Focused on Incarnation

June 30th will come and go. 

And it'll be like we were never there.

~

At the turn of the 20th Century, gentleman farmers took their leave in the Northernmost confines of Philadelphia County.  Here, Whartons and Wilsons retreated from the bustle of the city to relax on their country estates.  It was a quiet life of leisure, removed from an increasingly cramped Center City.  However, amongst the rolling hills and tranquil fields, change was afoot. 

As the city spread northward, the wealthy gave way to the working class.   In 1908, the Whartons gifted their 23 acres to the city as a Christmas present.  Those 23 acres would become Fisher Park.  By 1925 many of the estates had been abandoned, as their owners took to the Main Line.  The village that remained, mostly inhabited by German immigrants, took on the name of the demolished Wilson estate -- Olney (for the non-Philadelphians of you, that's AHL-uhn-ee).

The immigrants took jobs at places like Heintz Manufacturing, which opened a factory in the neighborhood in 1921.  They opened businesses along 5th Street.  They built blocks upon blocks of row homes.  They went to movies at the Colney and the Rockland (the former of which had, upon  its 1925 opening, the largest seating capacity of any theatre in the world).  They built schools.  The new denizens of Olney were industrious.  They were close-knit.  And many of them were Catholic.

In April, 1900, seeing the northward growth, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia split off the Northern end of St. Veronica's parish, creating a new one -- St. Justin's -- Olney's first.  Based at 2nd and Tabor, the parish bought a parcel of land at 5th and Lindley the following year and renamed itself Incarnation of Our Lord.  The new community flourished. 

Again, Olney's one constant, change, visited.

With jobs plentiful, new streets and houses, thriving businesses and varied entertainment and recreational opportunities, Olney was one of the more desirable sections of the city in the first half of the 20th Century.  As the Germans established themselves and improved their circumstances, they moved beyond the menial, entry-level jobs, progressing into management or operating their own businesses.

Enter the Irish.

Still widely -- and in many cases openly -- discriminated against, the Irish would take the jobs no one else wanted.  With the paving of US Route 1, the Northeast Boulevard (which hadn't yet been renamed in honor of President Theodore Roosevelt), the road to the middle class was literally opened to the new wave of immigrants.  In Olney they found a better life, surrounded by fellow Catholics.

Olney started to become what it is to this day, a melting pot of cultures.  With the Irish came the Polish, the Italians, the Czechs.  And so started what also continues to this day: the clashing of those cultures.  The Germans looked on in dismay as their neighborhood was overrun with newcomers.  Some moved, some stayed, swallowed in the avalanche of influx.  Little by little, the German theaters and business closed.  New ones took their place, but the German identity was more or less lost.  Still, their parish remained.  It now had a convent and school.  It held dances and picnics, processions and pot lucks. It was like home.  Businesses and neighbors came and went, but through it all, that stone building at 5th and Lindley beckoned them back.  It was home.  Families may have moved on but they still came back to bury their dead, to baptize their children.  To remember their roots. 

The growth and prosperity of Olney during the first quarter of the 20th Century was mirrored by that of its first Catholic parish.  In 1916, Incarnation ceded half of the territory acquired form St. Veronica's, to form a new parish, St. Henry's.*  In 1923, St. Ambrose was born of the Eastern section of the growing parish.  A year later, everything North from Olney Avenue to the city limits became St. Helena's.  Over the next several decades, people continued to move into Olney and its parishes continued to thrive.  This growth culminated in 1956, with the construction of Cardinal Dougherty High school which, by 1965 was the largest Catholic high school in the world, with an enrollment of over 6,000 students.

Olney had arrived.

*St. Henry's parish closed in 1993, being absorbed in its entirety, back into Incarnation.

~

For most of its history, Philadelphia has been an incredibly segregated city.  This goes beyond the typical black/white/brown segregation you see in some places.  In Philadelphia, segregation was an art form.  In Philadelphia, you had Irish neighborhoods, Polish neighborhoods, black neighborhoods, Italian neighborhoods, Greek neighborhoods -- and the lines of demarcation were pretty set.  You crossed a street and you knew exactly whose neighborhood you had entered.  A lot of that isn't the case any longer, as white flight has pretty much decimated the city.  But when I was born, in 1969, it was alive and well.  Olney though, has always been a bit of an anomaly, in that, after that first wave of immigrants, it's always been a melting pot where, eventually, the newcomers were welcomed.  As long as they were white.  Unfortunately, racism was also alive and well in the Olney I inhabited as a boy.

Another thing specific to Philadelphia is that its Catholics are extremely parochial.  If you ask a Philadelphia Catholic where he's from, and he knows you're also Catholic, he'll more than likely answer with his parish.  If he's not sure if you're Catholic, he'll say what section of the city it is in which he resides -- then he'll still probably say the parish.  The parish is more than just a geographical area drawn on a map to a Philadelphia Catholic.  The parish is an essential part of who he is.  There's no "shopping for a church", no picking and choosing which school you'll send your child to.  You don't join a parish -- you're born into it. I grew up assuming that's just how it was to be Catholic.  My first inclination that we were different was when I was five or six and started to understand days of the week and realized that, when we were down the shore (in the Diocese of Camden), we were allowed to go to mass on Saturday night and have it count for Sunday.  You see, in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, vigil mass, as it is called, was not permitted until sometime in the 1990's.  Many of the changes of Vatican II were very late arriving to Philadelphia.  Some still haven't taken hold.

