Closing churches in Boston, St. Louis and elsewhere…salvaging the building’s art for churches elsewhere:
Saunders said Our Lady of Hope spent $200,000 on stained-glass windows that were appraised at $2 million. The hand-carved marble altar from the Philadelphia Archdiocese cost $500, but he estimated that a new one like it would have been a thousand times more expensive. Many of the marble statues were free.
For help shopping, Saunders contracted with a Phoenix-based dealer who found him a series of Life of Christ windows in Upstate New York, and Sacred Spaces Liturgical Design, a company with offices in Alexandria, Italy and Poland, which found his Stations of the Cross at St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Harlem.
The archdiocese of New York was unwilling to sell them, but Saunders was so moved by the vivid scenes of Christ carrying his cross to Calvary that the company got permission to recast them — a job requiring five people, including a Texas-based artist who traveled to New York in the middle of the winter to make the molds, pitching two plastic tents with electric heaters in the shuttered church. The cost: $60,000.
By the way, the pastor is Fr. William Saunders, author of a popular and widely-read column in the Arlington diocesan paper.
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