Merger brings new era for Catholic Church in SE Washington County
Kelly Tunney | Herald-Standard
St. Thomas Aquinas Roman Catholic Church on Union Street in California will continue hosting Mass after a regional consolidation in the beginning of 2017.
St. Thomas Aquinas Roman Catholic Church on Union Street in California will continue hosting Mass after a regional consolidation in the beginning of 2017.
A saint known for her work with missions will be patron of a newly consolidated parish covering six worship centers in southeastern Washington County.
Over the weekend Pittsburgh’s Roman Catholic Bishop David A. Zubik gave his blessing to St. Katharine Drexel, a parish that takes in five congregations using six worship sites from Bentleyville to California to Marianna.
“Your sacrifices position your parish for more effective ministry by addressing serious financial problems, sharing resources and allowing your clergy to focus on the spiritual work for which they were ordained,” Zubik wrote in a letter read at weekend Masses at those churches.
Effective Jan. 8, the Sunday observed as the Solemnity of the Epiphany on the 2017 church calendar, Mass will be offered on a regular schedule at Ave Maria in Bentleyville, the St. Michael the Archangel worship center of St. Oliver Plunkett in Fredericktown and St. Thomas Aquinas in California.
Daily Mass will be offered at Ave Maria and St. Michael the Archangel.
Mass will be offered occasionally, including weddings and funerals, at St. Agnes in Richeyville, St. Joseph in Roscoe and the Ss. Mary and Ann center of St. Oliver Plunkett in Marianna.
“I think it is a significant new beginning, just a few days into the new calendar year,” said the Rev. Edward Yuhas, moderator of the team leading worship in a new parish with more than 3,700 registered in its rolls.
Those on the new parish’s rolls had a voice in naming the new parish for Drexel (1858-1955), a Philadelphia heiress who served as a novice with the Sisters of Mercy in Pittsburgh and then founded an order of nuns dedicated to the education of Native Americans and black people. She was canonized in 2000.
“The group came with three names for the bishop, he chose one of them,” said the Rev. Samuel Esposito, regional vicar for Vicariate 3, one of four in the Pittsburgh diocese. “She had a special focus on missions. (In Rome) she told Pope (St.) Leo XIII she wanted the church to send missionaries and he told her, ‘you go be a missionary yourself.’ She came home and responded to the need.”
Vicariate 3 covers 120,000 registrants in approximately 40 parishes covering 1,800 square miles in all or part of Beaver, Allegheny, Washington and Greene counties. In all the diocese has 632,138 registrants out of a population of 1.9 million in 192 parishes in those counties as well as Butler and Lawrence.
“This is truly an exciting time for the Catholic communities of southeastern Washington County,” Yuhas said. “We’ve recognized the need to partner together and share ministry and resources.”
According to figures compiled at the end of 2015 by the diocese, Ave Maria has 1,604 members, St. Thomas Aquinas, 776; St. Oliver Plunkett, 656 at two sites; St. Joseph, 352; and St. Agnes 339.
The merger comes amid the “On Mission for The Church Alive!” strategic planning process which aims to reorganize the entire Diocese of Pittsburgh by 2018 for better ministry, service and evangelization.
What prompted the planning to begin in southeastern Washington County a year before the rest of “On Mission” included a need to address financial problems at St. Agnes and better deploy clergy.
“Although this merger preceded the (On Mission) process is not a result of it, your inspiring example of collaboration, courage and compassion is a model for the entire diocese,” Zubik wrote.
Esposito said southeastern Washington County was among five areas in the diocese where parishes needed attention sooner than later. The others include two within Pittsburgh’s South Hills neighborhoods, one just outside Pittsburgh in its western suburbs and one in the Evans City area of Butler County.
“None of them were very large,” Esposito said. “We knew it wasn’t set for the long haul. A couple of times along that way, especially from 2012 to 2014, we thought we would do something individually there.”
Ave Maria already serves as administrative center for the five parishes.
It was established in 1994 in a merger of St. Clement, Ellsworth; St. Joseph, Cokeburg; and St. Luke, Bentleyville. The diocese said St. Joseph was closed and later sold then the St. Clement worship center was closed in 2001 as a declining congregation found it impractical to maintain two church buildings.
Mass schedules for St. Katherine Drexel are to be announced later this month, after an ad hoc planning team goes over the response of parishioners to two options. That planning team has been meeting since July 3, 2015, when Zubik appointed Yuhas and the Rev. Paul Grunebach as his teammate in service to the five congregations.
“I began as the chair of the ad hoc team that we drew from the five pastoral councils,” Yuhas said. “There were two from each council, as well as a facilitator, a process observer and the two pastors.”
The facilitator is a parish employee who lives in Charleroi, while the process observer is a member of one of the five congregations. In October that panel came to the bishop requesting a merger.
Both priests have ties to the mid-Mon Valley. Grunebach had been pastor of St. Oliver Plunkett, a parish named for a martyred Irish bishop, for the past 14 years.
As was the case for Ave Maria, St. Oliver Plunkett was established in 1994 as part of a diocesan reorganization and revitalization project, in the merger of Ss. Mary and Ann and St. Michael the Archangel.
“I grew up near Richeyville,” Yuhas said. “My family moved to Monessen when I was in sixth grade (and) went to the former joint Catholic school.”
After a tenure that included 10 years of service as secretary to then-Bishop Donald Wuerl and to Zubik, and a role as vice rector of St. Paul Seminary in Crafton, Yuhas came home.
“Since my mom had taken ill, I requested a return to parish ministry,” Yuhas said. That brought him back to Richeyville in July 2012 as pastor of Ave Maria.
A third priest also is available from the Newman Center at California University of Pennsylvania. For approximately four years, until 15 months ago, the Rev. Michael A. Zavage was pastor at St. Joseph and St. Thomas Aquinas, but he was reassigned by the diocese as Catholic chaplain for Cal U, Washington & Jefferson College and Waynesburg University.
“He was asked by the bishop to do what we have done on the parish level,” Yuhas said.
“When I was pastor there I worked closely with Father Yuhas,” Zavage said. “We were collaborators and our lay leaders were always working together. We started a regional bulletin and had regional confirmation classes.”
Zavage said a 5 p.m. Mass is celebrated each Sunday during Cal U semesters at St. Thomas Aquinas for students, but the public also is invited to attend.
According to diocesan archives the history of the combined parish dates back to 1876 when the pastor of St. Peter’s in Brownsville celebrated Mass once a month in Coal Center. In 1888, St. Thomas Aquinas parish was founded in Coal Center, then worshipped in both Coal Center and California from 1956 until 1967, when the Coal Center church was closed.
St. Joseph started in 1903 as a mission of St. Thomas Aquinas but became an independent parish in 1909.
St. Agnes dates back to 1960, but its roots go back to 1929 when the pastor of Ss. Mary and Ann began a mission parish in Richeyville. It became an independent parish in 1960 then in 1994 assumed the parishioners of two suppressed missions, St. Mary and Assumption, both in Daisytown.
Worship continued at the St. Mary center until 2007. The old St. Agnes church was razed in 1995 and parishioners utilized a converted movie theater and roller skating rink as a temporary church until a new edifice could be built in 2003.
Children growing up in the modern-day St. Katherine Drexel region have fewer choices for parochial education. Esposito said the nearest schools include John F. Kennedy in Washington and Madonna Catholic in Monongahela for elementary classes and Seton-LaSalle in southern Allegheny County for secondary classes.