The last few decades of the 20th Century would bring change that could neither be foreseen nor forestalled.

~

From its peak in the 1950's and '60's, Olney had nowhere to go but down.  And did it ever.  The first scourge came via the drug man.  As with many cities across America, the experimentation of the 1960's turned into the outright junkie culture of the '70's.  And with that came crime.  With crime came the urge to pick up stakes and find a better place to live.  And so started the trickling out of the neighborhood.

Next came white flight.  As with any sociological shift, there are myriad reasons for the mass exodus of white folks from cities across America.  The lazy view is to say, "this is what the neighborhood looked like when it was predominately white, and this is what it looks like now", and blame color for the change.  That completely ignores things like economics, education and the effect on property values white flight had.  I often wonder what would have happened had the first family of color on each block been greeted with a pie, instead of, at best, a bunch of For Sale signs springing up within weeks.  The trickle had become a flood.

All the while, unbeknownst to us, our leaders had been failing us in the most horrific of ways.  Of these three contributors, this would be the most lethal to Incarnation, in the end.

~

I was baptized at Incarnation on 7 September 1969, exactly one month after the day I was born.  I went to school there, as did my brother and sister before me.  We three all made our First Reconciliation, received our First Holy Communion and were confirmed there as well.  In July of 1981 I went to the funeral of one of my best friends, 12 year-old John Procopio there.  The following May we buried his father.  Three years later when my own father died, I was outraged that my mother brought him back to her childhood parish and not mine, not the parish in which my father had raised his family, to bury him -- condition of the neighborhood be damned.  In later years though, I came to realize she had simply done that of which I speak here.  In her time of need, her darkest hour, she turned to the one constant in her life -- her St. Francis Xavier.  At Incarnation, I sang in the choir then became an altar boy.  I was, for better or worse, molded into the person I am now by the selfless, tireless Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, whose job was thankless and whose influence I only realized long after most of them had passed.  I was led spiritually by great men like Father Nelson, Fr. Lynch, who always had a joke for me as I vested him before mass, Father Himsworth, who taught me my first words of Spanish and Father Peter Welsh, whose first assignment out of seminary was to help a group of traumatized 7th graders come to terms with the loss of that classmate.

I was also fortunate enough to have had some great lay teachers.  Mrs. Stango and Ms. Flueher,  Ms. Chesna, a childhood classmate of my mother and Mr. Mulhern, who surely passed up more lucrative opportunities, to teach there for over 30 years.  They all showed me an example of living a Christian life as an adult.  I benefit as much from their life lessons as I do from their scholastic ones to this day.

Growing up in the time and place I did meant having a family of 300 or so.  We went to school together; we worshiped together; we played together; if someone was short at the end of the month or had a bad day at the track and the lights got cut off, we ate together.  And if we got out of line, there were plenty of parents with permission to beat our ass down.  Long before it ever became a punch line, we already had a village raising each and every one of us.

But by the 1980's, things were getting bad.  Folks were moving out of the neighborhood in droves, driving property values down, which in turn lowered the economic threshold one had to meet to buy a house there.  The poorer the neighborhood, the more crime you're going to have.  That, of course, causes more people to sell, driving property values down even lower and continues the downward spiral.  Laying in our room at 4850 N. Lawrence Street at night, my brother and I would count the Route 47 buses on 5th street as we drifted off to sleep.  On the weekends, we'd try to see how many different voice we could hear spilling out of the bar at 5th and Rockland.  As the years progressed, we'd hear the occasional, then regular, beer bottle broken against a wall, or someone's skull.  On (very) rare occasions, we'd hear a gunshot. 

My father's job moved us to South Carolina in the summer of 1984 and I've only been back to the neighborhood a couple of dozen times since, with greater infrequency. I'd drop in to see Mrs. Campbell and grab a slice of Crown Pizza.  I'd maybe pick up a donut at Oteri's but I'd always do two things, regardless of time or season: I'd drive down Lawrence Street and visit Incarnation. 

Sweeny's bar became Nicky's and now even that's gone.  So is Crown and Givnish Funeral Home and Frank's Hardware and just about all of the businesses I remember on 5th Street.  Just about all my neighbors have moved out and there's really nothing left for me in Olney.  Even the Olney Times stopped publishing a few years ago.  I understand how the original German inhabitants of Olney felt when I cruise through these days.  It's like going to a completely different city.  There are boarded up houses and burnt out stores.  There are trash-filled abandoned lots and the graffiti is everywhere.  Everywhere, that is, except from 4th to 5th Streets, along Lindley Avenue.  Even the thugs don't fuck with God.

I've always seen that as somewhat of a sign.  Just like my life may be a mess and my relationship with the Big Guy in tatters, I can always come back home to a clean, safe place.  And it will always be mine.  Much like a parent's home I know I'll never return to live permanently, knowing Incarnation is there has always been of great comfort to me.  Knowing I can always go back home, to her loving embrace has been a constant in my life.

