ARTICLES

Like Hell It's God's Will

The Final Chapter in St. Brigid's Profanation

BY BARTHOLOMEW JAMES

After one last face-to-face confrontation between a small group of her parishioners and officials of the archdiocese, a stoic San Francisco church that withstood the great earthquakes of both 1906 and 1989 has begun its final transition to a profane future. The late October showdown featured police, building inspectors, and high emotions which were generated when, shortly after the sale of St. Brigid's Church to the Academy of Art University was completed, archdiocesan staff attempted to remove the Stations of the Cross and other property from the city landmark. Parishioners from the Committee to Save St. Brigid formed a human chain, blocking access to the property and briefly delaying the inevitable. Several days later, the property was removed without further incident, and the deconsecrated site now awaits a $7 million restoration.

When the upgrades and seismic retrofitting are complete, the 141-year-old-church will be used by the university for community events, and the gym in the church basement will be utilized by art students who take classes at another university facility several blocks away, according to university executive vice president of public relations Sally Huntting. In the interim, the building is expected to be designated as an official city landmark by the San Francisco board of supervisors and the city's mayor. The landmark status will mean that the Richardsonian Romanesque architecture of the structure, including stained glass windows from Harry Clarke Studios in Dublin, will be protected from modification or destruction.

The sale of St. Brigid's apparently ends an acrimonious 12-year battle between parishioners and the archdiocese under two archbishops. But those involved with the struggle to save the church lament that the city has lost far more than just a church for the faithful. They say that a major section of San Francisco is now left with a void where once stood a dramatic, evangelizing beacon of permanence and tradition. At a time when the Vatican has called all Catholics to evangelization and a renewed missionary spirit, the city has lost a lodestar of the faith important to fulfilling that mission.

St. Brigid's sits majestically at the intersection of Van Ness and Broadway, acting as a cultural and architectural anchor at the convergence of the Marina, Pacific Heights and Russian Hill Neighborhoods -- "a central place in the city's transportation, residential and commercial milieu," according to two board of supervisors resolutions, one of which initiated the landmark-designation process earlier this year. Seven months after the great earthquake and fire of 1906, the church reopened and "served the community as a refuge and place of solace in one of the city's most daunting periods." In 1995, the building was determined eligible for the National Register of Historic Places because it is considered a perfectly preserved example of Richardsonian Romanesque architecture, is an example of unique methods of construction for having used San Francisco curbstones and crossing stones in the construction of its façade, and because of its importance to the city's Irish community -- associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the patterns of San Francisco history. It is difficult adequately to describe with words the intricate beauty of the church. The Committee to Save St. Brigid has a website with photos and a detailed chronology of the church's history at www.st-brigid.org.

The movement to save St. Brigid's began in 1993, shortly after the San Francisco archdiocese announced it would close a total of 13 parishes, including St. Brigid's. The archdiocese said it needed to raise money for church seismic work after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and cut costs. The archdiocesan plan, which amounted to closing one out of every four of San Francisco's 53 parishes, was devised by a 13-member church commission. The commission issued a 46-page report, "Toward the Third Millennium -- A Pastoral Plan for the Archdiocese of San Francisco," which, among other things, cited declining church attendance and changing demographics as the rationalization for its recommendation to close the parishes. The commission proposed doubling Mass attendance by the year 2005 by making churches friendlier, livelier, and more attractive to young people and couples with children.

As the faithful learned from parish priests and the media of the plan to close churches, many parishioners were dumbfounded. Robert Bryan was a parishioner at St. Brigid's when the church pastor, Father Kirby Hanson, made the closure announcement at Sunday Mass. "He said it was God's will," recalled Bryan. "And I remember some old people sitting around me, and these are lifelong Catholics, saying things like, 'like hell it's God's will.' That's the way people reacted," he said.

Bryan is an internationally recognized attorney specializing in death-penalty litigation. He has debated and lectured on the death penalty and human rights at universities in the United States and Europe and is a periodic legal commentator for the ABC television affiliate in San Francisco. Bryan led the Committee to Save St. Brigid for over ten years and recalled that the archdiocese seemed surprised at the lay Catholic uprising. "They thought everybody would just roll over and accept the decision of closure; they did not expect the parishioners to organize and fight this thing. They were so out of touch with people, not just at St. Brigid's, but everywhere, they didn't anticipate that," he explained.

The archdiocese may have been out of touch with the sentiments of its own priests: 41 of them signed a petition asking Archbishop John Quinn to reconsider the parish closures. Twenty of those priests later withdrew their names after being challenged by the archbishop, who told the San Francisco Chronicle that the priest petition was "clearly calculated to be a media action, rather than a sincere effort to dialogue with me." (Whether the archbishop's statement was true or not, the plan generated over 150 news articles by virtually every major and minor secular newspaper in the Bay Area, and local, regional and national Catholic publications like the National Catholic Reporter and the Long Island Catholic. A list of the articles is on the committee's website).

