Old timers and new timers came together at a Whalley Avenue church to mark the centennial of a Catholic congregation that has grown smaller but still makes beautiful music together.
At mid-afternoon, despite biting winds, about 150 people gathered for the celebration Sunday at Saint Brendan Church at Whalley and Ellsworth.
Their pleasant aim: to hear choral singers perform a concert of spirituals, psalms, and selections from classic memorial compositions, including a thrilling “How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place” from Johannes Brahms’s A German Requiem.
The concert brought together singers from four parishes: St. Mary’s, St. Martin De Porres, St. Brendan, and St. Aedan’s.
St. Brendan and St. Aedan are for all practical purposes one parish. Mass is held in both at the Whalley Avenue church and at Westville’s Saint Aedan, but at different times with the same priest, Father Thomas Shepard (pictured), who has led the merged flock for nine years.
The two churches’ schools combined about five years ago. Now one K‑8 school operates in Westville. St. Brendan’s rents its school building is rented to other non-profit organizations.
The aim of Sunday’s concert was to honor the congregation’s deceased over the last century as well as to remember John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Speaking both of those historical figures, as well as ordinary congregants who have come before and helped build the church and the city’s Catholic community, Shepard said he wanted “to engage our memories for all those who came before. We stand on the shoulders of those who came before.”
Dottie and Dale Bruckhart (pictured) joined the church 30 years ago. They remembered Good Friday services when the capacious church had 1,400 people in the pews. Now you can take a digit off that numbe. But the community remains vibrant, said Dottie Bruckhart.
That in part is because it’s diverse now compared to the predominantly Irish Catholic congregation for whom St. Brendan and St. Aedan once served as second homes in a new city and country.
“People here used to remember ‘Catholics Need Not Apply’ signs,” said Shepard. Roll the clock forward decades, and in the 1970s the congregation started losing significant numbers due to “white flight,” he recalled. Now the combined congregation has 144 families.
DyAnn King congratulates her son.
Joseph King Jr.‘s daughter Erin went to St. Brendan’s school. She, along with her mom, and grandmother sat in the second row pew of the sanctuary Sunday to watch King perform with the 35-person combined choir.
As the head of neurosurgery at the Veterans Administration Hospital in West Haven, King does not usually get nervous before operations. The opposite was the case with Sunday’s musical operation.
“When the piece is complex, I have to worry about entrances and exits,” he said after the concert, when his mom congratulated “Joey” on his performance, one of five basses in the soprano and alto-dominated chorus.
“I’ve done thousands of operations but only a dozen or so concerts,” he said.
The conductor was Stacey Grimaldi; the organist and choirmaster, Gregory Czerkawski. Soloist Kanita Mote filled the church with her mezzo soprano in “Pie Jesu” from Maurice Durufle’s Requiem.
