The Face of Light, St Leo's Centennial Mass, Tacoma 1979 Today's Coolphoto 12/30/2023
In 1919 the massive church building burned down. The congregation made the basement a sanctuary, which is still in use today.
In 1879, just a year before my grandfather was born on the island of Hvar, and just a few years before he and his family fled to Tacoma from Dalmatia, J.B.A. Brondel established a missionary Church of St Leo the Great in Tacoma. In 1901 Peter Hylebos built a 2200 seat sanctuary for the community on the hilltop above New Tacoma. It was spiritual home to European immigrants, running from the grinding poverty of the Gilded Age of Europe, all hoping that life here would get them out of the hole and onto the path to a better life. In twenty years the glorious building burned to the ground, and the congregation had to make due with a church in the basement, hoping to build later. It was not to be; the sanctuary is in the old basement still.
Faye LaPointe On the Steps of New House.
Bix At The G Street Community. He lived there until his illness and death recently.
Our family parish growing up was St Pat’s, across town from St Leo’s. In the mid seventies, after St Leo’s started to decline and had closed its schools, Jesuits Bill Bichsel, David Rothrock, and Peter Byrne came to the community focused on the precarious existence of the poor in the neighborhood around St Leo’s. They took the call to social justice at its word and in doing so, created a community of remarkable generosity. This is where I found myself, struggling in a lousy economy and stumbliing out of a bad marriage .
Sunday Morning Breakfast In The Old St Leo’s school basement
The St Leo’s community colaesced around the mid-morning Sunday service at 10:30. The hallmark of the experience was complete acceptance of whoever walked in the door. Downtown Tacoma was blighted, with storefronts abandoned as the major retailers left for the Tacoma Mall. On top of that, the nearby mental hospital discharged patients to the streets of downtown where crime and alcoholism ravaged them.
Hilltop Tacoma at the time of the church’s founding in 1879 was a prosperous place, with large expensive homes climbing up the steep slope from the water. The boom was fuelled by land speculation and the timber harvest. The Panic of 1893 hit hard and over time the generation of business owners and senior managers that built them aged out. Hilltop became home to poor people, mostly Black. They lived in the big houses until they became unlivable, and eventually the city tore them down as part of a mid-century Urban Renewal push. They tore them down, but built nothing in their place.
Ella Carter lived across the street from the school. She was 100 years old in 1977.
With the door open to all sorts, including the prosperous from the better part of town, the indigent, the beaten down, and the forgotten, people showed up in disarray, mental and physical. Thanks to the generosity of spirit modelled by Bix, Peter, and David, we accepted them as part of our community, and we saw their confused wanderings as a real sign of the Cross. They were welcomed, as we all were, and there was peace.
Thus when the centennial approached, the congregation met it as a happy group. We were happy to know that we could welcome each other. We were happy to know that our lives for that short time on Sunday was closer to the word than they would have been otherwise. And we found ourselves living in an explosion of personal creativity. The artwork in the church grew sophisticated and beautiful. The music became wonderful, and the commentary during the service grew more thoughtful and inspiring. And over time we were happy to see that the embrace we all felt at 10:30 Mass widened into real sevice given to the neighborhood.
There was the drop-in center in an old storefront opened on Christmas Eve on Commerce called Nativity House. There was the Food Connection established in the old school basement. There was the small house David and Peter shared with Greg and Freddie, two handicapped men. There was New House run by Faye LaPointe, open to women seeking restorative justice. There was the G Street Community of common social fellowship, which to this day includes my brother. And there was the Native People’s Mass, said for years by Pat Twohy, every Sunday afternoon at two.
All of this flowed from the heart as a gushing fountain of peace. We celebrated the hundredth birthday of St Leos with our eyes dazzled by its brilliance. But life took over, and the fabric of the community of friends wore out, even as the brilliance of the mission continued. Couples divorced, as they will. Priests left the priesthood. Friends died from age and suicide. I became disillusioned by the deplorable history of abuse and the inexcusable cover-up over decades. The institution seemed to slip off a rotten foundation in a heap.
It is nearly fifty years now since the centennial was marked by the joy of community that I remember. Nativity House still operates, New House is gone, but the G street community exists still. People still have a place to get food at the Food Connection. The church service draws still and offers acceptance.
But I wonder, will they all continue as before? Now St Leo’s cannot be staffed by a Jesuit priest because there aren’t enough of them. The congregation has become too small to sustain its mission and will merge with a parish across town, far removed from the old neighborhood.
I wonder, after nearly 150 years, will the light of St Leo’s go out for the prosperous from the better part of town, for the poor downtown, for the indigent, the beaten down, and the forgotten?
The Face of Light, St Leo's Centennial Mass, Tacoma 1979 Today's Coolphoto 12/30/2023
©2023 Christopher Petrich
Thanks to you my good friends for fifty years of professional photography and twenty five years of online success with Coolphoto.com! I am at the end of my retail sales career and am closing up shop by the end of this year. I will continue to post new work on Coolphoto, in the form of members-only galleries and Today’s Coolphoto blog posts such as this.
I am sending selected original photographs to the Christopher Petrich Collection at the Northwest Room of the Tacoma Public Library, and I am creating new bound volumes of selected pieces under my Coolphoto imprint. I have four titles in the pipeline to add to the three volumes already published: A Complete Guide To The Lighthouses on Puget Sound Including Admiralty Inlet (ISBN: 978‐0‐9744775-0-8), Dreams (ISBN: 978-0-9744775-1-0) and The Beach At Fox Island (ISBN: 978‐0‐9744775‐2‐7). Each new title will be issued in very small editions of 100 or fewer copies.
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