A (Humble) Giant Among Men

One bright spot during my years at St. John the Evangelist in Beverly was Deacon Tomas Sanchez.  This mild-mannered but commanding gentleman started to appear at Mass with our priests in 1986 and quickly became part of our spiritual community.  I was almost a teenager at the time and had no idea what a deacon was because our parish never had one before.  He performed some but not all of the duties of a priest and was married.  I thought this was fascinating.

It was explained to me that deacons were lay people with special training who could distribute communion, preach homilies, administer baptisms, and officiate Catholic marriage ceremonies.  They could not however hear confessions, anoint the sick, say Mass or consecrate the bread and wine. 

I didn't remember seeing Mr. Sanchez in the pews prior to 1986 but I was glad he became a deacon.  His voice was calm but deep, making him sound a bit like James Earl Jones.  The sermons he gave were usually interesting and very relatable because he tended to talk about family life.  After suffering though many boring sermons in my childhood, he was a much-needed breath of fresh air for St. John's and when you saw Deacon Sanchez up on the altar, you knew it was going to be a good Sunday morning.
 

During one CCD class, Deacon Sanchez dropped by to give each student their own religious booklet on topics he thought they'd find interesting.  Mine was entitled “The Good Earth”  which was a Biblical overview on the environment that encouraged stewardship, not exploitation of the world God created for us.  At the time I didn't think much of it but over the years it did help me to have a greater respect for the environment and be wary of adopting certain political views based solely on party lines.  This was a point made abundantly clear when some of the dirtiest cities suddenly had clean air during the Covid-19 lock-down of 2020.  I still have the booklet to this day and will always think about Deacon Sanchez when I read it.      

When our family decided to leave St. John's for good and start attending St. Mary's, not having Deacon Sanchez at Mass was one of our only regrets...but it wasn't the last I would see of him.  During my college years, I was very passionate about the pro-life movement but grew increasingly frustrated by the ignorant tactics of some anti-abortion activists.  Under the leadership of St. Mary's pastor Fr. Richard Johnson, a parish pro-life group was formed so I decided to attend their first meeting hoping to steer the group away from being too fanatical.  To my surprise, Deacon Sanchez was there because he had been asked to offer advice to this fledgling ministry.  One of the first things he said was for us to not stoop to the level of those pro-file activists who yelled at women entering abortion clinics because condemnation and angry fists didn't do much to change people's hearts and minds.  Satisfied that he said what had been on my mind, I decided to keep quiet.

Sadly, I didn't see much of Deacon Sanchez after that except for a couple of chance encounters at my local bank branch.  Then after many years, I ran into him and his wife at a local supermarket.  He looked about the same except for a few wrinkles but his voice was slower and weaker.  I asked him, “Do you know who I am?”  He smiled and said my name but his wife looked at me and shook her head as if to indicate something was wrong.  I had forgotten I was still wearing my I.D. badge from work and he had just read my name without remembering me.  Apparently, he was struggling with memory loss.  I never did see him again after that and in April of 2022, I opened the newspaper to see his obituary.  I was surprised to read he was 92 because he certainly didn't look that old.  I decided to attend his wake a few days later.
 

At the funeral home, there were the usual photo collages of different moments in his life.  He had proudly served with the navy and a younger version of Mr. Sanchez looked very dapper in uniform.  There were also a few framed newspaper articles from the long-defunct Beverly Times that discussed his reasons for becoming a deacon.  He said he wasn't called to it right away but became more attracted to the vocation a little bit at a time.  Then I read a quote from him that shook me to the core.  When talking about his goals for St. John's, he said “You can't call yourself a Christian community if you leave even one person behind.” In that moment, I thought about how lauded a few of my former pastors at St. Mary's were for building up such wonderful communities of faith while at the same time, they turned their backs on me.

The Deacon Sanchez interview continued by saying while he might not be able to find an answer for everyone's problems, he would steer people in the right direction to give them the help they needed.  When my family had left St. John's, I was still filled with the hope that my life would get better so I never brought my struggles to Deacon Sanchez.  I wondered what help he could have given me had I stayed.

