Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Religious Statues Left Behind Find Their Own Patron Saint

After the makeover of St. Sebastian, the arrows that pierce the martyr’s torso look newly received. After the touch-up of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the mystic seems even more serene. 

Now it is St. Barbara’s turn, and Lord knows she can use some cosmetic attention. 

“I just got her a month ago,” Lou McClung says, as he dabs a paintbrush to a faded life-size statue of the patron saint of those who work in explosives. 

Nearby, a tired St. Anthony of Padua, patron of lost things, awaits his own appointment, as does a worn St. Rose of Lima, once known for her beauty but now, in the estimation of Mr. McClung, “a big hot mess.”

His words convey affection, not irreverence. Mr. McClung, a makeup artist by trade, has become a sort of patron saint of religious statues left behind. He gathers them in a shuttered Catholic church that he owns, then restores them to their former ethereal state — to when people seeking intervention gazed with hope into their glass eyes. 

“It’s a calling,” says Mr. McClung, whose rescue mission provides one answer to an awkward question: Where do the religious statues go once their churches close? 

Like other urban dioceses around the country, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Cleveland has been grappling with the reality that things are not as they were — and not only because of the recent priest scandals that have caused so much pain and disenchantment.

Many urban Catholics have moved to the far suburbs. Many parishes have fallen into arrears. 

And many priests — actually, that is part of the problem: there are not many priests. 

Those “Going My Way” days, when every parish with an aged pastor seemed to have an energetic young replacement waiting in the sacristy, exist mostly on celluloid now. 

In 1970, the diocese had 565 priests available for ministry; by 2010, the number had plummeted by more than half.

In 2009, after nearly a decade of evaluation, the diocese announced a “reconfiguration,” a pleasant term for the closing and merging of dozens of parishes. 

(Last week, though, critics of the reconfiguration announced that the Vatican had ordered the bishop of Cleveland, Richard Lennon, to reopen 13 of the closed parishes after determining that he had not followed proper procedure.) 

So began a series of farewell Masses in old churches that were once the beating hearts of ethnic communities — Polish, Slavic, Hungarian — in Cleveland and Akron, Lorain and Elyria.

The moment that the consecrated Eucharist, called the Blessed Sacrament, was removed from the premises, these churches effectively became mere buildings, albeit ones in which generations had been baptized, married and eulogized. 

But what about all the statues, stained glass and other religious items bought with money earned in the mills and factories of north-central Ohio? 

The disposition of these items was entrusted to Henninger’s, a local religious supply company acting as an agent of the diocese. 

If they were not placed with a neighboring parish, or one with the same ethnicity, these “used church goods from closed churches” were displayed for sale to other churches on a Web site, www.church-inventory.com.

Here they are, the holy detritus: used chalices and baptismal fonts, altars of repose and altars of sacrifice, small crucifixes and a crucifix 18 feet tall. Stained-glass windows. A Yamaha organ. 

A wall plaque in loving memory of a certain monsignor. And statues, from St. Aloysius to a figure identified only as a “female saint.”

This is where Mr. McClung, savior of statues, comes in. A graduate of the Catholic school system, he is 39 and large, with a Celtic tattoo on his left bicep, though he is more Italian than Irish. 

He manufactures his own line of cosmetics, and has spent the last 20 years “teaching women how to look their very best,” according to the Web site for his company, Lusso Cosmetics.

Mr. McClung had dabbled in statue restoration. (The first was a damaged St. Clare of Assisi that he bought “from some old crazy lady in an antique store.”)

But when the diocese announced the reconfiguration, he imagined many statues leaving the Cleveland area or being buried in storage, and thought of all the prayers whispered before them in various languages, uttered in thanks and in grief. 

Mr. McClung presented a plan to the diocese: a not-for-profit museum for the statues of closed churches. “And after a while,” he says, “they realized I wasn’t a flake.”

The first purchase he made from the Henninger’s inventory was a statue of Our Lady of Grace, from the closed Holy Trinity Church in Barberton. 

Soon after came St. Therese, from the closed St. Hyacinth Church in Cleveland; St. Francis of Assisi, from the closed St. Ladislaus Church in Lorain; St. Stephen, from the closed St. Margaret of Hungary Church in Chagrin Falls.

It got crowded in his home, but not any louder. 

Some of the statues were missing limbs or had been repainted with Benjamin Moore — “often by janitors or parishioners who mean well,” he says, recalling a Pieta’s Jesus with orange hair.

Mr. McClung then added to his religious acquisitions an entire church: the closed St. Hedwig’s in Lakewood ($150,000, rectory and school buildings included). 

He moved into the rectory, made one of the classrooms his skin-care studio and — with financial help from an anonymous benefactor — began to create a museum.

Helping out was his father, Jim, a Vietnam War-haunted mechanic with whom he had a trying relationship. The father complained at first that the statues “freaked him out,” Mr. McClung recalls, but he gradually adapted to the glass-eye stares, and the two men grew closer as they demolished and painted. 

When Jim McClung, 63, died of heart problems on Christmas Day in 2010, the memorial service for this nonpracticing Catholic was held in his son’s desanctified church.

The doors of the Museum of Divine Statues opened last April to reveal an entirely reimagined space that still evoked a Catholic church — and not only because of the whiff of incense or the Gregorian chants playing in the background.

An all-star lineup of saints along the side walls. Stained-glass windows from a closed church in Slavic Village. 

Dozens of first-class relics — pieces of saints, literally — under glass. A collection of rescued Marian statues. Even a gift shop, operated by Mr. McLung’s mother, Lucy, and guarded by St. Joan of Arc.

The museum is nothing if not emotional, Mr. McClung says. Most visitors thank him, with many gladly making donations to underwrite the cost of the statue restorations. 

Others “are still hurting,” he says, and direct their anger at him; he usually suffers in martyr-like silence.

Then there are those who respond by dropping off worn statues in need of a home — even leaving abandoned statues at his doorstep. 

Now, in the basement of the old school, a ragtag gaggle of the beatific: St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes; St. Florian, patron of firefighters; Our Lady of Lourdes; an angel from a Cleveland homeless shelter.

“Her wings are around here somewhere,” Mr. McClung says.

A group of two dozen women from St. Raphael parish in Bay Village arrives for a late-morning tour. 

Eddie Schwertner, Mr. McClung’s stepfather and a retired wastewater treatment plant worker, leads the women to the center of the room, where the museum’s burly founder awaits his audience. “Can you just tell us whatever made you do this?” one of the women asks. “We’re very grateful.”

Mr. McClung once again explains his desire to keep the statues here, where they belong. He reminds his visitors that they are welcome to make a donation or sponsor the restoration of a statue. 

Then he turns their attention back to the wonder of the saints that surround them.

“If you want to see a great set of eyes,” he says, “check out St. Vincent de Paul.”