The seven Catholic parishes in New Haven, Connecticut, have officially been merged on July 1 into one parish named for Father Michael McGivney, founder of the Knights of Columbus.
This new Blessed Michael McGivney parish will serve the New Haven Catholic community and will operate the existing eight church buildings to serve the thousands of parishioners in New Haven, the birthplace of the Knights of Columbus and the place where Blessed McGivney first served as a parish priest.
Archbishop Leonard Blair of Hartford chose the new parish name from a list of suggestions that a committee of New Haven parishioners picked after extensive consideration.
“I wish to thank the faithful of New Haven for thoughtfully and prayerfully recommending that Sts. Aedan and Brendan, St. Anthony, St. Martin de Porres, St. Mary, St. Michael, Our Lady of Guadalupe, and St. Stanislaus be united as one parish under the patronage of Blessed Michael McGivney,” Blair said in a release from the Knights of Columbus.
“Blessed Michael McGivney, founder of the Knights of Columbus, was an exemplar of charity and steadfast devotion to Christ, still today inspiring millions of people to action for the common good, in the name of God. I will continue to pray for this new parish community and invite all New Haven Catholics to do the same during this time of great Catholic revitalization in the Elm City,” the statement reads.
Supreme Knight Patrick Kelly spoke to the historic ties between the Knights of Columbus and St. Mary’s, the oldest Catholic parish in New Haven and the second oldest in the state.
“In 1882, in the basement of St. Mary’s, Blessed Michael McGivney gathered young Catholic men seeking ways to unite in their faith and find a means of supporting their families amid a society that frowned upon Catholic immigrants,” Kelly said in the same release. “The Knights of Columbus is honored that the new city-wide parish has adopted Blessed Michael McGivney’s name.”
Blair announced the plan to merge the parishes in December 2021. He specified “that the goal of the merger is to bring the priests, churches, ministries, and resources of the city together, uniting them in the hopes of creating a stronger, more vibrant Catholic community and culture.”
He explained that this move seemed “most prudent and necessary for the future of the Catholic community in New Haven to combine these communities and their respective resources.”
Father Ryan Lerner, the pastor of St. Mary’s, talked about this merger and what it means.
He is one of the three pastors working in solidum, “which means working in solidarity, working as a team,” he explained. “I am the moderator.” The other two pastors are bilingual — Father Hector Rangel of Our Lady of Guadalupe parish, who speaks Spanish, and Father Sebastian Kos of St. Stanislaus parish, who speaks Polish.
“Obviously, those are the three main language groups of the Catholics in New Haven,” Lerner said. “The three of us are working together.”
He noted that the Catholic collective’s “mother church” will be St. Mary’s Church, where the “center base of operations” will be located. The administration, including finances and sacramental records, will eventually be all in the same place, what is currently the rectory and offices of St. Mary’s Church.
Lerner said he anticipates even more people coming to St. Mary’s now to pray at Father McGivney’s tomb. “I’m getting ready to respond to that already,” he said. The blessed was reentombed here after the Knights’ centennial in March 1982, making the church a shrine.
The beatification occurred during COVID, in 2020, so at that time, the church was “not receiving a ton of pilgrims, because people weren’t taking major bus trips,” said Lerner. “But since the world began to emerge from COVID, just as people are traveling for vacation, more and more are wanting to make these pilgrimages.”
He also foresees the merger increasing devotion to the “Blessed.”
“It certainly is my hope,” he said. “We want to promote this as much as we can. We’ve been trying to [get] my brother pastors, the priests, deacons, administrators to promote the cult [veneration] of McGivney because we’re one of the very few cities in this country that has the body of a saint in one of our churches — God willing, one day ‘saint,’ hopefully. So we’re getting people to understand we have a ‘blessed’ right here in our city.”
Lerner, who is also the Catholic chaplain at St. Thomas More Chapel at Yale University, which surrounds St. Mary’s, pointed out that the young people “are really into this,” and lots of students are seen at the church.
“New Haven is a small city,” he added, “and we’ve got all these different beautiful churches, but we’ve also got a blessed right here among us who walked these streets. He was a young-adult Catholic in the Archdiocese of Hartford. So over the last couple of weeks leading up to this date [merger], we’ve been sharing a little bit about his life in the bulletins — it’s getting to know our blessed. This is our spiritual father.”
Lerner also sees devotion to Father McGivney as being a unifying factor for the merger of the parishes. It has been the custom at St. Mary’s, which up to this merger consisted of St. Mary Church and St. Joseph Church, to pray the prayer for the canonization of Blessed Michael McGivney, every day, or after every Mass.
“Many places may have prayed the St. Michael prayer,” he said, “and we still do it during daily Mass, but at the end of every Mass at St. Mary’s parish, we pray the prayer for the canonization of Blessed Michael McGivney. So my plan with my brother priests” is to have “everybody start praying that prayer this weekend in the other churches," he said.
"It’s a step towards now not only to promote the cult of McGivney here in New Haven, but also something we can do together as one parish family. It’s one thing to be one parish family by decree from the archbishop, or on paper. It’s another to really become one unified family. At least one thing we can do is be praying the prayer for the intercession and the canonization of our spiritual father,” said Lerner.
By Joseph Pronechen
Provided by Catholic News Agency
Thumbnail Image By Kategombos - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=118300421