One priest who didn't withdraw from the fight, and paid a price for it, was Father Cyril O'Sullivan, a priest at St. Brigid's. After a Sunday sermon, O' Sullivan took out a white towel and draped it over the lectern and said, "we will not throw in the towel," recalled Bryan. "And that became the symbol of the fight to keep St. Brigid's open, where people would actually demonstrate with white towels around their necks or draped over their shoulders. In other words, like a prize fighter -- 'we're not throwing in the towel, we're not giving up,'" said Bryan. Shortly after that, the archdiocese transferred O'Sullivan to a Marin County parish. "He was sent to Marin County with orders that he could have no contact with any of us because he was sowing dissension," said Bryan. Bill Mitchell, a spokesman for the archdiocese at that time, confirmed to the San Francisco Chronicle the reason for the transfer. "Father Cyril O'Sullivan has had some personal difficulties accepting Archbishop Quinn's decision to close St. Brigid's. One of the responsibilities of a pastor is to gently guide people to their new place of worship," he said.

Unlike some of the other churches slated for closure, St. Brigid's was a viable, financially stable parish, according to Bryan. Bryan estimates that the church had over 1,500 active parishioners, about $750,000 in the church bank account, and represented positive cash flow for the archdiocese. "In the archdiocese annual appeal, we were one of the highest contributors in the entirety of San Francisco. The diocese did not support St. Brigid's, St. Brigid's strongly supported the diocese financially," he said. The parish told Archbishop Quinn that it would pay the cost of seismic retrofitting for the church. "He said, 'I recognize that you can raise the money, but we've already made our decision, and we will not change it,'" recalled Bryan. "When he rejected that offer, the leadership's credibility went down the drain, in my opinion. I knew the reasons they were giving were not real."

The church was closed in July 1994 and has been unoccupied ever since. Bryan is convinced that the archdiocese intended to sell the property to raise money to cover clergy sexual misconduct claims and other financial problems. In 1995, a secret church report detailing the value of 25 church properties was leaked to the press. St. Brigid's was far and away the most valuable property on the list because of its potential to be converted to high density housing. In 2003, the property was sold to a developer who intended to tear down the church and build condominiums, but the escrow fellthrough because the campaign to designate the church as a landmark at the state or local level was pending.

"We actually prevented the church from being bulldozed, and I am very proud of that," Bryan said. But when he heard that the church had been resold to the university, he was appalled. "The people of Christ, the people of God have behaved in a way that I think is just outrageous. It hasn't been good for the Catholic Church, they've lost a lot of support from a lot of people far beyond St. Brigid's over the way they've mishandled this," he said. Bryan is particularly distraught that the church is now lost as an anchor for evangeliza tion in a neighborhood ideally suited to that purpose. "There are a lot of people who live here permanently, like myself, but there is also a community of young people who are executives, lawyers, doctors, and so forth. They live in the community a few years and then they get married and move to the suburbs or wherever. Once St. Brigid's was closed, there was no open door for them from any Catholic community in the area," he said.

University of Notre Dame School of Architecture associate professor and architect Duncan Stroik is a national authority on sacred architecture. Stroik points out that churches like St. Brigid's act as a source of evangelization for several reasons. The permanence of a church "evangelizes people in showing them stability, showing them solidity, dependability -- that this is a thing you can depend on, you can rely on," he explained. "And to some extent, there's a sense of perma nence in being unchanging, that there are truths, there are beliefs, there are images, there are dogmas that are unchanging," he said. In addition, a church can convey transcendence. "Some churches for some people can be so transcendent that the people feel lifted up, they feel transcended themselves," he said. "That in walking into this tall building with mosaics or gold or images of saints and angels they feel in a certain way that they're being lifted up a little bit. Maybe not to heaven, but somewhere in between," he said.

Beauty is a factor as well, according to Stroik. "Beauty evangelizes by showing us beautiful things, which give us harmony and peace; beauty gives us a sense that there's an ultimate beauty that it's trying to be a dim reflection of. Like Paul says, 'we see dimly now, but later we will see face-to-face,'" Stroik explained. "So in a certain way, those are all things that maybe are more the natural evangelism or the natural law; even the architecture is used to express the natural evangelism," he said.

Archdiocesan spokesman Maurice Healy downplayed the significance of the secularization of St. Brigid's and refused even to concede that the church is beautiful or architecturally significant. "There are different opinions. Some people like it, and some people don't," he said. He was reluctant to talk about the role of a church like St. Brigid's in the Vatican's call for missionary work and evangelization. He seemed annoyed when I brought up the subject and interrupted with his response before I had finished the question. "You don't need a church on a corner to do that," he said. And when I asked what he thought of Stroik's analysis -- that classic, old churches, with their tradition, permanence, and beauty can be a source for evangelization -- Healy was equally abrupt.

"He's got an opinion," he said.

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