I arrived at the wake a few hours after it began so attendance was light but visitors continued to trickle in here and there.  His wife told me the problem with living so long was that almost all his contemporaries had already passed away.  We talked about the Church and many other things.  When she mentioned growing up in Lynn, I told her that's where my dad was from.  I wondered if she had ever met him and just didn't know it.  Like my dad, she knew local sports legend Harry Agganis and even had to sit on his lap when they all piled into a car on a trip from the beach.  I also met Deacon Sanchez's four adult children and their extended family.  Everyone was glad to see me and I made sure they knew how much I appreciated their dad's time at St. John's.  While on my way out, I saw a couple approach the family and upon introducing themselves they said, “Deacon Sanchez had married us 15 years ago.”  His legacy lives on.

While this blog features a lot of complaints about the Church and many of my priests, I have nothing but kind words for Deacon Tomas Sanchez.  I'm glad to have known him...if only for a little while.  

Almost Thirty Years Later...Part 1

I'm convinced the universe plays tricks on people because the first few months of the new year brought into my life a few things from almost thirty years ago.

A blizzard was predicted for January 29th and that meant the Saturday Mass my mother and I usually attended was canceled.  It turned out to be a pretty big storm with heavy snowfall that continued into the evening.  The manager at my night shift job asked me to come into work a few hours early so that left no time to get out the snow blower.  This turned out to be a good thing because when I attempted to start the snow blower later that morning, the motor wouldn't crank over and it took some doing to get it running again.  By the time I cleared out the sidewalks and driveways of our house and an invalid neighbor's house, the only nearby option for Mass was to visit a church I swore I'd never set foot in again...my childhood parish of St. John the Evangelist in Beverly.

I had grown to dislike St. John's during my high school years for various reasons.  The dynamic priests who had once run the church had all been replaced by boring old priests who gave terrible sermons.  After the passing of the much-loved Fr. Everard, the parish saw two pastors who kept asking for more money but didn't do nearly as much to make the church a welcoming community. Those increased donations were used to renovate the church's interior but the end result was incredibly ugly and later covered over with another renovation.

During my awkward high school years, I really could have used ministries and mentors geared toward teens but the parish was on spiritual cruise control.  They did absolutely nothing for young people which is too bad because I was passionate about my faith but was starting to question it.  I also noticed that there were very few females my own age who went to Mass.
       
What this parish did have was plenty of old people...and a good number of them were hypocritical because they liked to get dressed up for Mass but they really didn't do much to increase the faith once they stepped outside the church.  When I was an altar boy, one of my priests told me there were a group of old ladies sitting up front who always came to him after Mass to complain if we made mistakes.  Trying to do your best when you're young is tough enough but now I had to impress the “Russian judges” in the first row.
 
As I entered college, my family decided to switch to St. Mary Star of the Sea in downtown Beverly but every once in a great while I'd hear stories about my former parish that made me glad we left.  One St. John's priest named Fr. Mullen put his foot in his mouth when he gave a Memorial Day sermon that criticized the glorification of war with such things as parades.  A World War II veteran sitting in the front row was so angry, he yelled out something along the lines of: “If it wasn't for us veterans, you wouldn't be free!”

St. John's was also the parish of Mayor Bill Scanlon who I felt was an arrogant bully.  During one election in which he was expected to win by an overwhelming majority, his campaign decided to sling the mud anyway by leaking to the local newspaper his opponent's sealed juvenile record from high school.  His supporters justified these underhanded tactics and since the mayor had once played hockey in his youth, they would quip, “He's not trying to win the Lady Byng Trophy.”  Yet Mr. Scanlon's campaign often touted the fact that he was a long time parishioner of St. John's.  Years later, the mayor was seen helping to cut the ribbon of a new abortion clinic shortly after being named Catholic of the Year by St. Mary's School.  Hypocritical indeed!

For one particular lent, my mother decided to attend Mass everyday and sometimes that meant she had to visit St. John's.  I would drop her off and then pick her up later but I refused to enter the church.  Unfortunately, the Beverly Catholic Collaborative Plan made it more difficult to avoid this place and one of our pastors got the bright idea to discontinue the 5 PM Mass at St. Mary's during the summer months and shift it over to St. John's because that building had air conditioning.  My mother and I decided to go to Mass elsewhere for the season.

