FRIDAY POTPOURRI: THE HISTORY OF ST. SEBASTIAN PARISH: PART I INSTALLMENT II

Here is the second installment.  If you have any corrections/additions, I would be most grateful. 

Due to the construction of the Ohio Erie Canal which was completed in the early 1830s, Akron became a boom town growing by leaps and bounds.  As the city of Akron grew, so did the number of Catholics and St. Vincent, the mother church of Akron, gave birth to a number of daughter parishes mostly to its east and south.  St. Bernard parish was the first in a line of parishes.  It was organized in 1861.  At their first meeting they raised $2.75.  So a request for a donation was made to King Louis of Bavaria since most of those in the new parish were from his nation.  He responded with a gift of $500 and from there the history of that parish took off.

St. Mary Parish was founded next.  It began its existence as a mission parish of St. Vincent in 1887 by The Rev. Dr. T. F. Mahar.

That same year the County of Summit constructed an infirmary near the intersection of West Exchange and Rose Boulevard, currently the heart of St. Sebastian Parish.  This area was largely un-peopled.  Though the city of Akron was considered a bustling city, what would later be the St. Sebastian area was still far out in the country.  

The infirmary was a place for people with no means, family or friends.  The sick, the elderly, the abandoned, those addicted to alcohol and the like found a home at the infirmary.  Not that life was easy.  It was also a large working farm and those who lived there had to work hard.  Death was a regular visitor and so the infirmary had its own potter’s field.  In the area where Schneider Park is now located (one block east of the current church) there are reports that the city asked contractors to be on the lookout for human remains when doing work on the park as late as September 9^th, 2009.  Though there was no report of having found anything (the cemetery was presumably removed at county expense between  the years 1912 and 1916) if one looks at arial images of the park, green rectangles the size of graves in perfect rows can be seen in the northwest section of the park.

In the summer of 2017, the city of Akron and the University of Akron teamed up to investigate the possibility that graves were still present in the park.  For two weeks, university students researched, examined, and mapped the area.  In their early estimations, they surmised that there may be somewhere between 200 and 500 graves still in the park.  They found evidence of an old “cemetery trail” and of an old care taker’s shed.  It is also thought that the grave area may be larger than originally suspected.  All this evidence coincides with stories that Ralph Witt, who went to St. Sebastian Parish School when it opened, told.  He spoke of walking though the park on his way to school and he and his friends would occasionally find a bone sticking up through the ground.

When the workers were asked if this project would include using imaging to see if the green rectangles still contained human remains (as opposed to really good back fill that just produced good patches of grass) the workers responded that the ground had too much clay in it to make taking such images possible.  Eventually someone will have to take shovel to dirt to make absolutely certain.

On a similar note, according to R. J. Brownfield there is a small hill in Hardesty Park, a park located a few blocks north and west of the parish.  This is reported to be an Indian burial mound.  

The information on Schneider Park is subject to change and soon!  There is a town hall meeting coming up at which they will report their findings.  There is also the possibility that they will return to do more work after discovering that the scope of the project was larger than originally anticipated.  

FRIDAY POTPOURRI: ITE MISSA EST

This coming weekend Bishop Lennon will be arriving to Akron to have the final parish Mass at Saint Mary on South Main Street in Akron. One hates to see any parish close for any reason but such things happen. This one is particularly sad because the building is, IMHO, one of the most architecturally significant buildings in the diocese. Unfortunately the Catholic neighborhood around it has shrunk to a considerable extent and so this is the result. I hope that those of you who could were able to stop by and see the church before it closed (or will see it this weekend.) Interestingly enough the school will remain open. (There is a large nin-Catholic community that it serves.)

Previously on A.A. we had a tour of the exterior of the building, a limited tour of the interior, and had a trip of the bell tower. Today there is one more tour to be taken: Through the tunnels underneath the parish buildings!

Fr. B. was kind enough to take some time out of his busy schedule give Fr. Pf. and me a little trip through these seldom seen places. I remember once the 8th grade boys at my first assignment wanting to see what the basement of the church looked like. It was small, neat, and largely empty and they were deeply disappointed. They would not have been at Saint Mary!

Opening the door in the basement of the school we entered a tunnel. I could easily stand in it (I don’t know if you could tell from this first picture) and it led us to the large room underneath the plaza between the church and school.

This picture does not do this room justice. It once housed giant boilers and coal bins but is now replaced with a much more efficient heating system that takes up a fraction of the space. The room is quite large and very high. It could be a small ball room except that it is a basement! Two new, large, cement pillars were erected in the middle of it to shore up the plaza above.

We next passed underneath the church. You can get an idea of the size of the tunnels from seeing Fr. Pf and Fr. B ahead of me turning on the lights.

