A Brief History of the Restoration and Renewal of Queen of All Saints Church

From my point of view as Pastor of Queen of All Saints, this parish being a creation of the Spirit of God, has been in the process of transformation from the first day of its foundation in 1873 until our present time. This is happening for those of us who have heard the words of St. Peter in the Acts of the Apostles, “Repent (change your heart) and be baptized.”  This parish has played a very significant role in my personal transformation in that, of eighteen years of ordination, I have lived out ten of them here.

 Unlike many of you, I cannot speak of the years before 1994, since a number of you enjoy many, many memories of the past stretching back a number of years.  My recollection begins at 9:00 AM on June 20, 1994, the day I arrived to take up my pastoral responsibilities.  The parish I found was indeed a very good one.  Our faith community has been around for a hundred and twenty years and has always been made up of many good and dedicated people.  Many, many people and all previous administrations have made their significant contributions for the overall good of Queen of All Saints, each in their own way.

 However, there were a number of things that needed attention: the number of people involved in ministry was unacceptably low;  a weed patch where a parking lot was needed; and a baptismal font left dry and unused.

 Work was immediately begun on involving and expanding ministry with the Children’s Liturgy of the Word being offered at all the Masses.  This meant that the Galindo Room (former baptistry),  left as storage space, needed to be fixed up.  In came the Knights of Columbus and work was begun.  You can see the results : A new ministry was established.

 We likewise gave a great deal of effort to expand and improve our preparation and celebration of the Sacrament of Baptism, even as we used a salad bowl to celebrate it.  We did this with the help of Ellen Midgley,  Tim Duncan , and Nancy Tomsic .  Ellen and Tim helped to deepen the preparation and celebration of adult formation through the RCIA process and adult confirmation.  Ellen then went on to develop ministry around our celebration of funerals and the Sacrament of Matrimony.

 We spent over a half a million dollars on our school ($120,000 from the Garaventa Foundation, and the rest from several years of improved school enrollment) to: remodel bathrooms; put in double-paned windows; air conditioning; painted the school inside and out; and computerized each and every classroom.  We spent over a hundred thousand dollars on our parking lot to make it one of the most beautiful lots in the city.  Thanks to the DeRosa, Mork, Gallagher, and many other families for donating trees,  plants and the statue of Mother Mary.   

 We brought a priest from India (through Belgium) named Fr. Mathew, who was skilled as a magician, to work with our youth; and another priest knowledgeable in liturgy, in the person of Fr. Robert.

 We hired a seasoned, experienced, and very effective principal (with a history here at Queen of All Saints) in the person of Maryalice Clare.  At the same time, Nancy Tomsic expanded and developed our Religious Education program. Sr. Dianne Fagan, the only staff member who pre-dates my administration, continues to do a great job with our senior ministry program, and has expanded the luncheon and outreach programs with trips and excursions now available.  Two years ago, we established our very own chapter of the Knights of Columbus.

 Last year, we expanded our outreach to the Spanish-speaking community in the persons of Fr. Reynaldo and Pati Urias.  This ministry continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

 In the midst of all of this, in the Fall of 1998, we as a community of faith celebrated our 125^th anniversary as a Church and the 50^th anniversary of our school .  By all accounts, it was a great celebration.

 The point of all of this recalling is to refer to the gradual, but very real, renewal that has been taking place in our community for the last ten years.

Queen of All Saints is beginning to see herself as capable of taking on greater and greater challenges, and seeing larger and larger horizons.

 At one parish council meeting, ever faithful and sincere Arnie Knipp, the council’s presiding member, asked to have a listening session for any parishioners who wished to address concerns to the council.  Remember at the time, we thought we would turn our attention to improving the Hall.

This will eventually mean tearing it down and building a decent parish center. One parishioner came forward and asked, “How much plaster must fall from our stained glass windows before we do something about it?”

 We were all very content, perhaps too much so at the time.  As a result, we were simply going to paint and, because the Diocese ordered it, retrofit the Church as it was.  Since we had to retrofit, it was most prudent, responsible and appropriate to take a deep look at the worship space.  We had just ended one millennium and were about to begin a new one, when we formed what we called a “Vision Committee” to help us plan this task.