Now almost thirty years later, I pulled into the plowed parking lot of St. John's to attend noon Mass with my mother.  The new front doors of the church were more ornate than the ones from my childhood.  Only three or four old people were inside at first.  With surgical mask and sunglasses still on, I looked around at all the changes to the interior.  Almost everything was a little fancier even if it didn't need to be.  For some reason, a purple accent stripe was painted two thirds of the way up the right wall.  The pews were now angled instead of straight.

My eyes may have been looking at St. John's as it was now, but my mind kept switching back to how the place looked before and just after that disastrous renovation.  I could see an usher in a red blazer walking up the aisle with a special crank handle in his hand that was used to open the long side windows.  Today these windows are sealed because of the air conditioning and they have added gothic details too.  I could see the awful gold crosshatching and burning bush flames that had once adorned the sanctuary and wondered of the old paint was still under there.  I saw the church's original altar rails and purple curtains.  Off to the left were the father and daughter singing team and to the right was Fr. Kiley playing the organ.  One of the only things that remained untouched were the church's hanging lights.

More people trickled into church including an portly gentleman I had sometimes seen at the Carmelite Chapel, two girls in their 20s, an older woman and her daughter, and a family of high schoolers but the vast majority of parishioners were elderly and that made me wonder about this place's future.  At one time, the bulletin for the Beverly Catholic Collaborative published each church's weekly need vs. what they received in donations and all three parishes regularly fell short.  I glanced at the latest bulletin and noticed they stopped publishing the weekly need but collections at St. John's were still fairly skimpy.

 

I didn't recognize the priest celebrating Mass because we had been away for so long.  His sermon on the lives of the saints was okay and at one point he said, “What we want might not be what God wants.”  As a single Catholic, it was a line I heard often and it really bothered me because I just didn't know what God wanted anymore.  At first, I wasn't going to put any money in the collection basket but then at the last minute, I changed my mind.

After Mass, we returned to the parking lot and one by one the handful of cars started to pull away.  I could still see the throngs of well-dressed parishioners from long ago.  During my childhood, the noon Mass was usually followed by a trip to Dunkin' Donuts for some Munchkins and perhaps The Three Stooges on TV.  For this trip, my mother and I decided to get something to eat at a restaurant and when we got home, I cleared some more snow with the snow blower.  I had been up for 24 hours by the time I got to bed.  Another shift at work awaited and busy days like this left little time to have a life.

Renovation Ruination

I think it's safe to say that Vatican II probably tried to accomplish too much too soon and while some of the changes it brought about were minor, others must have been extremely jarring for longtime parishioners,  Nowhere is this more true than in the arena of church renovations.
 
Although the Second Vatican Council never issued a single document or dictate that made architectural changes to churches compulsory, that didn't stop zealous pastors from getting carried away with their efforts to bring the Mass closer to the people.  All over the country, drastic renovations were initiated that seemed more like “wreckovations” to parishioners who loved their ornately decorated houses of worship.  High altars, elevated pulpits, reredos, side chapels and part or all of the altar rails were removed.  Statues and frescoes were whitewashed.  Some churches even saw stained glass windows covered over because they were thought to be a distraction.  These changes must have been almost universal because during my lifetime, I've only been to a couple of churches that still used an intact altar rail during the distribution of communion.  Things were getting so out of hand, the Vatican published Opera Artisis in 1971 which called for restraint in dealing with the artwork that adorned churches.  The National Conference of Catholic Bishops appeared to counter these recommendations with a 1978 booklet entitled Environment and Art in Catholic Worship and this only seemed to quicken the pace of these heavy-handed renovations.

A friend's mother mentioned the hurt feelings that were caused when most of her church's marble altar rail was removed because working class immigrants had scraped up whatever money they could to fund its installation.  My mother's childhood parish of the Immaculate Conception of Salem, MA  saw colorful statues painted white and many ornamental details lost.  Both she and my uncle have a bit of sadness in their voices whenever they talk about these changes.  “It's so different now.  It looks nothing like it did when I was a kid,” she laments.
 
