GRAND RAPIDS, Mich — A 150-year-old church in Grand Rapids is now closed for good after celebrating its final mass Tuesday morning. The church is closing because of declining attendance over the last 30 years and the building is facing both structural issues and low finances.
The first mass at St. James was in July of 1872, and now almost 150 years later, people said goodbye to the parish.
"To know that it's closing and not know what the future is for it is very unsettling," Mary Rademacher Reed, a former parishioner, says.
The final mass was also the first time parishioners returned to the church since the beginning of the pandemic.
"It was really emotional for me," Reed says.
She says she was flooded with memories from growing up going to St. James school and the church.
"Every important event that you have happened here at your church, here at the parish, here at St. James," Mary says. "I can picture so many times all of our families out on the steps after a funeral or a wedding or all of the sacraments that we all went through, the home movies that my dad took, still showing all those wonderful moments in our lives."
"The whole parish was a family," Norman Szubinski says.
He raised his family at the church, and he worked there as a pastoral associate and helping out with different activities over the years, like funerals, bingo and fish fries.
"We passed samples out to all the people and we were just a famous fish fry," he says.
Norman says he's upset to see the church close.
"But I kind of understood that eventually it was going to happen, because that's what the people downtown [at the diocese] wanted," he says. "Whatever they want, they're going to get."
His daughter, Kathy Swain, agrees. Swain got married and two of her sons were baptized at the church.
"I knew that they were they were talking about closing it, but it was just like, so, I felt it was just so abrupt," she says.
She and her dad hope the building is preserved in some way to honor the history.
"A lot of the farmers and the people here, they just built it themselves, too. So, it's their heart and soul sweat, and tears in here," Kathy says. "So, a lot of the people that are still going here, they're fourth, fifth, sixth generation. To see like your ancestors build this, and now it's no longer gonna be there, that's sad."
"We've got enough breweries, but I would say It's better than, than tearing it down," Reed says.
The church will be going up for sale in the next week or so. The pews will either be donated or sold to other churches, and whoever buys the building must preserve the stained glass.
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