Newspaper Page Text
Thursday, March 30, 2000 N©W§ The Southern Cross, Page 3
St. Patrick Church, Savannah, still remembered
iron work while slating was
done by M. Ganet and Sons of
the same city. E. W. Daley
saw to the plastering work.
The church was consecrat
ed with great ceremony by
Savannah Bishop William
Hinckley Gross, CSsR, on
March 17, 1882. Earlier, a
Rita H. DeLorme crowd packing the build-
ings of the Central of
Georgia Railroad across the street
had strained to see all that was tran
spiring on the speakers’ platform out
side the church. Inside the newly
consecrated church, members of
every Irish or Catholic society in
town, plus numerous clergy, religious
and laity as well as the mayor and
city officials, listened as Bishop H. P.
Northrop, Vicar Apostolic of North
Carolina, preached the first homily at
the new Saint Patrick’s. An elaborate
music program concluded this part of
the dedication, though afterwards “a
very elegant dinner was given Bishop
Gross and the visiting bishops and
clergymen by members of Saint
Patrick’s parish.”
The church was described in local
papers as promising to be “one of the
neatest and handsomest in the state,”
despite the fact that Saint Patrick’s
congregation was, for the most part,
made up of people of moderate cir
cumstances and the building of the
church had required great effort and
sacrifice. Over the years, various
improvements were made in the
church and, in 1936, a mere four
years before its battering by the hurri
cane of 1940, new and more appro
priate windows were installed in
Saint Patrick’s featuring images of
the Good Shepherd, Saint Patrick,
Saint Michael, Saint Joseph, Our
Lady of Lourdes, Saint Bridget, Saint
Theresa, Saint Anne and Saint Joan
of Arc. The windows were meant to
represent the French and Irish settlers
who had founded Catholicism in
Savannah, and several were dedicated
Saint Patrick's Church,
to the memory of parishioners.
During the 60-year span between
the church’s erection and demolition,
many outstanding clergy served Saint
Patrick’s. Besides Father Thomas I.
Sheehan, its pastor at the end of its
days, the roster of the church’s pas
tors included, Father Emmet Walsh,
later Bishop of Charleston, Father P.
H. McMahon, the previously men
tioned Father Prendergast, Fathers
Henry A. Schonhardt, J. S. McCarthy,
Thomas O’Hara, amd Richard
Brown, and Monsignor Joseph D.
Mitchell.
The old church did not “go gently”
into its “dark night” of oblivion. An
editorial in the Savannah Morning
News in late August, 1941, noted the
devotion of parishioners of Saint
Patrick’s to their church and the
many religious ceremonies, from
marriages and baptisms to funerals,
which had taken place inside its
beloved walls. Said the editorialist:
“On the seventeenth of March each
year, the feast of the patron saint of
the church, Savannahians gathered to
hold the religious service that marked
the celebration of Saint Patrick’s Day.
All of these things went into making
Savannah, before 1940
Saint Patrick’s the landmark which it
was in the souls and hearts of the
people. They can be forgiven a tear
as they see Saint Patrick’s being tom
down, making way for developments
in a new age, its people gone or wor
shiping in other and newer parishes.”
Some brick and other materials
salvaged from the razed church were
slated to be used in the constmction
of the new Blessed Sacrament
Church and for building a rectory for
the new church at Port Wentworth
(Our Lady of Lourdes). Parts of the
building were incorporated into
Cathedral and Sacred Heart parishes
as well as into Our Lady of Lourdes.
Father Thomas I. Sheehan became
the first pastor of the latter church.
In a reminiscence printed in 1941,
R. P. Daily, an historian who was the
first infant to be baptized in Saint
Patrick Church, bemoaned the loss of
his parish church and said “it will not
seem like Savannah to have the home
coming person step out of the Central
Depot and not see the familiar red
brick of Saint Patrick’s Church.”
Rita H. DeLorme is a volunteer
in the Diocesan Archives.