While changes to St. Mary Star of the Sea in Beverly were minor by comparison, a couple of prominent statues did not escape the whitewash treatment.  During the 1990s, our pastor was Fr. Charles Hughes and he brought these sculptures back to their original colorful luster.  When a parishioner offered to pay for gold leaf to be added to St. Anthony's rosary, Fr. Hughes insisted it wasn't necessary because a good Franciscan would have carried a wooden rosary.  Today some parishes have instituted “re-renovations” in order to undo many post-Vatican II changes.  It's enough to make you wonder what it was all for in the first place?

Playing musical chairs with a church's decor does very little to get people to go to Mass but in times of uncertainty, undertaking such a renovation provides the illusion that something very tangible and achievable is happening.  The 1960s saw tremendous societal upheaval but instead of confronting the evil of these times, Vatican II's poorly-timed renovations were a distraction that caused many parishes to focus on inward things that really didn't matter all that much.

Unfortunately, the trend of unnecessary renovations didn't begin with Vatican II.  Seeing historical photos of the lower church at St. Mary's in Beverly reveals a very beautiful altar that seemed more than adequate.  It was replaced with a new altar of a much simpler design because Fr. Francis Shields found it necessary to have the lower church completely gutted shortly after his instillation as pastor in 1958.

During the post-World War II years, modern design took hold in America and anything old and ornate was often seen as being obsolete and disposable.  When the Great Salem Fire destroyed St. Joseph's Church, its 1949 replacement was constructed with International Style architecture.  While some grew to cherish this plain-looking building, others thought it was ugly.  When the Archdiocese of Boston wanted to demolish this house of worship many years later, its modern design was occasionally cited as a reason for not saving the building.    

Long after Vatican II, many pastors still can't resist “sprucing up” what they feel are tired-looking churches and I've seen some pretty frivolous and downright baffling renovations over the years.  If you look at exterior of St. Paul's Church in Hamilton, everything seems normal.  Upon entering the building, you notice something isn't quite right.  In 2003, someone got the bright idea to place the altar up against the left wall.  Pews in a semitransept off to the right now have a nice view of the Mass.  Unfortunately, worshipers in the main church don't despite an attempt to angle those pews so that they are more in line with the sanctuary.  I sometimes call St. Paul's the sideways parish.
 
The Carmelite Chapel at the Northshore Mall once featured partitions that slid along tracks in the ceiling but they had long been disused.  A tasteful but very minimal renovation saw the instillation of new ceiling panels without tracks and a pink curtain behind the altar to replace an unattractive green one.  Other than that, the chapel still retained much of its original look.  In 2010, a more extensive renovation took place which saw an entire section of pews removed so the altar could be extended farther out.  The pink curtain was removed and replaced with a wood facade that held two artificially lit stained glass windows from the closed Our Lady of the Assumption Church in Chelsea.  To top it all off, large rectangles of soundproofing hung from the ceiling from chains.  Removing seats is one way to make a house of worship seem more crowded but during the reduced capacity of the Covid-19 lock down, I bet our priests wished they had those extra pews.
 
I thought St. Mary of the Annunciation of Danvers was a nice-looking church yet when Fr. Michael Doyle was installed as pastor, talk of making the parish more “liturgically appropriate” began.  Controversy erupted when plans were made to demolish a neighboring funeral home for extra parking.  When all was said and done, the historic house was gone and the church's interior was completely done over but the renovations seemed gaudy to me.  Instead of adopting a less-is-more approach, the parish went overboard trying to make everything so fancy.  Not long afterwards, Fr. Doyle complained in the church bulletin of dwindling collections and the need for parishioners to give more.
 
The interior of St. Mary Star of the Sea in Beverly was already beautiful but in the early 2000s, our pastor decided to have it fully repainted.  The parish had just paid off a considerable amount of debt thanks to a one-time land deal with a real estate developer.  Talk of boiler repairs, snow removal costs, the possible installation of a sprinkler system and about a hundred other expenses made me wonder if it was really a good time to spend money on such a superficial thing?  After a change in leadership a few years later, our collections no longer met the parish's weekly needs.

