Ordo Praedicatorum

Recently, The Catholic Times, the newspaper of record of the Diocese of Columbus, published an in-depth story on the Catholic Churches in Muskingum County Ohio, including our own Dominican parish of St. Thomas Aquinas in Zanesville.  The article is reprinted below.

Zanesville’s two parishes have much in common
By Tim Puet
Catholic Times

For more than 165 years, Zanesville has been a community with two strong, active Catholic parishes.

It’s easy to tell one from the other physically. St. Nicholas, dedicated in 1899, is probably more familiar to people passing through the city because its Florentine dome dominates the skyline at the top of Main Street on the eastern edge of downtown.

St. Thomas Aquinas, a half-mile to the west, dedicated in 1844, has a clock tower as its most recognizable exterior feature and is part of a “street of downtown churches” on North Fifth Street.

In the era of ethnic parishes, St. Nicholas was “the German church” and St. Thomas was “the Irish church.” From their respective beginnings in 1842 and 1820, St. Nicholas has been staffed by diocesan priests and St. Thomas by the Dominicans who arrived in Ohio in 1808 at Somerset in neighboring Perry County.

Setting those physical and historic distinctions aside, there’s much more uniting the two congregations, each of which have about 1,130 households, than dividing them.

“We really have no boundaries between us,” said Father Leo Connolly, pastor at St. Nicholas since 2003. “That’s not just true in the sense of our being united as Catholics, but in the fact that neither church is designated as serving a particular part of Zanesville and southern Muskingum County. The area is shared by both of us.”

The other two parishes in the Zanesville Deanery, St. Ann’s in Dresden and St. Mary’s in Mattingly Settlement, share the same priest and administrator and cover the northern part of the county.

“I think people mostly decided to go to one church rather than the other because it’s where their parents went, or the Mass schedule was more convenient, or, in cases where a man from one church would marry the other, he would generally follow the custom of becoming a member of the woman’s church,” said St. Thomas parishioner Bernie Kuhn.

“I’ve especially noticed in the last 20 years or so that the parishes have been doing more and more things together. Then two years ago, the two parish schools were combined into one school, Bishop Fenwick, with the older children and the preschoolers going to what was St. Nicholas and the younger ones to the former

St. Thomas building. That’s also done a lot to bring us closer.”
Joint efforts by the parishes include pre-Cana classes, a funeral choir, a Boy Scout troop, Knights of Columbus Council 505, Muskingum Valley Right to Life activities, an Ash Wednesday prayer service, and a procession on the Feast of Corpus Christi between the two churches. The parishes also are considering combining their youth groups.

“Then you have things like the charismatic prayer group at St. Thomas that pulls people in from both parishes,” said Helen Fedorke of St. Thomas. “Each parish has its own quilting group, but those groups share some members. That’s something you’ll also find with some of the other parish organizations.”

In addition, St. Nicholas has joint Confirmation services and joint pre-Baptism instruction with the Dresden and Mattingly Settlement parishes.

It also has joined several churches with mainly African American congregations in taking turns hosting a bimonthly choral event known as a Singspiration. St. Thomas, meanwhile, has been mainly responsible for providing priests to serve students at Muskingum College in New Concord.

“Another aspect which involves a lot of cooperation is the festivals for the two parishes,” said Father Jordan Turano, OP, who became pastor at St. Thomas earlier this year. “Both festivals have much the same set of workers, a mixture from both parishes.

“The St. Thomas festival is the first week in June and St. Nicholas has its festival the first week in August, so there’s adequate time between the two to keep people from feeling burnt out. Proceeds from both end up going to the same place, the combined school.”

For the most part, the Zanesville parishes coordinate their daily and Sunday Mass schedules to ensure that starting times for Masses are varied. However, Christmas is an exception to that rule.

“For many of the Christmas Eve Masses, we start at the same time, and that’s intentional,” Father Connolly said. “When there were different starting times for those Masses, the earlier one would be packed, then people would see how crowded it was and go to the other church, where there would be a last-minute surge.

“That tended to cause a lot of distraction, so we decided on having the same starting times for several Masses because that tended to more evenly distribute the crowds.”

Father Connolly is the only priest at St. Nicholas and said he’s extremely grateful for the help he has received from the three Dominicans stationed at St. Thomas. He said this cooperation most often manifests itself when he’s at a meeting in Columbus that runs late and knows he can call on a Dominican to celebrate the 5:15 p.m. weekday Mass at his church.

Both parishes coordinate their service to the area’s hospitals and nursing homes to ensure that all are visited regularly by volunteers and Eucharistic ministers and that each has a priest visiting for Mass and a service of Anointing of the Sick at least twice a year.

The city at one time had two hospitals – Good Samaritan, run by the Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity of Manitowoc, Wis., and Bethesda, a non-Catholic hospital. These were combined in 1997 into the Genesis HealthCare System, which has become the city’s largest employer.

The Franciscan Sisters continue to own the buildings and land at what is now Genesis-Good Samaritan, to serve on the Genesis board, and to have a presence at the hospital, with four Manitowoc Franciscans and one member of the Sisters of St. Francis of Tiffin, Ohio, working there.

“At one time, there were probably more than 100 sisters serving in the city,” Father Connolly said. “We had Dominicans teaching at St. Thomas School and the Franciscans at both Good Samaritan and St. Nicholas School.

“That was when Zanesville was known as ‘Clay City’ or ‘The Pottery Capital of the World’ because those industries and the city’s AK Steel plant gave us a worldwide reputation,” he said. “But as with so many places in Ohio, the plants have closed, so that now when our young people graduate from college, there’s nothing for them to come back to, and they start families somewhere else.

“They’ll often return home to have their children baptized here, but those children are raised elsewhere.” He estimated that in both parishes, 60 percent of the members are over 40 years old.

“The challenge of an aging population and retaining young members is one of the things we face here in Zanesville that’s very similar to the challenges facing the Church as a whole,” he said.

“There is a long history and a great tradition of Catholicism here, and that’s a reassuring thing. We know we’ve been able to handle problems before, and now we have an opportunity to continue to build on what’s been done in the past and create traditions of our own.”

“I find there are a lot of people here with a very deep faith and trust in the Church,” Father Turano said. “They’re always willing to give of themselves to help others. The cooperation I see among the parishes is wonderful and I’m sure it’s going to grow as time goes on.”

Besides the two Roman Catholic churches, Zanesville has a Melkite Catholic parish. Holy Trinity Melkite Church was established in 1974 by a group of mostly Lebanese families and has worshiped at homes, chapels at Good Samaritan Hospital and a Zanesville Episcopal church, and a building east of downtown.

A few years ago, it purchased a former Mennonite church building just off U.S. 40 west of town. It meets there for the Divine Liturgy every Saturday at 5:30 p.m. and for other major feasts. Father Ignatius Harrington, pastor of Holy Trinity and Holy Resurrection Melkite Church in Columbus, said 15 to 20 people usually attend the Saturday service.

He encourages Roman Catholics to take part in the liturgy at either Melkite church, noting that doing so fulfills the Sunday Mass obligation while providing a different worship experience and a heightened sense of the universality of the Catholic Church.

“As with other Eastern Catholic churches, we as Melkite Catholics believe ourselves to be both authentically Catholic and faithfully Orthodox,” he said. “We see ourselves as bridge-builders between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions.

“We understand the Roman Catholic Church to be an ‘Orthodox’ (true believing) Church and the eldest among sister Churches. We are in communion with the pope and understand him as both patriarch of the Western Churches and the eldest of the patriarchs, presiding as the first among equals over the whole Church.”

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