~

I truly believe that in the 1950's, Church leaders sincerely thought they could send wayward priests out to "the farm" to get some counseling, clear their heads, do some praying and simply stop being attracted to young boys.  There was very little understanding of psychology at that time and I believe they thought men such as these could be fixed.  I also believe that the overwhelming majority of men with such proclivities did not become priests in order to gain access to children.  I think they simply thought that since they'd be taking a vow of celibacy, it would simply never be an issue.  It would fix them.

Clearly both of these beliefs were wrong.  When this became clear -- when priests came back from their sabbaticals, were transferred to new parishes and did it again -- Church leaders failed us in a way that can never be fixed.  Christ is nowhere to be found in a cover up.  He is absent in lies.  Christ is not present in hush money.  The men whose duty it was to protect not only our children but our Church as a whole failed.  And the cost has been staggering.

Sadly, with the financial structure of the Catholic Church, those who can least afford it usually end up paying the price.  The Church is kind of like the mafia, in that the money all goes up, with very little coming back down.  The parish pays its vig up to the diocese, the diocese to the archdiocese, the archdiocese to Rome.  So when a diocese gets hit with a huge judgment, Rome ain't paying it -- when we all know good and damned well that they knew exactly what was going on the whole time and can more than afford to pay for their failure in leadership.

Faced with huge liabilities from pedophilia lawsuits and no help coming from Rome, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia did what many other dioceses have done in recent decades -- they decided to close some schools.

And change again swept through Olney.

~

The first domino to fall was Cardinal Dougherty, which, with the Archdiocese's largest physical plant and second-lowest enrollment at 704, was a logical choice for closure.  No one was going to ship their kids into Olney to go to school.  The math just made it impossible to keep it open.

Two years later, 44 elementary schools took the hit.  With St. Henry's no loner in existence and St. Ambrose having closed its school, the choice came down to Incarnation or St. Helena's, as Olney could no longer support two Catholic elementary schools.  Although it had a larger enrollment and longer history, Incarnation also had a much older physical plant, somewhat poorer parishioners and, in what was most likely the determining factor, laid ten blocks deeper into the badlands.  As the Archdiocese had been systematically abandoning North Philadelphia for decades, it came as no surprise that the school closer to the suburbs made the cut and Incarnation was closed, after 99 years of educating Olney's children. Still, the name would live on, as the kids who were moved up 5th Street would be attending St. Helena-Incarnation regional school.  The optimist in me said, "it's ten blocks.  It'll be ok".  The realist in me said, "this will make it a whole lot harder to keep the church open when the nex t round of parish closures comes around."

Sure enough, another panel was commissioned, to study churches in the northern half of Philadelphia and Delaware County, ie: the poorest part of the city and the (relatively) poorest of the three bordering counties.  Even though it was not even included in the list of parishes being reviewed, it was announced on Sunday 2 June 2013 that Incarnation of Our Lord Parish will be closing on 30 June.  The archdiocese had learned form the school closures, where folks had eight months to mount protests and appeals.  This time around, it was four weeks and done.  No appeal.  No questions.  Everything south of Roosevelt Boulevard will go back to where it originally belonged, again becoming part of St. Veronica's, while everything North thereof will be absorbed into St. Helena's.  The archdiocese said that the actual church at Incarnation will remain open as a worship site of St. Helena's.  There'll be weddings and funerals there.  The occasional mass.  But that's just diocese-speak for, "we'll let you bury your dead out of there until we can sell it off". 

Inky as we know it will die on that day.  And Olney will never be the same.

~

Retired NBA player Cuttino Mobley is only six years younger than me.  He also grew up in Olney.  It's a testament to how fast the neighborhood had fallen when, in interviews, he would talk about growing up in a rough, inner-city neighborhood, crime-ridden and violence-infested.  He talked about how basketball was his ticket out.  Mobley attended Incarnation for elementary school and Cardinal Dougherty High School.  Even though we had two entirely different experiences growing up and clearly have different lives as adults, I am connected to him.  He and I both learned about God and the world around us at Incarnation.  When we each think of home, we think of Incarnation.  Regardless of where we go and what we do with the rest of our lives, our foundation was poured at Incarnation.  From the first Germans who held mass at 2nd and Tabor to the people I don't even know who go there every Sunday now, we all share a common heritage, a common lifeline, a union that can never be broken.

The bars and businesses of our youth may be gone.  All the people may have moved on.  When we drive through Olney, Fisher Park (into which no one lacking a death wish would dare set foot) , Oteri's and the Library (operating on what amounts to a part-time schedule, due to budgeting cuts) may be the only things we recognize.  Until now though, Incarnation was always there to welcome us home.  No matter what mistakes we've made, regardless of how far off course we found ourselves, it was all washed away when we went back home.  But very soon it won't be.  We'll carry the lessons we learned and the experiences we lived with us, but we'll never be able to go back.

~

June 30th will come and go. 

And it'll be like we were never there.




Until next time,
Keep the Faith