And this highlights a very good point.  Priests who place a great deal of importance on exterior changes need to realize they get very little bang for their buck when it comes to improving the spiritual health of their parishes.  In this blog's second entry, I described the disastrous renovation of St. John the Evangelist in Beverly.  Despite “improvements” that were at times painful to look at, my mother, brother and I continued to attend Mass there.  It wasn't the horrible decor that drove us away from the parish.  Rather, it was the realization that our souls were no longer being fed.  Sadly, this is why we left St. Mary's too.  Perhaps pastors need to do a better job building loving and caring communities within the walls of their churches rather than wasting so much time debating what color paint those walls should have.

Now This Is A Church

Saint Mary Star of the Sea in Beverly, MA

The thought of leaving the only parish you've ever know can be unthinkable for some Catholics.  In fact, the sudden closure of several churches within the Boston Archdiocese several years ago caused much discord and upheaval.  If your spiritual needs are not being met, however, changing parishes can be quite easy.  During my childhood at St. John the Evangelist in Beverly, I just assumed our great priests would always be around but by my early teens, they were no longer there due to a series of transfers and the death of our pastor.  At a time when I was seeking closeness with my faith, the new priests assigned to our parish seemed distant and cold.  Their sermons just didn't do it for my family and soon my older brother and I were making up nicknames for them like Fr. Forgetful and Fr. Boring.  With the departure of our interim pastor, we were assigned Fr. George Butera.  He seemed friendly enough but was a bit quirky and after a while my mother came to the realization that he was always asking his parishioners for money.  This was a real sore spot for us because the church's interior had already undergone a recent and unnecessary renovation.

After sticking it out for a few years, my mother wanted something more so on a random Sunday in late 1992, she decided we would give Saint Mary Star of the Sea in downtown Beverly a try.  It was a large traditional looking church (circa 1908) made out of red brick with a steeple that could be seen for miles.  My first time inside had actually taken place many years before when my mother introduced my brother and me to the Holy Thursday tradition of visiting seven different churches in one evening.  When we entered St. Mary's again and took our place amongst the parishioners, the only thing I had remembered about the building from that initial visit was the high ceiling covered in ornate woodwork.  My brother admired the architecture and remarked, "Now this is a church."  I was struck by the large and diverse congregation which seemed to include a good amount of young people.  I guess we get so attached to our parishes, it almost felt like I was a spy trying to blend in with the crowd or at the very least, a stranger who had been invited to a friend of a friend's party.  The teen girl who sang during the Mass was very talented and my brother thought she was cute too.  The priest, who was nearing the end of his assignment here, gave a very upbeat sermon which only added to the positive energy we found at St. Mary Star of the Sea.

After Mass, we decided right then and there to make this church our new spiritual home.  The beautiful architecture was a plus and despite my brother's remark, it was a combination of many things that drew us to this place.  You just got a sense that the congregation was dedicated in its faith and had worked hard to build a wonderful community that was a reflection of God's love.  As my mother, brother and I returned week after week, we didn't feel like strangers anymore.  The pastor at the time was Fr. Richard Johnson.  He seemed to be a likable grandfatherly figure with a positive attitude that often shone through in his sermons.  There was also Fr. Richard Mehm who was extremely conservative in his beliefs and took his faith very seriously.  You could always count on his sermons to tackle the hot button issues head on without apology.  New to St. Mary's in 1990 was the fairly young and somewhat jocular Fr. Richard Beaulieu who had belonged to this parish as a child.  He was more liberal in his outlook and wasn't afraid to call out the hypocrisy of conservatives which of course upset some parishioners.  I wondered if he and Fr. Mehm often butted heads behind closed rectory doors.  This was all so very refreshing to me because at the very least, these priests had something to say and their sermons usually gave you something to think about which had not been the case with the church we left behind.

A regular sight at one of the morning Masses was a little boy who liked to shake hands so much, he left his pew and went up and down the isles in order to reach as many people as possible.  I marveled at that kind of innocence and it reminded me of how I saw the world during my early childhood at St. John's.  How cynical it was for me to wonder when he would stop doing that.

My initial experiences with St. Mary Star of the Sea were uplifting but I wanted so much more from my faith and this church.  Doubt and awkwardness had punctuated my high school years.  Would this house of worship provide a nurturing environment to help me find my place in the world?

