Thom Nickels: Sell the mansions, but keep the beauty of the church

It was former Catholic Archbishop Chaput who made the brave but not entirely unexpected move in 2012 when he announced that the Philadelphia Archdiocese would be selling its 13,000 square foot, three-story stone mansion at 5700 City Avenue. (The mansion was purchased by St. Joseph’s University that same year.) 

The sixteen-room, six-car garage structure sat on slightly more than 8 acres of land and was often referred to as a “baronial home.” Purchased for $115,000 in 1935 by Cardinal Dennis Dougherty at a time when the idea of a mansion seemed appropriate for a “Prince of the Church,” the opulent residence eventually began to be seen as an embarrassment of riches in the wake of financially-driven closings of Catholic schools in the area.

Archbishop Chaput was no novice when it came to selling expensive mansions for smaller living quarters. In 1999, as Archbishop of Denver, he sold the Denver bishop’s villa and moved into the diocesan seminary. 

Since the 1960s, there has been a noticeable downturn in the fortunes of the Catholic Church, both in the United States and abroad. The closings of schools, convents, seminaries, and parishes, as well as the consolidation of parishes because of financial problems and empty pews, has been a nuclear winter for a Church that once boasted full and healthy seminaries, convents and overpopulated parishes in the years before the Second Vatican Council. 

Financial losses related to clergy sex abuse issues, in effect, forced the Archdiocese of Boston to sell its Diocesan mansion and grounds to Boston College for $99 million in 2004.

The sale of the Detroit diocesan mansion came relatively early in the game (1989), when the bishop there felt he could no longer live in splendor while the city slumped into abject poverty. The 40,000 square foot bishop’s house was the city’s largest mansion. The property was sold to Detroit Pistons star John Salley.

In Pittsburgh, the Catholic diocesan mansion was sold for two million in 2009. This 39-room mansion in an area known as Squirrel Hill had housed Latin rite Catholic bishops for at least six decades. In the decades before the Second Vatican Council, it was not uncommon for wealthy Catholic families to donate houses and property to the local diocese. In Pittsburgh, the McCahill family donated their great English country home, also described as “baronial” with its beamed ceilings, French doors, silver and brass scones, to the Diocese in 1949. The current bishop of Pittsburgh, Bishop David Zubik, sold the mansion and moved to an apartment in the diocesan seminary.

While the Philadelphia mansion on City Avenue was never a gift to the Archdiocese, the first Archbishop’s home just a few blocks away, was a gift from a real estate developer. The sale of the first “gift house,” however, made it possible for then Cardinal Dougherty to purchase the mansion that Archbishop Chaput sold. 

“The majority of the funds for the purchase came from the sale of the former archbishop’s home a few blocks away,” reported the Boston Pilot, the diocesan newspaper in Boston.

The granite-walled, slate-roofed, Victorian Gothic-style mansion on City Avenue was designed by Quaker architect Addison Hutton in 1882 for the Scull family. The Scull family can be traced to Nicholas Scull (1687-1761), who in 1748 was made surveyor-general of the region.

(Benjamin Franklin, in his autobiography, wrote: “…Nicholas Scull, afterwards surveyor-general, who loves books and sometimes makes verse…”)

Hutton designed many mansions for the wealthy on the Main Line and in Lower Merion Township. Hutton’s 1873 mansion, Pembroke in Bryn Mawr, was destroyed by fire, but his famous Ballytore Castle in Wynnewood, designed for the Hallowell Clothier of Strawbridge & Clothier fame, later became the Agnes Irwin School (1933 to 1960) and is currently St. Sahag and St. Mesrob Armenian Apostolic church.

When the Scull family lived in the Cardinal’s mansion it was called Egerton House. The site included a large home on an adjoining property, which is now a convent for the contemplative Visitation Nuns, an order of nuns who have not modified their religious habit since their founding by Saint Francis de Sales in 1610.

Since it is the nature of mansions to have many owners, Egerton House was renamed The Terraces in 1925, when it was purchased by Richard J. Seltzer, a famous real estate broker of the time. When it was sold to Cardinal Dougherty in 1935, there was a large outdoor swimming pool on the property. The pool was never used by visiting clergy or dignitaries, and according to the Pilot at the time, “It remains a concrete ruin behind the house.”

