it?), and he lists Unity as being in Chicago rather than Oak Park, a suburb of the city. But he did remind me of what a worthwhile building this is.

Readers of this blog know that I frequently include pictures of religious institutions. Many, I found in researching their history, were created by architects who specialized in such structures. But, out of the approximately 1,000 buildings designed by Wright in his nearly 70-year career, only 10 fit this description.

Wright, a member of this Unitarian congregation, offered to design this church after its predecessor burned to the ground following a lightning strike. Wright being Wright, his building costs doubled the original projection of $45,000. But Wright being Wright, he also revolutionized how people would experience such spaces.

What Wright had in mind to replace the traditional Gothic revival church building that had stood here was a structure with no steeple or front entrance, to be built entirely of poured-in-place, exposed concrete—a forerunner of 20^th-century design. 

Minus traditional religious iconography, the sanctuary emphasizes light and space. It gives rise to introspection and meditation, in keeping with the commission’s request for a building that would embody the principles of “unity, truth, beauty, simplicity, freedom and reason.”

When I visited, I understood perfectly how Paul Hendrickson, in his 2019 biography of the architect, Plagued by Fire, felt sitting in a pew in the church, “with all its light and silence and seeming saving grace pouring down.”

When the temple was formally dedicated in 1909, Wright was not on hand for the ceremony, having departed Oak Park in scandal because of an affair with the wife of a client. But, if so much of his life was profane with its ego, arrogance and deceptions, Unity Temple represented his belief in the sacred.

Photo of the Day: Grace Episcopal Church, Providence, RI

I took this photo five years ago this past October, when I was on vacation in Rhode Island. This year, Grace Episcopal Church has been temporarily closed due to the coronavirus.

When the crisis clears, this institution in downtown Providence will be well worth a visit. Though the community sustaining the church dates back to 1829, its current home was built in 1846, according to specifications by Richard Upjohn.

Upjohn, an immigrant from Britain, was the go-to architect for the Episcopal Church when the denomination was in the midst of a building expansion in the U.S. (Trinity Church in New York may be his most famous project.)

Grace Episcopal has its own distinction as the first asymmetrical Gothic Revival Church in America. Its beauty was enhanced in 1912 with the addition of a chancel by architect Ralph Adams Cram.

Photo of the Day: Our Lady of Victories, Harrington Park NJ

Earlier this week, on my way to visit an area park, I spotted Our Lady of Victories, then turned around and photographed it. It reminded me of the one other, sad occasion several years ago when I visited this Roman Catholic church in northern New Jersey.

Photo of the Day: St. Anthony Orthodox Church, Bergenfield NJ

St. Anthony Orthodox Church, a longtime mainstay of Bergen County, NJ, where I live, was dedicated in 1964.

I took this photo in the middle of last month, while walking along the crossroads of Bergenfield, Englewood and Tenafly.

Photo of the Day: Old Stone Church, Upper Nyack NY

I must have driven by the site a dozen times at least in the past, but I had never taken any real notice of the Old Stone Church in Upper Nyack, NY until I got out of my car and began walking around.

This structure on North Broadway in this village was begun in 1813 and dedicated the following year. The oldest church in Rockland County, it first housed the Methodist-Episcopal Church of Nyack. Later it served as a Unitarian Sunday school, then a non-denominational church. Now, after restoration several years ago, it is listed on the NY State and National Registers of Historic Places.

Photo of the Day: Steeple of ‘Old North Church,’ Boston MA

Even without knowing it at first, I knew there was something important about this steeple when I saw it from a distance while I was in Boston 12 years ago this October.

Technically speaking, this is now the Episcopal Church’s Christ Church. But it is known to history as “Old North Church,” and if there’s a more famous steeple in American history or literature, I can’t think of one right now. I had to take this picture as soon as I became aware of it.

You know about it from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride,” with the memorable lines:

He said to his friend, “If the British march

By land or sea from the town to-night,

Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch

Of the North-Church-tower, as a signal-light,–

One if by land, and two if by sea;

And I on the opposite shore will be,

Ready to ride and spread the alarm

Through every Middlesex village and farm,

For the country-folk to be up and to arm.”

A plaque downstairs commemorates Revere and William Dawes, the other rider who alerted the countryside that, per the steeple signal, the British were marching to Lexington and Concord by sea across the Charles River and not by land.

The two men, unnamed in Longfellow’s poem, who actually climbed the steeple and held high the two lanterns were Old North Church’s sexton, Robert Newman, and vestryman, Capt. John Pulling, Jr.—men whose courage was all the more conspicuous because, as Patriots, they went against the prevailing Loyalist sentiment in the congregation.