The wall in the background is actually a large semi-circle. It follows the shape of the apse. The pillar is there to help support the great weight of the high altar.

These tunnels wind around under the nave of the church. A few years ago a University of Akron cinema student used these tunnels in a movie about the seven deadly sins. Apparently this was hell. Who knew that hell had incandescent light bulbs?

These are the cold air returns. If you look above you can see what appears to be coffee cans handing down from the ceiling. If you look up you can see this grate, which would be in the floor or the nave, and see into the church. Here you can get a glimpse of a stained glass window in the clerestory from the basement. Legend has it that once a lady dropped a particularly valuable ring down one of these vents and it was never found. People have searched for it to this very day (I admit, I kept an eye out.) Determined persons with metal detectors have made the rounds and came away with rings and other interesting objects that have fallen through the grates over the years but the ring was never found.

I found a marble.

FRIDAY POTPOURRI: WHILE IT LASTS!

As you may be aware, Saint Mary on South Main in Akron is slated to close this summer - a victim of "progress." It's once thriving neighborhood has been divided up over the years by highways and the expansion of industry and Catholics, as they are wont to do, have moved out to other locations.

In my opinion this church building is the finest piece of architecture in the diocese both for its authenticity and its integrity. I wish a lot of things - and the world would be a much different place if everyone followed my every whim, but I wish we could do something with this building so that it might be preserved as a gem of Catholic architecture in this diocese. But greater things than this have been lost and guess what - people are still saved and the Church lives on.

That being said - if someone would give me several million dollars I promise to buy it, fix it up, and use it as - I don't know - a private shrine, a venue for concerts - anything . . .

I took my cousin to visit two weeks ago. These pictures were taken that day. Next week there will be pictures of the interior and my climb up the bell tower.

If you get the chance, please do yourself a favor and visit the Church before June. There is something so pleasing about the proportions and lines of this building. According to the pastor who has been so kind about my visits, there have been many artists and architects stopping buy to study, make sketches, take pictures, and such.

Here are a couple of pictures that I hope explain why.

Saint Mary, 750 South Main Street, Akron, OH 44311

FEMINISM - RISING FROM THE ASHES

fem'i-nism, 1 fem'i-nizm; 2 fem'i-nism, n. 1.

Beyond that I do not feel confident to write. Just as we watch the ground break open between factions within the Anglican Church threatening to cause the two movements to part company and go in their respective directions, so does it seem that there will be inevitable breaks in the common ground in feminism.

A woman was telling me of a conversation that she was having with her grandmother earlier this week (if you are reading this, I hope this is a fair reporting of that conversation) in which she stated her rejection of the modern feminist movement. The grandmother was aghast and emphasized how much life was better for women and indeed people in general now because of the work of the feminist movement. But that was countered with the notion that the feminist movement of today bears little resemblance to the movement of her grandmother's day which also focused on and protected the family.

Indeed there has been a shift. For example, consider what an early pioneer of the feminist movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, had to say about abortion, "When you consider that women have been treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit." Compare that to NOW's (the National Organization of Women) statement. "NOW affirms that reproductive rights are issues of life and death for women, not mere matters of choice. NOW fully supports access to safe and legal abortion, to effective birth control and emergency contraception, to reproductive health services and education for all women. We oppose attempts to restrict these rights through legislation, regulation or Constitutional amendment."

So where does that leave the faithful Catholic who also believes in the advocacy of the political and socioeconomic equality of men and women, the hallmark of the feminist movement? It causes a deepening abyss within feminism leaving many to redefine for themselves what feminism is. Whatever this new definition is, it will grow out of the ashes that we wear today. It begins, to borrow from Sheldon Vanauken, with the realization that this God who made the universe came to live in the world and was killed by the world and the proof of this is His resurrection. And that if this is true, this is simply the only really important truth. For all other supposed truths will come to an end. This one lasts for eternity. And we need to conform our lives to it. In the end what is truly good about feminism will reflect what is good about faith and the meaning of the human person in relation to and relationship with God.

I still will not pretend to know how to finish the above dictionary entry, but Colleen Caroll Cambell is willing to start the ball rolling. She is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a former White House speechwriter, and author of The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy. (Perhaps next time she could get Dawn Eden to help her with a snazzier title.) She has an international television talk show, "Faith and Culture," on EWTN, writes for a number of publications and speaks to audiences across the Unites States.

This Sunday, February 25th, she will be speaking at St. Mary Church in Hudson at 7:15 on The New Feminism: An Authentic Catholic Vision of Woman. I hope to get there myself if parish duties permit. Perhaps a tectonic shift is taking place and instead of feeling left apart, here will be discovered a new place to stand with feminism.