 A little over three years ago, we had absolutely no clear sense of what the Holy Spirit was doing in our community.  Do you recall the expression, “Be careful of what you ask for in prayer, because God may give it to you?” We prayed for a renewal of our parish and guess what - it is coming to us in “spades.”

 Although we have always celebrated the Sacrament of Baptism (and at Easter time, try to do so in a very big way), it didn’t dawn on us at the time that throughout the rest of the year, our dried and unused font did not give very good testimony to what should be a living and active baptismal faith.

 The Church’s understanding, and thus our focus, on the importance of the baptismal faith has changed dramatically since the Galindo Room was built. This is a very significant point .  “Now” we are beginning to appreciate the importance as to how we enter into the mystery of Jesus’ death and resurrection through the waters of baptism.  This same appreciation extends to how the relationship that we have with God in the Spirit is renewed in the celebration of Eucharist.

 To go into the waters is to die with Him in the small sense of ourselves as mere egos, so as to rise with Him in an expanded sense of ourselves as born in the Spirit.  We are being re-created by the Spirit into the “new creation” that God is using to bring about His kingdom in the world. Unfortunately, you get no real sense of this with two inches of water.

 For those who have been baptized many, many years ago, our sense of the Real Presence of the Lord is renewed in us when we celebrate (through the power of the same Holy Spirit) the Eucharist and, therefore, come into a direct experience of the death and resurrection of the Lord. Our lives of faith may go to the altar as bread and wine, but truly return to us as the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, and all the while we give thanks to God for all the subtle ways His Spirit moves us toward becoming a “new creation.”  That is why we must now join our two altars into one, in order to retrieve and exhalt our original altar.                

 We will then stand between the image of Him who went to the cross and the reality of Him who brings us into the resurrected life through Baptism and Eucharist.  It is He who gives meaning to our suffering, who mysteriously transforms us into His Body on earth; that Body which “becomes what it eats” when we partake of His Body in the Eucharist.

 Speaking of death and resurrection, I should like to share with you what this process of renewal has been for me personally.  As is always true for those of us who have been set free by the cross of Christ, it has been a real suffering combined with inexpressible joy.

 You would have thought by being a life-long Catholic, having spent sixteen years in monastic life and eighteen years as a priest, with a Bachelor’s and two Masters degrees that focused on theology, that the central truth of our faith would have been clear to me all along.  But it was only going through the last three years of this process, like the three years of our Lord’s public ministry, that I can relate to the unawareness of the Apostles.  As they approached Jerusalem, hearing the dire foretelling of what Jesus knew was in store for him, the Apostles didn’t have so much as a clue what it would mean for them personally.

 It is said that, “hind-sight is perfect.”   If there were mistakes to be made, I made them.  There were times when I lost my cool and expressed words in anger.  I didn’t clearly understand the issues that some of the community faced, and so I came across as unfeeling or uncaring at times in my frustration.  I was by no means alone in sharing this “human condition;” but in the end, I can only apologized for my own faults, and I do!

 I hope you can hear this apology and apply it to yourself if my words or actions have offended you.  You might, for your own spiritual life, examine your own need to open yourself to the power of forgiveness.  For it became clear to me that, together, we will come into the glory and the power of the resurrection to lift us and our church into the realm of an effective tool to bring the Kingdom of God to “old town’ Concord  (Todos Santos).

 It also became clear that, for some, nostalgia would be their “only” consideration.   Their sense of tradition seemed to be limited to the span of their life-times.  Finally, they came to the conclusion that if Queen of All Saints was going to: add a walk-in baptismal font; restore the original baptismal font to a prominent function; add the mysteries of light to the fifteen mysteries in the stained glass we already have; combine the original altar to our present altar; create a Blessed Sacrament chapel (and thus enhance the status and availability of the Sacrament to the people); and, worst of all, not consider money as the most important consideration before we even began to consider the feasibility of this project for a parish like ours -  then they would have no other alternatives.   In the end, there is nothing that the night can do to stop the dawn.  St. Paul asks in his letter to the Romans, “If the Lord is for us, who can be against us?”