Back to the beginning: visiting my childhood parish

[rug]

DECEMBER 26, 2016
Deacon Greg Kandra

This morning, to mark the Feast of St. Stephen, I decided to take a short drive to Rockville, Maryland to visit a place that holds some powerful memories for me: St. Patrick’s, the parish where I grew up and where I first served as an altar boy nearly 50 years ago.

It’s marking its 50th anniversary this year. I remember when it was first going up, in the middle of a vast empty field; now it’s surrounded by subdivisions. The plot was donated by the Hannan family, which gave the Church—in addition to that land— Archbishop Philip Hannan, longtime leader of the Church in New Orleans. When the family donated the land, their one stipulation was that a church be built there in honor of St. Patrick. And it was.

I remember it as a glorious place—with a soaring ceiling and beautiful opaque green windows and a slippery marble sanctuary (bordered by a marble altar rail). It was an elegant, tasteful blending of the modern and the traditional. The tabernacle, an artfully designed metallic square box, sat in a small side alcove, apart from the altar; that was a radical, newfangled idea in the 1960s. A magnificent and inspiring mosaic of the resurrected Christ adorned the wall behind and above the altar.

Now, it all looks different.

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