AmChurch outrage: Demolishing Manhattan's "Famine Church"
The last news I can find on this is from August, but photo above is part of what the Archdiocese of New York did this summer to beautiful and famed St. Brigid Church in Manhattan, which was more than 150 years old. It is called the Famine Church of the Lower East Side because it welcomed survivors of the so-called potato famine in Ireland in the mid-19th century.A familiar story: Faithful parishioners raised money to save St. Brigid, and a donor even offered to pay for ALL repairs needed, but the Archdiocese said no and had wreckers smash St. Brigid's historic stained glass windows and wreck the historic and irreplaceable interior.
The stained glass windows were crafted in Belgium in the mid-19th century and were valued at perhaps $100,000 apiece. But AmChurch hates Catholic beauty and history, evidently.
New York State Senator Martin Connor says, "When they take away our history, they're attacking our values." Truer words were never spoken.
Click on this post's title to visit the site of the Save St. Brigid Committee. Also see this link, where you can see St. Brigid's interior before the Archdiocese attacked it:
http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/powerplays/archives/002773.php
Of course, nothing like that could ever happen in Los Angeles. Nobody, for instance, would ever sell off St. Vibiana. Ooops, well...
I do not know if the site of the Archdiocese of New York has anything to say about St. Brigid Church, but I will investigate.
posted by Quintero at 5:35 PM
3 Comments:
This is particularly galling to me, since traditional stained glass is very dear to my heart. If it's really true that the glass was wrecked out and not salvaged and sold, it displays an astounding antipathy to the Catholic heritage, and even a callous -- one might say philistine -- disregard for art itself.
If you find out more about the Archdiocese's actions, please post about it.
Dear Dover B,
Will do.
If a punk on the street threw a rock and put a hole in a stained glass window, everyone would rightly denounce him as a desecrator and vandal. But let an archdiocese wreck entire windows and hardly anyone says anything.
The building was apparently unsafe,but the stained glass windows just shows how much these wreckovaters hate the True Catholic Church!
Kenneth M. Fisher
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