Last Mass held at St. Boniface

WILKES-BARRE – Clutching her songbook in the choir loft, Amy Saraka leaned over and whispered, “Could you pass me a tissue?”

“Here, take a whole box,” a sympathetic Rosemarie Geiser said.

The two women had plenty of company as they sang and cried their way through a two-hour closing Mass at St. Boniface Roman Catholic Church on Blackman Street in Wilkes-Barre on Sunday afternoon.

Red eyes and handkerchiefs were plentiful as scores of parishioners past and present crowded into the 114-year-old church to bid farewell, to sing and pray.

Yet there were lighter moments during the solemn ceremony, as when Monsignor Joseph Rauscher, a native son of the parish who is now pastor of St. Nicholas Church in Wilkes-Barre, reminisced about growing up in the St. Boniface community.

He spoke of May Crownings and dances, learning to roller skate, and even watching amateur boxers fight at the annual bazaar.

“I have memories of walking to church and walking to school because it was a neighborhood, and a family,” he said.

“This place is holy ground,” he said, repeating words of a hymn the choir had sung earlier.

“The hands that built this place,” he said as his voice threatened to break, “are holy hands.”

Church founders mortgaged their homes to finance St. Boniface, he reminded the crowd. “Our ancestors made sacrifices so we could be here… Their spirit will go wherever we go, because we are the body of Christ.”

Toward the end of the service, parish administrator the Rev. James McGahagan said closing-ritual prayers over the church’s baptistry, confessional, Stations of the Cross, and statues of Our Lady of Fatima and St. Joseph.

After a final prayer before a tapestry that depicts St. Boniface, the congregation sang an original hymn in honor of the 8th-century martyr.

The choir’s lead soprano, Marian Fadden, wrote the lyrics earlier this year in honor of “our patron saint” who had been “led to the Germans to proclaim God’s word.”

Many worshippers kissed the altar as they filed outdoors to watch 92-year-old Mary Dierolf and 87-year-old Marian Basler share the symbolic duty of locking the door “for the last time.”

“I feel terrible,” church member Bill Lewis, 85, said quietly as a tear slid down his cheek.

His grandson, 8-year-old Jeremy Callahan, stood nearby with his head buried against his mother, his small body shaking with emotion.

The youth had been one of only two children in the First Communion class at St. Boniface this year – a sign of changing demographics.

“I remember all those children receiving First Communion, walking in a procession with ‘angels’ in front of them and behind them,” former parishioner Antoinette “Dolly” Wilcox said, remembering a time when each of her seven children, and their many classmates, could fill pew after pew.

St. Boniface is consolidating into a new parish, St. Andrew, which will use the St. Patrick Church building on Parrish Street as its home.

Following the St. Boniface closing Mass, parishioners processed to St. Patrick’s via motorcade and held benediction there.

Next on the agenda was a banquet at Genetti Hotel & Conference Center in downtown Wilkes-Barre, where many people seemed to be feeling better. Lewis, for one, chuckled as he shared a memory from his days at the former St. Boniface School, when he and another boy deliberately misbehaved so they would have to stay in at recess.

They had access to other children’s packed-from-home lunches, and helped themselves – to the desserts, of course.