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By Bill Altreuter

A.'s mother grew up on Buffalo's East Side, and A. and her sister started out there too. They all went to Corpus Christi, and still feel a connection to the parish, one of the many Polish churches in that neighborhood. The East Side has become pretty significantly depopulated over the course of the last fifty or so years, and the people who live there now are more likely to seek spiritual fulfillment at a mosque or a Baptist church than at a Polish language Mass, but there is still a touch of Polonaise in the neighborhood. When the diocese announced that it was going to start shutting down parishes the East Side was one of the places that was targeted. Corpus Christi was independent from the diocese, staffed by Franciscans. Six or seven years ago the Franciscans decided they were done-- the parish enrollment had declined to the point where it no longer made sense for them to staff it. It looked like that was going to be the end of the parish, and in A's family this was a big deal, even though none of them still belonged to it. At the eleventh hour the the Pauline Fathers agreed to take it over, and appointed Fr. Anselm Chalupka as pastor. He did a good job, although you couldn't really say he turned it around. He raised money to repair the decrepit physical plant, he was a visible presence in the life of the East Side, and he was a charismatic figure. Part of it was that by the usual standards of inner city Buffalo clergy he was shockingly young: when he came to the parish six years ago he was 33. Part of it was that he was a native Pole, which must have pleased his constituency, and which made him rather exotic to everyone else. He grew the parish to 370 people from 250, which is pretty good-- I'm not sure how many of the 120 were related to A, but probably a couple were.

Today was his last day. He has been sent to a parish in Yonkers. A's family wanted me to go to his last Mass in Buffalo, because he'd told them that his wish was to see the church filled once before he left. He got his wish, and looking around before the service started it occured to me that the scene resembled something that a Polish Leo McCarey might have made a movie about. They put on the whole kielbasa, a Tridentine Mass, and there was a full house in attendance. Then came the homily. Using Mark's gospel about prophets not being honored as his departure point Fr. Anselm noted that biblical prophets don't predict things so much as they speak the truth. From there he moved into a discussion about how Darwin's "Evolution of the Species" has been used as a justification for atrocity and then-- even knowing it was coming I couldn't believe it was happening-- he made the argument that the United States is perpetrating a holocaust against the unborn. It was like watching Godwin's Law enacted before my eyes. Two days ago Scott Roeder was convicted of murder, after having been allowed to raise the defense of justification for gunning down a man in his church, and there I was, listening to a guy with an accent like a vampire movie call me Hitler.

So here's where I am on the preservation of historic churches: turn them into brew pubs. Nobody's ever called me Hitler in a brew pub.

Full post as published by Outside Counsel on January 31, 2010 (boomark / email).