Maine churches finding new life in secular service

LEWISTON – Easter Mass will no longer be celebrated at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church. The altar and tabernacle are gone and the pews, and the statue of the Virgin Mary soon will be removed.

The church, with stained-glass windows, arches and high ceiling, was the spiritual center for generations of Franco-Americans who lived, worked and worshipped in the Little Canada neighborhood.

The church was closed last year, but a Franco-American wants it transformed into a museum and a 475-seat performing arts center. “Once we’re gone no one’s going to care about the Francos. That’s why we want to preserve it,” said Lionel Guay, chairman of the board of directors of the Franco-American Heritage Center at St. Mary’s.

As populations shift, congregations shrink and maintenance costs rise across the region, more churches close:

. A Congregationalist church in Bath became the Chocolate Church arts center and gallery in the 1980s.

. The former St. Lawrence Congregationalist Church in Portland is being made into a 100-seat theater and community center.

. The city of Portland will begin accepting proposals soon for redevelopment of St. Dominic’s.

In many instances churches are becoming schools, office space and housing, said Tuomi Forrest, spokesman for Philadelphia-based Partners for Sacred Places, a national nonprofit group that promotes stewardship of religious properties.

Urban flight, in particular, has changed the Catholic landscape, David Twomey, property management director for the Roman Catholic Diocese in Portland, said. “People weren’t as mobile as they were today,” he said. “And they were all tightly living around a church. And now the Catholic community is more assimilated.”

In Portland, the congregation of St. Dominic’s aged and shrank as parishioners moved from the inner city to the suburbs. St. Dominic’s, the spiritual home of the local Irish-American community, closed in 1998 after 105 years. Longtime parishioner Barbara Busby recalled the tears that pooled in many eyes at the final Mass. “It was a loss, but I’ve lived long enough to know that things change. But I didn’t think this was one thing that would change,” she said.

The city bought the church in December, saying that the brick structure was too important to be allowed to deteriorate.

Across town, demographic changes also explain the St. Lawrence Arts and Community Center, which sits on Munjoy Hill like a forlorn castle with bits missing from the slate roof, boards covering some windows and the belfry empty. The church, built in 1897, closed as Protestant residents moved to outlying areas, Bill Millikin, executive director of the Friends of the St. Lawrence Church, said.

The group has spent about $600,000 and the building still needs much work, but the group prepares for the May 3 opening of the Acorn School for the Performing Arts production of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.” A stage and sheetrock have been put up in the old parish hall, but lights, electrical fixtures, fire doors, a wheelchair lift and painting remain unfinished. For now, the sanctuary serves as a storage room. Dust coats the curved pews, donated bottles and cans wait to be exchanged for cash at the redemption center, and a wall leans inward. Holes in the roof let in the cold and the pigeons that can be heard fluttering in the far corners.

In Lewiston, the number of parishioners in Little Canada had dwindled as the nearby mills closed, some of the tightly packed tenement buildings disappeared and the descendants of immigrants eventually moved away. By the time the last Mass was celebrated in June, about 240 families remained of what once were thousands.

For Gerard Dennison, treasurer of the Franco-American Heritage Center, the history of St. Mary’s is the history of his family. His great-grandparents were the first members of his clan to attend and were among the church’s original members. His father attended the parochial school and was the first baby baptized in the upper level of the church, which was built in 1927.

Dennison and the other board members are hoping to raise $3 million to repair the granite facade, convert the sanctuary into the performance center and the lower level into a museum and resource center. He said he can’t think of a better place to represent the stories of families like his.

“It was the social life, the spiritual life,” he said. “Basically all of our culture dating back to the 1860s, our past ancestry.”