Something More Than Coffee And Donuts

It's amazing how drastically your view of something can change over the years.  Looking back to when I was a small child, I loved the elderly parishioners at St. John the Evangelist.  It didn't matter how wrinkled or gray they were.  I thought these people had a grandfatherly or grandmotherly aura about them and some even radiated a form of charisma that children were inexplicably drawn to.  One elderly usher liked wearing turtlenecks and tinted glasses with the church's standard issue red blazer and I thought he was just plain cool.  When it came time for everyone to shake hands, I tired to reach as many people as I could and loved it.  Young, old, male or female.  It didn't matter.  I really wanted to shake your hand.

As I got a bit older, this innocence waned.  I think young people bring to the table a passion that's genuine and pure but often it lacks a certain amount of tact that comes with age.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though.  During one altar boy training session, Fr. Kiley urged us to do our best because if we made the slightest mistake in our duties, he would hear about it at the end of Mass.  You see, there was a group of old ladies sitting in the front pews who critiqued our performance on the altar.  My immediately reaction was to ask Father why these parishioners were paying all this attention to us and not the Mass itself.  I saw a distasteful complacency in the front pew peanut gallery and wasn't afraid to say so.  Now my remark could have been put more diplomatically but at its heart was a concern some parishioners were missing the true meaning of the Mass.

When you think about the early years of St. John the Evangelist in the 1950s, it had to be about passion.  This group of people decided to be part of a new parish in a city that was already home to two Catholic churches.  For over a year, they met in the basement of a veterans post to worship but eventually this new parish built what was then a very modern complex that not only housed a church but a school and convent as well.  I'm guessing these people had to strongly believe in what they were doing and put their money, time and energy where their mouths were all in an effort to spread the Gospel, educate young minds and form a community of faith.

In the 1950s there seemed to be a spiritual confidence within the Church where bold and creative ideas emerged for propagating the faith like the establishment of chapels inside shopping malls in order to reach people in their new marketplaces.  During my time at St. John's some thirty years later, I just didn't see much of this remarkable passion.  As I was struggling with my faith, the old people around me seemed to be content, static and stale.  For many, going to church was simply part of a long-held Sunday morning routine where pews were "reserved" and a mere dollar in the collection plate was good enough even for the parishioners who could afford much more.  After Mass activities included gossiping over coffee and donuts but never trying to carry one's faith beyond the church doors.  These are not the things that build great parishes but many at St. John's were blind to just how stagnant the congregation was.  They were certainly blind to the struggles my friends and I faced as young Catholics.  A good number of my public school classmates attended CCD with me but very few of them actually went to Mass.  That number shrank even more after confirmation with some of my friends giving up on God altogether.  Had this parish offered us something more than coffee and donuts after Mass then perhaps this wouldn't have been the case.

I started to look around the church and wonder where all the young people were.  This question took on new meaning as I found myself developing attractions to the opposite sex with almost no girls my own age in sight.  A feeling of loneliness eventually crept in and I grew to resent the large elderly presence at St. John's because in many ways it represented a failure of my parish to stay relevant.  On a personal level, I so badly wanted to find fellowship and love with people my own age, seeing all the gray hair and wrinkled skin in the pews became tiresome.  Hearing the elderly constantly complain about death or aches and pains was downright depressing to this teenager but few things were worse than when an old lady would tell me how handsome I looked!  (Oh how I longed to hear that kind of compliment from a girl my own age.)

Sadly, much of my life in the Catholic Church has been marred by priests and laypeople who have never treated my concerns with a sense of urgency yet if parishes are to thrive, there needs to be a balance that encourages the best traits of ALL its parishioners.  While youth often brings recklessness and self-absorption, it also offers creativity and passion and these gifts can be the perfect compliment to the wisdom and patience that comes with age.  Without a serious commitment to its young adults, congregations stagnate in a climate of indifference and narrow-mindedness until they wither away.

They Put Hot Rod Flames In My Church!

St. John the Evangelist Church and School

My first spiritual home in the Catholic Church was St. John the Evangelist in Beverly, MA during the 1970s and 80s.  It was a neighborhood parish located far from the downtown in a box-like building attached to a Catholic elementary school complex all of which was constructed during the late 1950s.  In fact, the church itself should have been the school's gymnasium but original plans for a separate house of worship on the complex's grounds had been scrapped.  My older brother went to school here for a couple of years but my only experiences with the building's classrooms were the occasional craft fair and CCD (a.k.a. Sunday school).  I found it to be a fascinating place with "secret" rooms along dark hallways, a fallout shelter in the basement cafeteria and a set of locked doors at the top of the main staircase that supposedly led to an abandoned convent.