Visiting dignitaries to the mansion have included Pope John Paul II in 1979, President and Mrs. Ronald Reagan, and the future Pope Pius XII, Cardinal Eugene Pacelli in 1936. 

According to historian Jay P. Dolan, Cardinal Dougherty lived like a prince during his 33-year reign. In The Irish Americans: A History, Dolan writes of Cardinal Dougherty’s “imperious” manner, as if he were a member of the Court of Saint James.

Dolan writes, “In a city ruled by WASPs, he [Dougherty] still wielded considerable political power, quietly but effectively. In 1934 he issued an edict forbidding Catholics to go to the movies, under pain of sin. The people did as they were told, effectively shutting down the movie industry in the city.” 

Catholics of the time, however, expected nothing less from a Prince for the Church.

Today one rarely hears the term “prince” in connection with the College of Cardinals. In fact, long after his death, Cardinal Dougherty’s wide brimmed hat or galero hung on the end of a cord in the Philadelphia basilica. It was a custom in the pre-Vatican II Church to hang a deceased Cardinal’s hat from the ceiling of the local cathedral until it turned to dust. Sadly, this amazing custom has largely been abolished although the galeros of many Cardinals still hang in a number of United States cathedrals. 

The Dougherty-era was a time when the Catholic Church was enjoying its greatest display of prominence and power. It was a time when the Church finally entered the American mainstream; it was, as many have noted, “the social arrival of the Catholic Church.” The “arrival” of Catholicism at this time seems to parallel the “arrival” of the Mormon Church some years ago, especially with the presidential candidacy of George Romney, the Book of Mormon on Broadway — what many commentators, in fact, called “The Mormon Moment.” 

Archbishop Chaput’s idea to sell the mansion can be attributed partially to his Capuchin religious order, whose members take vows of poverty. 

The archbishop sensibly announced the selling of the mansion before listing the names of the 48 Catholic schools scheduled to be closed. Ironically — sadly even — his deference didn’t seem to mitigate the ripples of shock and anger that followed the announcement. Critics posited that the “axing” of the schools was done in a brutal and “un-Christlike manner,” as if business and financial decisions of this sort could somehow be made easier when delivered like the Sermon on the Mount. 

As a former suburban Philadelphia Catholic grade school student myself, I found it hard to relate to these images, if only because as a child I was made to transfer schools twice. While it never occurred to me to cry over bricks and mortar, I was anxious about losing friends. Perhaps it was just my peculiar makeup, but ultimately for me the prospect of a new school meant the end of a stale and all too predictable environment. 

“It’s not the school but the teacher” is a sentiment I’ve come to value.  

Archbishop Chaput’s decision to sell the mansion and live in the Cathedral rectory had some secular humanists and a few liberal Catholics going off the deep end and proclaiming, “Sell everything, sell the Vatican museum, sell St. Peter’s, sell tabernacles the over the world over and pawn all useless, sacred treasures.”

But even if all the gold and silver chalices, all the bejeweled icon and statue coverings were melted down in some smoldering cauldron, it would only feed the hungry for a day. The next day the hungry would return with their empty bowls but the sacred treasures would be lost forever. 

These secular humanist die-hards and liberal Catholics who called for first-century austerity fail to take into account the difference between opulent living and giving the best when it comes to what the ancient Jews believed when it came to decorating the Second Temple of Jerusalem, built by Herod. 

Nearly 20 stories high and constructed by some 10,000 men, the white marble and gold edifice with striking bronze doors was considered to be a “footstool” of God’s presence. It was in this elaborate, incense-smoked place that Jesus himself prayed, and which, incidentally, he never once criticized as being too opulent or extravagant in its expression of adoration of the Father. 

For over a century and a half, hard-working Catholics in the United States gave willingly to build churches that would stand the test of time. Nothing was too good for a temple, be it marble altar rails, towering frescoes or gilded high altars. Living a simpler “humbler” life should mean downsizing from a mansion to a house, but one should never confuse that with transforming beautiful churches into concrete Brutalism bunkers.

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.