Abandoning a church, and its past

With the imminent closing and sale of the Church of the Immaculate Conception in the South End comes yet another stage in the slow and agonizing cultural suicide of the Catholic Church in Boston. Each church closing means an irreparable loss of history, continuity, and culture, whether it be the closing of a feisty and proud ethnic parish, like the South End's Holy Trinity, the closing of beloved neighborhood churches, often of some architectural distinction, such as Blessed Sacrament in Jamaica Plain, or the closing of a rare and important center of high culture and dedicated urban ministry like the Church of the Immaculate Conception.

Consecrated in 1858, the Immaculate has not, for a long time, been the church described so lovingly, if ironically, by writer and philosopher George Santayana in his autobiography "Persons and Places." And the last echo of the florid music for which it was once famous has long since died. But the building has stood for 150 years, secure in its proud and powerful memories. These memories include that of philanthropist Andrew Carney, whose will established the church on seemingly firm foundations, and whose benefaction was commemorated by the painting of St. Andrew at the high altar

The list of treasures already lost or damaged at the Immaculate makes for sickening reading -- the great crystal lamps that stood on either side of the high altar, the important canvasses by Costantino Brumidi, who also decorated the Capitol in Washington, the fine marble Stations of the Cross, the ecstatic stucco figures of Saints Ignatius and Francis Xavier -- and soon there will be nothing left.

In 19th-century Boston, the Immaculate was easily the most fashionable and elegant of Catholic churches, one whose director of music headed the organ department at the New England Conservatory, and whose string players eventually formed the core of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Every Sunday, preachers brought the faith to a public hungry for skilled oratory.

Every Sunday, carriages came in from the Back Bay and Beacon Hill filled with the devout or the merely curious, and a surprising number of those who came out of curiosity eventually joined the church. Of longer duration has been the devoted service provided at the Immaculate to neighboring hospitals, to the sick and the dying, the wretched and poor, the confused and outcast. These, too, have known the Immaculate as a sign of the love and care of both the Mother of God and Mother Church, and, not least, as a sign of the traditionally urban ministry of the society of Jesus.

For many of us, it is impossible to think of the Immaculate without remembering its former rector, the Rev. Francis Gilday, who holds pride of place among the men and women once associated with the church and now held in veneration. Gilday had the voice of a longshoreman, but he also had the gentleness and humor of a St. Philip Neri. Gilday never saw any reason the church's civilizing mission and her mission of charity could not go hand in hand. Furthermore, he loved the Immaculate so much that he raised, privately, all the funds that were needed to keep the building and its world-famous organ in good order and repair. Gilday once stated in a televised interview that the upkeep of the Immaculate had not cost the Jesuit Order one penny.

The Immaculate is the property of the Jesuit Order, and, it would appear, they may do with it what they wish. The government is not in the position of enforcing Roman canon law, and the wise provisions made in canon law for dealing with churches of undoubted historic and artistic importance are ignored with impunity by any religious authority bent on destroying its own heritage, but let the Jesuit fathers be clear about what they are doing: In abandoning the Immaculate, they abandon their own past, their own tradition of high culture and faithful service, a tradition that once made the very word "Jesuit" a kind of short hand for all that is opulent and splendid, a tradition that seemed to say that the best is none too good for God.

One by one the historic Catholic churches of the inner city collapse, and soon there will be little to do but lament with Jeremiah, Et egressus est a filia Sion omnis decor ejus -- and gone from daughter Sion is all her beauty.

Dennis Crowley is a freelance historian and a former parishioner of the Church of the Immaculate Conception.