Since my father was raised Orthodox, he rarely accompanied us to church but his absence never bothered us or seemed out of place.  As a small child, I didn't have much of an understanding of the Mass.  You sat in a pew and kept yourself entertained while the boring grown-ups yammered on.  I loved placing money in the basket and looked forward to the part where everyone shook hands.  When people went up to get communion I knew Mass would soon be over but wondered what the host tasted like.  Back then, going to Church was just something you had to sit through but you never questioned going.  It was part of the Sunday morning routine and after Mass my mother might get a box of Munchkins at Dunkin' Donuts.

Over the years I had some very thoughtful CCD teachers and they helped me gain a better understanding of my faith.  Soon I was joining in on all those verses the grown-ups had yammered on about.  Following in the footsteps of my brother, I eventually became an altar boy.  While some of St. John's priests faded into the haze of distant memories, a few were unforgettable.  Our longtime pastor was the sometimes soft-spoken and sometimes gruff, Fr. George Everard.  He could get so worked up during passionate sermons it wasn't uncommon for him to thump the pulpit.  Fr. John Kiley was a master at playing the organ and often added his own intricate embellishments to the music.  He was also in charge of training the altar boys and treated us to an annual trip to Canobie Lake Park.  These were truly innocent times and we had such a high regard for our priests, they almost seemed otherworldly.

As my teenage years approached, doubt started to creep in.  It's only natural to ask the big questions:  Why do bad things happen to innocent people?  Is God really out there?  Where is my place in the world?  At a time when I needed consistency, guidance and fellowship there wasn't much at St. John's geared toward helping young people find their way.  I started to look at the aging population of our parish and was troubled by their overwhelming numbers.  To make matters worse, Fr. Kiley got transferred to a different parish in 1987 and Fr. Everard passed away the following year.  Their replacements left much to be desired.  One priest was so elderly and forgetful, his sermons just rambled on and on.  Our new pastor was very aloof and I no longer put these priests on the same pedestal as their predecessors.  This wasn't the only unwelcome change at St. John's, however.

For a box that was supposed to be a gym, the Church building itself had always been nicely decorated but for some reason it was decided that an extensive cosmetic renovation was needed.  A fundraising campaign was launched and before long workmen were tearing up beautiful woodwork and subdued purple draperies.  What we got after the renovation boggled the mind.  The wall behind the altar was painted in a sloppy crosshatching that looked like it was done by the 5th grade art class.  The sanctuary was now a semi-circle with a prominent raised section emerging from the ceiling.  On it they painted what was supposed to be the burning bush but the depiction was barely noticeable and resembled tumbleweed instead.  Taking up most of the space on this surface were several plumes of fire that were awful looking.  My brother said they resembled the flames you'd see painted on a hot rod.  After all the hype, our once beautiful church was laughable.

This was my first introduction to a twisted logic that seems to pervade the Catholic Church.  Instead of focusing on the things that really matter like fellowship, evangelization, or helping the poor, people convince themselves that painting a wall or replacing light fixtures will strengthen a parish.  I would argue these costly renovations ultimately do very little to attract people to the Catholic Church.  What I saw on display at St. John's was a complete waste of time.  Rather than an expression of God's love, it seemed to reflect someone's ambition.  The Bible says to give anonymously yet so often when these renovations occur, a commemorative plaque is installed in a prominent place so everyone can see all the donors' names.

If I suffered from a little bit of doubt a few years ago, it was now magnified many times over as a result of these disappointing changes.  Our church saw yet another new pastor but his most defining trait was constantly asking his parishioners for more money.  There was always some pet project that needed funding but very little was done to increase our faith.  My family was so fed up we eventually decided to give that big church downtown a try and it quickly became our new spiritual home.  I haven't set foot in St. John's since but a recent look at their website revealed those terrible renovations have been painted over with more subdued colors and accents in purple.  Seems like the church already had that a long time ago.