PARISH BULLETIN
Now Thank We All Our God: Remembering a Visit to New England’s Oldest Catholic Church

Leo J. O’Donovan |  Fall 2009

If you stand up on the coast of Maine to proclaim the gospel story of Jesus walking on the waters (Mt 14: 22-33), you had better know something about the sea. Deacon Martin Fallon, a tall craggy man with a weathered face and a prophet’s voice, does indeed.

Likening the sea’s churning power to the welter and confusion of so much modern life, he described Jesus calling “Come” to Peter and then stretching out his hand to the frightened, sinking disciple. Just so, suggested the retired Air Force pilot who has spent twenty-five years in the diaconate, the Lord invites us at the most unexpected times to come to him—and reaches out “to bring us to the dry land we all seek.” At St. Patrick’s Church in Newcastle, Maine, it was the homily of someone who has long lived by the sea, delivered for a congregation of local residents who know the sea’s power and the land’s security but also for many visitors who come again and again to be reminded of both.

Before Mass began, two members of the congregation, anticipating Deacon Marty’s theme, had zealously invited people to participate in the parish’s program for the rite of Christian initiation of adults, nicely weaving the idea of Jesus’ invitation to come to him into a call to join those who would be participating in the process and there learn to say the simple word people at a distance often long to hear: “Come!”

Celebrated in the parish’s new, two-story-high, wooden church, designed and built by parish member George Hervochon with regular advice from beloved former pastor Father Ray Picard, the liturgy was marked by a simple solemnity. Nineteen-year-old Leticia van Vouren played the piano. Tom and Andrea Handel (each with an imposing ponytail) served as cantors. Some 350 congregants, the majority PFAs (Maine-speak for “people from away”), sang along vigorously. With local Lincoln Academy students as Mass servers in white albs, there was a dignified presentation of the gifts led by one of the servers with a processional cross. The lector was eloquent, as clear and insightful as one could hear in any cathedral, and the congregation approaching the altar for Communion, which at St. Patrick’s begins at the back of the church, could have been woven by John Nava as a procession of saints (he did the tapestries at Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles). It was a Mass like many another around the world that Sunday, but also entirely of Maine, whose soaring sky and stands of fir trees shone through the church’s clear glass windows.

This was a special year for St. Patrick’s, the bicentennial of its original 1808 church that is now, with the loss of Boston’s Franklin Street Church of 1803, the oldest Catholic Church in New England. (The new church was built in 2004 not to replace the old one but to complement it for today’s larger congregation, and the two are connected by a lovely, plain cloister walk.) The history of the parish began with two young men from County Wexford, Ireland, James Kavanagh and Matthew Cottrill, who emigrated to Boston at the ages of twenty-four and eighteen respectively and soon after journeyed north to Newcastle, where they opened a mill and shipyard.

In the summer of 1798, visiting the two men and their families, the French émigré priest Father John Cheverus, who later became the bishop of Boston and eventually cardinal archbishop of Bordeaux, celebrated the first Mass in the area. Later that year a small wooden chapel was built on Cottrill’s property. Within nine years the growing Catholic community decided to build “a good brick church,” which they completed in a year.

The old church is charming, with a square brick bell tower serving also as the entrance and set flush in front of the brick nave, eighty feet long and twenty-five feet wide, with five round-arch windows on each side. The architect, Nicholas Codd, gave his early-federal style building a thirty-foot-high, arched ceiling under a pitched roof. The unusual altar in the small sanctuary is in the form of a tomb and, older than the church itself, is believed to be the one at which Father Cheverus offered Mass. The original backless benches—the women sat on the Epistle-side and the men on the Gospel-side, as was customary at the time—were mercifully replaced by pews during a renovation in 1896. At that time, a wooden spire with a cross was added to the brick tower and the original plain glass windows were replaced by stained glass ones (most probably ordered from Sears & Roebuck in Bath). The parish is also proud of its Paul Revere bell, a gift of Cottrell in 1818 and still in use today. (It is one of ninety-three Revere bells in existence.)

The shortage of priests in Maine has led Bishop Richard Malone of Portland to form geographically-based “parish clusters,” and St. Patrick’s is now clustered with six other parishes between Brunswick and Newcastle. With Father Picard transferred to Yarmouth, Father Alfred Irving serves as the “Administrator of the Roman Catholic Community of Lincoln County.” But St. Patrick’s proudly continues to have a parish council and a wide range of activities supervised by committees on finance, buildings and grounds, faith formation for young people, church life for social activities (including the annual St. Patrick’s Day dinner, now held in Cheverus Hall beneath the new church), family life, and social justice and peace. Maine winters are harsh, and St. Patrick’s parishioners have been leaders in People to People, a voluntary clothing exchange. The Parish Center, a separate wooden building, is generously open for use by other community groups. And it’s just what you expect when the bulletin includes a note saying that “an eighteen-year-old young lady” who has had to live on her own and support herself needs additional funds to begin college—and receives just what she needs.

On a later Sunday in the summer, a happy turn in the weather allowed Mass to be celebrated again in the “Chapel in the Pines” that dates back to the mid-1960s and for ten years now has cherished Deacon Marty’s version of the San Damiano Cross of St. Francis of Assisi (another copy stands behind the altar in the new church). On the green benches that are brought out every summer, some 350 locals and visitors greeted each other cheerfully, sang heartily and applauded the visiting priest’s homily urging us to remember Jesus’ response to the entreaties of the Canaanite woman (Mt 15: 21-28) and welcome, not shun, the differences in our neighbors. Before the final blessing, young Amy Ford was brought to tears as the religious teachers in her Faith Formation program gathered around her with their students, thanked her for her recent years of service, and wished her well in new and enlarged responsibilities. “Now Thank We All Our God” seemed exactly the right closing hymn as we were sent off to live the word we had heard, with the nourishment of the Bread we had broken.

After celebrating its bicentennial year during a troubled time for our church, the parish of two-hundred-year-old St. Patrick’s remains a stirring example of gospel witness, through the vigor and vitality of its faithful people.

Father Leo J. O’Donovan, SJ, is president emeritus of Georgetown University and a former president of the Catholic Theological Society of America.