Salvation for a neighborhood icon in Manayunk

After Father Lawrence came to St. John’s last July, the task force, (which had met twice before Father Lawrence arrived), voted overwhelmingly to stay at St. John the Baptist and undertake its restoration. Last August, Father Lawrence announced that decision to the parish. It now became Father Lawrence’s responsibility to lead a congregation of modest size through a complex and expensive project. But more than that, it meant saving a beloved neighborhood icon.

To Lawrence, partial deconstruction did not feel like a viable option for the parish or the broader community. “That’s like saying if you have a Cezanne that’s costing you an arm and a leg to insure, why don’t you just get rid of it?” Lawrence said. “I think this is one of those structural pieces of art that’s important for at least the landscape of this community.”

With the decision to stay at St. John’s, the parish also started developing a pastoral plan in the hopes of stabilizing and strengthening both the building alongside the recently united parishes.

“I use the building as a metaphor,” Lawrence explained. “It’s a beautiful, old building. It can lift our minds and hearts to God very easily, but it’s broken and in need of repair. These communities that have come together, they are old communities. St. John’s is 1831. St Mary’s is 1849. I think St Josaphat’s is 1890s. In and of themselves there’s a beauty in this community, but there’s brokenness. It needs, I like this word, remediation.” He found the last word reaching for a set of engineering drawings on the rectory’s dining table.

The challenge facing St. John’s is to catalyze a far-reaching community response to restore the church, and through the project strengthen the parish itself. Father Lawrence and a newly formed friends group must motivate community members to raise funds, maintain support from Archdiocese officials for their plans, and manage a team of building professionals to prioritize repairs. This is the real work of preservation, aided in this case by a confluence of factors: the availability of expertise within the parish community and its extended network, the iconic nature of church architecture, and the good fortune that the building was still structurally sound.

As work has begun in 2015, the initial cost appears to be lower than expected, bringing the total estimate for near-term church repairs down from $3.6 million to closer to $1.7 million. Investigation of the compromised buttresses revealed total reconstruction was not necessary because the stone wall behind the masonry cladding was so strong. Instead, the church and its consultants opted to stabilize the failing sections of masonry cladding with metal rods and mortar, repairing flashing to break the damaging freeze-thaw cycle, and repointing the mortar joints.

The lower estimate of the project’s cost is thanks in part to retired contractors, such as Tony Canuso, volunteering their services as construction managers. Canuso, who founded Neshaminy Constructors, helped “find people with the same passion we have” to work on the church at a fair price. This professional-parish collaboration—along with the strategic repair work–helped bring a six-figure buttress repair down to the $50,000 range.  The hope is to do the same thing for repairing the bell tower. The plan is to tie its stone cladding back to the interior stone structure using Helifix anchors and repoint any areas of visible cracking.

Father Lawrence said he presented the parish’s reasons for staying at St. John the Baptist to the Archdiocese, and explained how they intended to pay for repairs. So far, the Archdiocese has been supportive.

“If a parish is able to care for multiple church buildings and maintain fiscal stability without jeopardizing ministerial outreach or continued presence in the community then it is encouraged to do so,” said the Archdiocese’s communications director Ken Gavin in an emailed statement. 

“I was baptized here, confirmed here, went to school here, got married here,” one parishioner told me on her way into the steep St. John’s churchyard, pink carnations in hand for her mother-in-law’s grave. Generations of Manayunk residents have stories like hers. There are also scores of living St. John’s school alumni, as well those who were connected to St. John’s once powerhouse Catholic Youth Organization. The Friends of St. John the Baptist hope that St. John’s wide network will work in their favor.

So far informal fundraising efforts have yielded $250,000 in cash, $100,000 more in pledges, and several other potential major gifts are possible, said Van Fossen, a parishioner whose background is in fundraising and development. Beyond these and parish contributions, the repair project may also to draw from a trust reserved for capital improvements, the result of earlier parish mergers.

“The building is a big draw,” said Van Fossen. So the Friends hope that Keely fans, building buffs, or philanthropists with an interest in history could also be moved to support the capital campaign.

“In the end we will be saved by beauty,” said Lawrence borrowing from Fyodor Dostoyevsky. “You take the beauty of the building with the beauty of the faith and the community. Those things can easily coalesce. I really think there’s a great potential here.”