St. Ann’s May Become a Religious Artifact Museum
From today’s Buffalo News by Jay Tokasz:
Churches may become museum
Preservationists, including some who helped rescue Frank Lloyd Wright’s Graycliff estate in Derby from demolition, have set their sights on saving two Catholic churches.
The group plans to buy St. Ann Church, a soaring Gothic Revival structure built in 1886 at Broadway and Emslie Street, and St. Francis Xavier Church, a basilica-style building constructed in 1913 on East Street near Amherst Street in Black Rock, and turn the properties into a museum for religious art and artifacts.
Religious objects such as altars, stained-glass windows and statues will be collected from many of the other churches that have closed or are scheduled to close under the downsizing plan for the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo and displayed at St. Ann and St. Francis Xavier, according to members of the group, known as the Buffalo Religious Arts Center.
You can read the whole story here.
The blog will publish updated information and developments as they become available to the public.
If only the Diocese of Buffalo would spend the amount of energy in evangelization as they do for finding buyers/uses for closed churches, places like St. Ann’s might not be in jeopardy. While a noble idea, St. Ann’s was built to be a House of God, not a museum. I say, try and fill it will people, not objects.
Unfortunately it’s too late for people – the people who abandoned the church in their flight from the city and their heritage.
It is never too late. Not when God is involved. Those particular people may have abandoned the church. But there are others. They need to be evangelized and brought into the circle that is the church.
Who will evangelize? “Whom shall I send?”