Here I am, using the phrase “technically speaking” again—this was not the original steeple glimpsed by Revere. This is actually the third on this spot. The first, the one seen by Revere, was destroyed in the 1804 “Great Gale of Boston.” The second, built two years later, fell down into Hull Street in 1954 as a result of Hurricane Carol. (Luckily, the steeple was swaying so long that the neighborhood had enough time to be evacuated.)

The steeple you see now was rebuilt a year later, and made to look more like the one that Revere saw—only this time, with added steel reinforcements to safeguard against future storms. So far—God willing—it has held.

Photo of the Day: St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church, Leonia, NJ

I believe that at least some of my readers from Bergen County, NJ, grew up attending Masses in St. John the Evangelist. They in particular are likely to feel sad that an institution so much a part of their memories has temporarily closed, like others in the Archdiocese of Newark, because of the coronavirus. 

At just the moment when we need a source of consolation amid stress and tragedy, one of our chief lifelong sources of it is unavailable to us.

Decades before this, the Roman Catholic Church looked to other communication channels to spread the faith, such as radio and television. But the resort to live streaming is less a proactive than a defensive measure. It supplements the physical experience of the Mass, but does not replace it. I was grateful to participate this morning via St. John’s live-streaming, but longed for the real thing.

The creators of the Church instinctively grasped that, like love for another person, love of God is best transmitted tactilely—through the swelling of the organ, the lifting of voices toward the vaulted ceilings, the clasp of hands in the sign of peace, and the odor of incense. And, as the very name “Mass” indicates, the individual is anchored in a large, mass faith community.

In the end, a live streaming service is a poor but necessary substitute for the Mass. Although I understand and respect First Things editor R.R. Reno’s argument that canceling services is “utterly unnecessary,” incidents of exposure to the coronavirus that have occurred in other faiths confirm the need for caution. 

Even now, so many of us long for God as we long for each other. For now, we will have to find him inescapably where we always should have: in the deepest parts of our souls.

Photo of the Day: Heinz Memorial Chapel, Pittsburgh, PA

I visited Heinz Memorial Chapel, the non-sectarian religious facility of the University of Pittsburgh, while in town this past week. Like the buildings next to it—the Cathedral of Learning and the Stephen Foster Memorial—it was designed by Philadelphia architect Charles Klauder. 

Each of the three is distinct, but Heinz possesses an interior and exterior beauty all its own. In an American city of 20^th-century bustling industrial smoke and noise, it harked back to a 700-year-old Western European tradition of purity and silence: the neo-Gothic style of architecture. I think you’ll understand perfectly why I photographed the site.

The building is the result of a bequest by the Pittsburgh industrialist Henry J. Heinz to honor his mother, Anna Margaretta Heinz. Ground was broken in August 1933 with the dedication ceremonies occurring five years later. 

Open daily throughout the year except for university holidays, the chapel hosts approximately 1,000 events annually-- religious services, weddings, concerts, lectures, memorial services and guided tours.

The building inspires a sense of quiet awe of the creative humans who brought it to fruition in the darkest days of the Great Depression and of the supreme being who inspired their efforts and continues to infuse those who behold this space.

Did I say “quiet”? Well, maybe only some of the time in the chapel. Aside from services, you might hear the sounds coming through the pipe organ—the third instrument of this kind in the history of the chapel.

But cast your eyes around at the Indiana limestone walls, stone vaults, high ceilings, and arches—not to mention stained glass pieces, each with their own story—and you can easily imagine yourself far, far away.

Photo of the Day: St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Fifth Avenue, NYC

When my company was located at the Rolex Building, I used to pass by the house of worship located catty-corner from it on Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street, St. Thomas Episcopal Church. The fourth church for the parish, it replaced a prior structure destroyed in a 1905 fire. 

Many other congregations might not have recovered from a blaze that consumed interiors by John LaFarge and sculptures by Augustus St. Gaudens. But architect Ralph Adams Cram announced that the new structure would probably be “the most expensive church per square foot built thus far in the United States.” St. Thomas rebuilt rapidly, with the first service in its new home being held Oct. 4, 1913. 

Like St. Patrick’s Cathedral a few blocks to the south, St. Thomas, with its French High Gothic architectural style, stands out from the modernist, glass-and-steel cathedrals of commerce that now populate Fifth Avenue. From its triple-arched entrance way to its stone quarried from Kentucky, it awes even from the outside—an impression only enhanced by a preservation project completed a year ago that saw restoration of its stained glass windows and the cleaning of its facade.