Slow Revival Marigny Church Making Comeback Submitted By N.O.V.A. Times Picayune 04-26-1998 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ************************************************ Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church still bears signs of what used to be: a hopscotch grid painted on the schoolyard blacktop; dusty boxes of bingo cards tucked away on auditorium shelves. The Faubourg Marigny school closed a few years ago, and the weekly bingo games ended after legalized gambling came to New Orleans. But the church lives on. It's a shadow of what it was in the days before many people began flocking to the suburbs. But the congregation is reviving, albeit slowly, now that the Marigny and Bywater neighborhoods are attracting a new generation of young artists and urban homesteaders. "The church needs a lot of work," the Rev. Michael Roberson, the pastor, said as he looked around the building with its peeling paint. Recently a heavy tablet illustrating one of the Stations of the Cross fell off the wall near a confessional. But this building, designed by noted New Orleans architect Henry Howard, has seen worse, and it has survived. And today the parish will celebrate its 150th anniversary with a street party that will bring back parishioners who left the neighborhood years ago. Sts. Peter and Paul was born in 1848, a time when parishes were created specifically to serve the various ethnic groups that inhabited this port city, a major entry point for immigrants in the early 19th century. An enclave of Germans in the neighborhoods that formed below what is now the French Quarter had Holy Trinity, the church on St. Ferdinand Street that closed last year. French-speaking Catholics there attended Annunciation, in the 1200 block of Mandeville Street. And for the mostly poor Irish immigrants, there was Sts. Peter and Paul. "It's just incredible to read the accounts from that time," Roberson said. Many of the male parishioners worked on the wharves and factories that lined the Mississippi River in the 1800s. Often, priests would go to the riverfront to collect the men's paychecks to make sure money got to wives and children before it was frittered away on drink, he said. Sts. Peter and Paul was created after the Diocese of New Orleans dispatched an Irish- born priest, the Rev. Cornelius Moynihan, to organize the English-speaking Catholics of what was known then as the Third Municipality, now Faubourg Marigny and Bywater. That was in April 1848 and the parish considers that to be its birth date, although Moynihan was still working out of Annunciation church at the time. It wasn't until the next year that the parish was able to buy land at 725 Marigny St. to build a church. The parish was generally known as St. Peter's until 1860, when work began on the massive building at 2317 Burgundy St., and the parish became Sts. Peter and Paul. Moynihan and two of his successors, his nephew, the Rev. Jeremiah Moynihan, and the Rev. Bartholomew Kenny, are buried under the church's floor. They were the first in a string of Irish-born pastors, men with names like Flanagan and Hanrahan, who helped the parish grow. The church's two towers look more similar today than they did before time and the weather took their toll. In 1911, a 40-foot spire atop the taller tower burned after lightning struck it, and it was not replaced. In 1934, a brick belfry that brought the tower up to 125 feet had to be shortened to 100 feet to get rid of some of the weight that was making it sag. In 1915, a hurricane ripped the roof off the church. The main altar was condemned for a short time in the 1930s because the arch over it had been weakened by the leaning tower. But even more devastating for the parish has been the suburban flight that has hurt many congregations in the city's old neighborhoods. Average weekly attendance at Mass is about 350 today, said Roberson, who does not have an assistant pastor. According to parish records, that number was about 1,400 in 1960. The school closed in 1993, its enrollment down to about 150 children from a peak of more than 500. It was one of several Catholic school closings in the 7th and 8th wards in this decade, including Our Lady Star of the Sea and Epiphany. Other parishes in the area, including Holy Trinity and Annunciation, lost their schools long before. Then last year, Catholics had to face the trauma of closing Holy Trinity altogether. The last Mass brought about 400 people back to the church, a crowd more than six times the size of its dwindling congregation. Roberson hopes to bring old-timers back to Sts. Peter and Paul, too, but for a celebration, not a funeral. Today, Archbishop Francis Schulte will celebrate an anniversary Mass at 10:30 a.m. The street in front of the church will be blocked until 5 p.m. for a big party with food and live music, Roberson said. Former parishioners who have left the neighborhood have been invited. But there's at least one old-timer who never left. Laura Wallace has been living in the parish since 1921, when she was 4. She lives half a block from the church now, and it's her responsibility to lock up after Mass. Wallace, whose mother died when she was 2, was raised by two Irish aunts who attended Sts. Peter and Paul church. Wallace started school at Holy Trinity, however, because her aunts "didn't trust me to cross a paved street," she said. Burgundy was the only paved street in the area, so it had a lot of traffic. Eventually, Wallace started attending school at Sts. Peter and Paul, where she was confirmed. She graduated from the school in 1930. Wallace still remembers the pot-bellied stoves used to keep the classrooms warm and how boys and girls were taught in separate classes. She's talked to former classmates who plan to return for today's celebration. "They're very excited," she said. "We're all feeling that." Pascal Calogero Jr., chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court, is thinking about going back to his old church today, as well. "It's all good memories as far as I'm concerned," said Calogero, who was born in 1931 and lived in the neighborhood until the late 1950s. He was baptized at Sts. Peter and Paul, made his first Communion there and was confirmed there as well. Calogero attended the nearby Charles J. Colton public school on St. Claude Avenue. But he still remembers the catechism classes the parish offered for Catholic children who attended public schools and Sister Margaret Mary, the school principal who conducted them. Calogero, the son of an Italian-American father and a German-Irish-American mother, said the neighborhood had lost some of its Irish character by the time of his boyhood. But he remembers Sts. Peter and Paul as a very busy parish. "Right after the war, with all the men coming back, it was very, very active," he said. The parish's Holy Name Society could turn out "a couple hundred men and boys" for a meeting, he said. Calogero has fond memories of the Rev. Michael Hurley, assistant pastor during part of the 49 years that the Rev. Joseph Hanrahan was pastor. Hurley held volleyball games in the small schoolyard and "kids from all over downtown New Orleans would come to play," he said. Calogero is not the only public official or even the only jurist to come out of Sts. Peter and Paul. William P. "Cy" Hickey, a longtime New Orleans assessor, was a parishioner. So was Edward Douglas White, who was chief justice of the United States from 1910 until his death in 1921. Wallace said the closing of the school in 1993 left her with "a very unhappy feeling." But Roberson said kids soon will be laughing, yelling and playing in the classrooms and schoolyard again. The parish is refurbishing the school building to host the archdiocese's Summer Witness youth program. Meanwhile, he said, new interest in Faubourg Marigny and Bywater is helping the church's membership increase, "but not by leaps and bounds." Roberson describes his church as "a homey parish, a real family experience." It is the kind of place that many Catholics remember going to as children, with stained glass windows, an ornate altar, and statues of saints lining the walls. There's a choir loft that used to have a pipe organ, long since replaced by a small electric organ on the ground floor. Votive candles are everywhere. A mural painted on a half-dome behind the soaring altar bears an inscription in Latin, a language all but forgotten in the modern Catholic Church. "Behold the bread of angels," it says. "This," Roberson said, "is a different place than your more typical suburban parish."