Sunday, October 12, 2008

Angel, Dark Angel

My parish church is closing. Probably. Maybe. Churches throughout the Diocese of Scranton are closing, and St. Mary's in Nanticoke (a.k.a. Our Lady of Czestachowa) is shortlisted for closing. Though Bishop Martino has recently stated that nothing is final, nothing is decided yet. Maybe he's waiting for election results to come in to let him know which parishes voted according to his directive issued last week.

I'm operating on the assumption that St. Mary's will be closed, and that we will be consolidated along with two or three other parishes into a single church with no air conditioning, poor handicapped access, and ample parking for up to 30 vehicles. Word is that St. Mary's will be a backup or secondary church to be used for special occasions, like when more than one Nanticoke couple wants to get married in a Catholic Church on the same weekend. Still, I worry that it will fall into disrepair while it is idle, and some things will be lost forever due to neglect.

Among these are the stained glass windows. These are magnificent works of art, perhaps as old as the church itself, more than a century old. They bear the names of their donors, and some of these names are familiar to anyone who lives in Nanticoke. For example, one was donated by a "K.M. Smith." For decades I have assumed that this means it was donated by the children of the K.M. Smith Elementary school. But only last week it occurred to me that this was donated by the school's namesake. Now I want to find out who K.M. Smith was.

I've started photographing these windows. This is something I have thought about for a very long time. Ideally a project to capture these windows as photographic images would involve a large-format camera on a rig that allows it to image a small section of each window at a time, and create a mosaic of the window that will avoid having any distortion due to perspective issues. Less ideally the project would be undertaken by some guy with a Nikon Coolpix L4 who was waiting for his cousin's wedding to begin. But, hey, it's an imperfect world.

So before the wedding, and after Mass the next day, and after Mass today, I have been trying to capture each and every stained glass window in the church. The pictures are not perfect: they are sometimes blurred, rarely encompass everything I would like to grab, and always involve some perspective distortion. But they're better than nothing. I will not let this church, and these windows, pass beyond the veil unremembered.

I've got them all, I think. I'll go back and get them again and again, as often as I can, trying to achieve quality through quantity. But I've got them all. Here's one that's been a favorite of mine since I was a little kid.

This window is remarkable for several reasons. It may contain the only image of the adult Jesus in the main church windows. (I think there's another in the baptismal font area, but I think that's a later addition.) It's the only window that I could see that shows signs of wear, on both the images of St. Michael and Jesus. (A cleaning attempt gone awry?) It's the only one that shows an angel, as far as I know the only angel who is also classified as a saint. (Gabriel is a named angel, but I'm not sure he/she/it is considered a saint.) It's the only figure in the windows holding a weapon. (Others hold miniature churches, books, staves, crowns, but only Michael gets a sword.)

And...it sure as heck looks like a black guy.

Try to understand: Nanticoke was a coal mining town, settled primarily by Roman Catholic Poles, though several other nationalities and religions were represented. Until the middle of the last century the population was fairly static: your parents lived here, you lived here, and odds were your spouse was someone from in town. Very few people moved into town. So very few black people moved into town. Having a black guy in a century-old stained glass window in church is a pretty big thing. (Though I cannot say for sure if anyone else has ever remarked upon it.)

Brightness and contrast enhanced to show detail
Of course, one could argue that St. Michael was an angel, and as we all learned from the St. Joseph's Baltimore Catechism, "Angels are spirits that ain't got no bodies." (Well, that's how I remember learning it. From the older children.) So the artist had pretty free reign to depict St. Michael in whatever way he wanted. As a black guy with an Afro or whatever. And apparently, that's just what he did.

Damn, he looks pretty pleased with himself.

For all these years, a black guy has looked over the Polish parishioners of Our Lady of Czestachowa, sword in his hand, wings on his back, crown on his Afro, a crocodile-lizard-serpent version of Satan under his feet.

Note the distinctly Medieval footwear here. I only just noticed the flipped-up
portion of the hem of St. Michael's skirt. Is he preparing to pee on Satan?
No wonder the crocodile-lizard-serpent looks worried.

It's a little thing. Just a window, just a detail in a building slated for closing. But it's part of the story of this Parish, of the city of Nanticoke itself. And it's something that should not be lost. Somebody needs to remember it.


Title Reference: "Angel, Dark Angel", short story by Roger Zelazny.

7 comments:

  1. ...
    So are the closings based on simple expenses, or expenses due to 'altar boy' penances, or population, or cleric numbers, or..?? Did not read the one linked post and have no idea if you have already discussed this or not. If you have just note the link and I will go read.


    "Less ideally the project would be undertaken by some guy with a Nikon Coolpix L4 who was waiting for his cousin's wedding to begin. But, hey, it's an imperfect world."

    Indeed it is. Better 'that guy' than no guy. I too have always been fascinated with stained glass and its beauty, secular and religious.


    RE: the 'black guy' angel. Are you sure it is not just an aging-process thing..?? Sure does not look the same in the long shot of the window. Perhaps the artist was simply making an easy hairdo for that figure.


    Interesting. I am thinking I should record the stained glass of my boyhood church ... which happens to be just down the street from where I now live.


    ...tom...
    .

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  2. The reasons are several and complex, and with all things being handed down from officialdom, I don't believe everything I've been told. But, here's a list, in no particular order:

    - Aging, dwindling poulation in the area. Old people are dying, young people are moving away.

    - Poor church attendance. I think only one in three registered Catholics bothers to go to church each week and toss some cash in the collection basket. This hurts revenues.

    - Aging, dwindling priesthood. New priests are few and far between.

