
But today the cat was allowed to roam about freely. The rectory, which was nearly empty when I arrived filled with people. With our meeting finished, it was time to greet the world openly. We walked out of his suite into a dark hallway made gloomy by a wall that had been constructed to separate his room from offices that had slowly taken over the rest of the bedroom floor. A sign on the door in this wall read, “KEEP OUT! PRIEST’S SLEEPING QUARTERS!”
The remaining suites on this floor and the two guest rooms were offices containing busily working employees; the music director and her assistant, the Director of Religious Education and the liturgical coordinator. They greeted me warmly and showed me about the rooms.
The suites were very nice if not somewhat small. Each c
onsisted of a dorm sized sitting room with a fireplace and built in bookcases. The bedrooms themselves were even tinier, but as my dad would say, “All you do is sleep in there anyway.” Each suite also had a private bathroom decorated in a different color of Victrolite, an opaque pigmented glass manufactured by Pilkington Brothers in the United Kingdom. The floors had correspondingly matched tile floors of different designs. Despite the number of bathrooms in the house being more than there were on the whole block where I grew up, there were only two bathtubs, one for the pastor, and one for the live-ins. Everyone else did with showers. If truth be told, they probably did make better offices than bedrooms.

A half flight of stairs brought us to the landing of the west wing of the house which consisted of two large suites and some storage closets. Parish history tells us that this part of the building was a later addition built on to the house for the founding pastor’s sister who also acted as major duomo in her day. The quality of the construction is not quite what the rest of the house is, but it was very serviceable. The rooms lacked the fireplaces, built in shelving and tile work of the original house, but the rooms were larger and best of all: air-conditioned.
Ensconced in these rooms now were the business manager, the development director, and a couple of bookkeepers. The rooms were large enough to hold conferences and meetings and, on the weekends, the Sunday collection was counted on the large table in the development director’s offices. Prior to them becoming offices at least one pastor had lived in these rooms forsaking the pastor’s suite to the pastor emeritus, Monsignor Zwisler, who still lived in residence at the time of his retirement.

As we walked around, the rest of the house revealed a similar fate. On every floor there were former living spaces that had now been turned into working space. In the basement was the deacon’s office. It too may have been air conditioned but there was nothing else unbasementy about it. Large cement blocks made up his walls and pipes ran across the ceiling. Apparently a number of people made use of the shelving that ran across his walls making the room half storage, half deacon’s office.
On the main floor was the secretary’s office, the volunteer’s office, the pastoral assistant’s office which took up the entire live-in’s suite, the copy room, and pastor’s office which once served as the living room. It was all nice and efficient, close, and very communal. And there was no way I would be able to live like this.
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