A priest transforms the art in his parish church

Father Carter, a Franciscan Friar of the Atonement, had been summoned in a last-ditch effort to turn it around, and almost immediately upon his arrival, he decided that the images in the church did not reflect the reality of his community. And so one morning, the neighborhood woke up to find that the plaster Madonna in the church garden, a figure with outstretched hands that greeted commuters going to the subway, had turned mahogany brown. Not only that, her lips looked a little fuller, her eyes deeper.

“I transformed her,” Father Carter, a 6-foot-4 giant with a voice like a basso lullaby, recalled the other day, with an unmistakable air of glee. Transformed? Father Carter, after all, was a man of the cloth who might have been capable of transformation by any number of mystical means.

“I painted her,” he replied with a chuckle.

Father Carter went on to darken every figure of Jesus and Mary in the church, from the crucifix above the altar to the bas-relief figures in the Stations of the Cross. (He left untouched the subsidiary figures, white-skinned and red- or blond-haired reflecting the Irish immigrants who lived in the parish more than a century ago.) He installed a replica of Our Lady of Monteserrat, a carved black Madonna and child from Spain, in a prominent alcove.

Father Carter’s transformations caused something of a sensation, even among black parishioners, but he remained undeterred. It had not been easy for him, he explained, as a black man, to become a priest in the 40’s. He had been turned down by several religious communities before being accepted by the Friars of the Atonement. He was sure that the picture on his application, alerting everyone to the fact that he was black, was responsible. The one time he omitted the picture, he got an interview, he said, only to be told flatly that the priesthood didn’t accept “colored vocations.” The experience had made him determined to change the complexion of the church, if only with paint and a brush.