    - Population explosions in some parts of the diocese. Even before 9/11, the population of some areas of the Scranton diocese with easy access to New York and Philadelphia have been experiencing population growth as people opt for long commutes to the big city over actually living where they work. Even though Catholic populations in these areas have increased, they have brough virtually no priests with them - so existing priests are being reassigned to serve these growing parishes.

    - Illegal immigrants. Yes, our illegal immigrant population has also exploded, and these people also forgot to bring priests with them. As an added bonus, they also avoid registering at the Parish whose services they utilize, so they're not leaving a trail for INS - and officially, the Diocese doen't know they exist, so no additional resources are allocated.

    - Artificial priest shortages. The new bishop has decided to enforce rules that have apparently been on the books forever but were never enforced before. Priests are allowed to have ONE mass each day - used to be that the same priest would do the 7:00, 9:00, and 11:00 masses; but fewer priests saying fewer masses means fewer masses are being said. Also, priests are required to retire at a certain age, whether they want to or not, whether they're still capable or not. It's within the bishop's discretion to accept or reject these resignations, but he has only been too happy to accept them all - and a lot of priests have said tearful goodbyes to their congregations.

    - Scandals. Yes, we've had our very own pedophile priest, who apparently got rotated from diocesan services to a position at a University to keep him away from the little boys - and put him in direct contact with the teenage boys he preferred. The bishop hired an outside consultant (at an enormous cost) to recommend how to consolidate schools, and then rejected all objections from the affected parties - consolidating all the Catholic schools in an area of several hundred square miles into two or three centralized schools whose total capacity was less than the combined population of the existing schools - because the bishop presumed (correctly) that many parents would choose to pull their kids out of Catholic school than have them spend several hours a day on a school bus on Pennsylvania's sometimes treacherous roads. The bishop and one of his underlings became directly involved in a criminal case involving an (alleged ) legitimate area businessman / organized crime figure - who has recently funded the construction of a brand new student center at my Jesuit alma mater. And on and on. Bottom line, a lot of people do not like this bishop, and see him as little more than a shutdown manager, a Philadelphia thug sent to put a bunch of coal miners and hicks in their place.

    So those are some of the reason behind the closings.

    As for St. Michael's skin coloration - yes, it could be due to aging. Other windows have been done in a variety of styles and techniques, and some have aged differently (going to gray) while others remain Western European Pale, as will be seen whhen I post them. I find the wear marks that are unique to these two windows interesting - did someone try to rub off the darkened matter on the image's skin, only to discover that this WAS the skin? The pinched face looks Italian to me, actually, but the hairstyle is unique among the windows of the church. (One other, St. Stanislaus Kostka, appears to have the features of a Greek man in the middle of his life, including a helmet of dark hair - an unfortunate artistic choice for a Polish figure who died when he was 18.) In my experience, angels have usually been presented with pale skin, blonde hair, and androgynous features. So even if this was not intended to be an Africanized St. Michael, its relative swarthiness sets it apart from these more traditional depictions.

    It would be cool if more people started to photographically preserve the great old things that make their regions unique! I'd love to see the stained glass from your church!

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  3. ...
    ...truelol... Dude, ya wasted a good post on a blog comment..!!


    Sounds like a lot of poor decisions, lifestyle and societal changes, and 'self-fulfilling' decisions.

    Sorry to hear the pedophile priest problem factors in there also. Makes me glad I was not an altar boy as a kid. (Though for the record, none of our old parish priests have ever been formally named or informally rumored to be 'a problem'.)


    Hey, pics of the church windows would make a good blog post or three.


    ...tom...
    .

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  4. http://www.stmattlutheran.org/Pages/History/windows_tour.htm

    Here is a link to the church I grew up in. I remember many hours of pondering those windows as a child. My Dad still attends.

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  5. So many of those old ethnic parishes are closing and leaving behind these beautiful works of art. And yet there are new churches being built in other areas of the country that are booming with Catholics that have moved away from those Rust Belt states. Right here in Forsyth county, two new church buildings went up in the last ten years and they are filled. Seems to me those windows could be put to good use and inspire whole new generations in some sort of recycling program -- taking them out of the closed churches and installing them in new ones. Or there may be groups like the PRCU or Italian American Club that might consider using them as they build.

    Or, use those buildings as community centers, especially for senior citizens. Yes I know they require upkeep and someone has to pay the bills, but I bet people would be more willing to give to a fund that keeps their local church open for some purpose rather than sending money to the diocese where it disappears in the coffers.

    The people I know who choose to remain practicing Catholics give their allegiance to their local parish community, not "The Church." It's disheartening that so many of them are ill-treated by the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

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  6. Joy, that's a very cool site. Thank you!

    Dee, I don't know about removing the windows while the church still stands - there is always a possibility that THIS church will someday inherit the mantle of Nanticoke's only remaining Catholic church. (It doesn't have the capacity to hold all of Nanticoke's Catholics right now, but give it time...) And if that were to happen, and the windows needed to be replaced - well, have you ever read Larry Niven's "The Patchwork Girl"? Brrrrr...

    Someone I know suggested in all seiousness that the situation could be amicably resolved by building a single new church for the city, incorporating architectural elements of all of the current churches - the windows from one or more of these churches, the altar from this, the baptismal font from that, the pews from the other; doors, bells, steps, tabernacles, and on and on. Then, after all of the old churches had been parted out, they could be torn down - but would live on in the new building.

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  7. t sad that your parish might close, especially because of the B.S. reasons you state. The reality that the Church being just another big business shows in times like that. I agree with Dee that it is the community and not "the Church" that keeps people around.
    I would be heartbroken if the parish I grew up in had to close. Not just the spiritual aspect of it, but it is a little jewel box of fine craftsmanship. The school did have to close and consolidate a few years ago, like the ones in your area.
    Is it possible that the artist portrayed Angel Michael as a Moor?

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