On my desk, in the right hand corner, is a well-used copy of a paperback book. Someone gave it to me, although I have another copy at home, one of my dead father’s books.
The little book is a history of Notre Dame Church, printed in 1925, written in French, a language I speak better than I read, as did most of my French-Canadian ancestors, back there in 1925, when not being able to read was common.
I was baptized in Notre Dame Church, as was my father. My memere and pepere were married in that church, and my father attended Notre Dame School, and was an altar boy. He was in the 1938 first graduating class of Monsignor Prevost High School, located very near the old church.
The original church burned to the ground. My family was living in Kansas City, but the fire made the evening news. My father was not an emotional man, but his eyes were full of tears as he watched the 10 second news clip of Notre Dame burning.
They replaced the old Notre Dame with a new church that looked like an insurance office, like all new churches. Not long ago, Notre Dame merged with a nearby church and became St. Bernadette’s.
On the streets around the church is the old orphanage, the house of the Christian Brothers who taught here, the rectory, the convent, and a closed grade school.
Done
Done on Irving Street. Done on Thomas Street. Done on Earle Street. Done on County Street. Done in the buildings that housed the French funeral homes. Done in the corner stores, the places like Vaillancourt’s, where my father did business in French well into the 1960s, speaking to the women he called “Les dames Vaillancourt,” which means “The Vaillancourt ladies,” in English.
In the 1930s, the federal Works Progress Administration tried to keep artists from starving to death during the Great Depression. They hired writers to produce a series of state guides. In the section devoted to Fall River, the guide to Massachusetts noted that, after English, the language most often heard on the streets of Fall River was French.
Done. Done at St. Mathieu’s. Done at Ste. Anne’s. Done at St. Louis de France. Done at Dominican Academy. Done on Pleasant Street. Done on Arizona Street.
No matter how many lights blazed, or how many candles were lit, there was something dark about those old churches, dark laced with the smell of incense and the echoing sound of the door to the confessional closing, and the stares of the calm-eyed statues.
Immigrants built them as big as the mills where the boss couldn’t speak your language and called you names.
“Here we are!” those old churches said. “We are poor, but we have made this so we will have something of our own, something everyone can see.”
Done.
The little book I have says that when they dedicated the bells in the tower of the old Notre Dame, 15,000 people showed up for the celebration. Compare that to the vote total in Fall River’s last election.
And the little book is all I have, all that is left.
Oh, they’re still going to Mass at St. Bernadette’s, still driving or walking the narrow streets that lead to the church, but they’re worried about money.
We see it in bits and pieces, so we miss the whole, but the dismantling of the physical structure of the Catholic Church in Fall River is a huge story.
For a long time, the Church operated what was very nearly a parallel government. It provided health care, services to the poor, education, registration of births, marriages, and deaths, many of the things we now expect from government.
The parish churches were the bones of a living thing. Even now, the old Catholic churches, open or closed, are the biggest structures in a lot of neighborhoods, and usually the only really beautiful building in the neighborhood.
Will our monument be the free-standing plaza with a dollar store, a drug store, a laundromat, and a place to buy discount cigarettes? Even in the suburbs, where the people have more money than they do in Fall River, they do not, and can not, build anything like the huge and beautiful churches that even poor Fall River neighborhoods once took for granted. Will future generations guess what kind of people we were by looking at the ruins of a “fulfillment center,” or a marijuana “grow facility?”
I’ll keep the little French book. It shames me, and it comforts me as the churches come down all around me.