A ghost lives on the comer of
Liberty Street and Martin
Luther King, Jr., Boule
vard— a very formidable
ghost. No ordinary specter,
this one, but the spirit of a
durable set of buildings:
Saint Patrick Church and
Rectory. Photos of the old edi
fices taken when they were
in their prime attest to their
apparent strength of structure and
their pleasing design. Other photos,
snapped following Savannah’s major
hurricane of 1940, reveal a devastated
church with a pealed-back roof.
Established as a parish in 1862,
Saint Patrick’s served the overflow of
parishioners from the Cathedral of
Saint John the Baptist. Bishop
Augustine Verot had purchased a for
mer cotton warehouse sited on prop
erty on the comer of what was then
West Broad and Liberty Streets for
$11,500. With some modifications,
the church was dedicated in 1863
with a tablet on the premises attesting
to its purposes as follows: “Taken
from Mammon, dedicated to God
under the invocation of Saint
Patrick.” On hand beside Bishop
Verot at the dedication was a good
segment of the Irish and Catholic
community of Savannah.
The first pastor of Saint Patrick’s
was Father Charles Clement
Prendergast. His parish of some
2,000 members was drawn from
Catholics who lived chiefly in the
area west of Montgomery Street and
included the Yamacraw district.
Because the parish continued to grow,
the cornerstone of a larger and more
suitable church was laid on
November 16, 1879. E. F. Baldwin of
Baltimore, Maryland, provided the
plans and Dewitt Bmyn of Savannah
carried them out.
Contracts were let to Jacob Ward
for brickwork and John Nicholson for
gas fitting. James Geddes of
Baltimore provided the galvanized
Pope
(Continued from page 1)
he left a prayer written on a piece of paper in a
crevice between the stones.
The prayer was the same he recited earlier in the
month at the Vatican, asking God’s forgiveness for
Christians who have “caused these children of
yours to suffer.” The prayer was to be put on dis
play at the museum at Israel’s Holocaust memorial,
Yad Vashem.
Rabbi Michael Melchior, a member of the Israeli
Cabinet, welcomed the pope to the wall, saying the
pope’s visit confirmed the Catholic Church’s com
mitment to “end the era of hatred, humiliation and
persecution of the Jewish people.”
He also said the time had come for all sides to
“end the manipulation of the sanctity of Jerusalem
for political gain.”
The pope’s visit was plagued by Israelis and
Palestinians using speeches to the pope to trade
claims to the city as their own capital.
Just before visiting the Western Wall, the pope
met with the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Sheik
Ikrema Sabri, who asked the pope to promote the
end of “Israeli occupation of Jerusalem.”
The pope told Muslim leaders at the al-Aqsa
Mosque complex that the city was the common pat
rimony of Jews, Christians and Muslims.
Pope John Paul’s last appointment in Israel was
his celebration of Mass in the Church of the Holy
Sepulcher, which he described as “the most hal
lowed place on earth.”
Before the Mass, the pope kissed the rock mark
ing the place where Jesus’ dead body was anointed,
then, stooping down to enter a small cave, he
kissed the stone ledge of Jesus’ tomb. “The tomb is
empty,” the pope said in his March 26 homily. “For
almost 2,000 years the empty tomb has borne wit
ness to the victory of life over death.”
Another highlight for the pope was his March 25
Mass at Nazareth.“I give thanks to divine provi
dence for making it possible for me to celebrate the
feast of the Annunciation in this place, on this day,”
said the pope.
Visiting the lower level of the Basilica of the
Annunciation, he held onto the altar and knelt to
kiss the plaque that commemorates the place the
angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and “the Word was
made flesh.”
Nazareth has been the scene of tensions between
Christians and Muslims over Muslim plans to build
a mosque on a plot of land adjacent to the basilica,
but all was calm on the day of the pope’s visit to
Jesus’ hometown.
In next week’s issue...
ishop Boland’s “Accountability Report to the
People,” which will contain annual financial
information, will be included in the April 6 edition
of The Southern Cross.