The Roman Catholic churches stand 66 miles apart, one in the centre of Harlem, the other on 82 acres between a farm and a hunting club in this rural hamlet in Dutchess County. The Harlem church, St. Thomas the Apostle, is an exquisite piece of neo-Gothic architecture, its spiky terracotta crown resembling a wedding cake.
Finished in 1907, the church first served Irish parishioners and then a black congregation that waned and withered, its Sunday Mass sparsely attended, its building in dire need of repairs, until closing in 2003. Now it faces demolition.
The church here, Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, is still under construction, modest in appearance yet impressive in size. It will have a steel frame, a bluish stone facade and seats for 1,200 people — four times the number that can fit in the church it will replace, which in recent years has rapidly run out of space for its growing flock of New York City transplants.
The two churches are connected by 12 stained-glass windows from Germany depicting New Testament scenes, which have graced St. Thomas for a century and will soon surround the altar at Blessed Kateri. The church is named after a 17th-century Mohawk who converted to Catholicism against her tribe’s wishes.
“We’re building a very large church,” Msgr. Desmond O’Connor, pastor at Blessed Kateri, said in an interview. “And we thought it could sustain windows as big and imposing as the ones down in Harlem.”
The transfer of the windows was arranged through a new program in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York through which priests can select sacred objects — crucifixes, chalices and pulpits, for example — from shuttered churches and give them new homes.
The archdiocese began these artefact adoptions last year when it closed 21 parishes, most of them in Manhattan, the Bronx and in old industrial suburbs amid the shrinking of the Catholic populations there.
Church law prohibits the sale of such religious items and calls for their disposal only if they are damaged beyond repair, so the recent wave of closings presented a problem: What to do with all the stuff — some of it beautiful, much of it quite worn — behind the churches’ padlocked doors.
There are similar programs in other parts of the country, most with elaborate safeguards, including password-protected Web sites open only to priests, and storage areas equipped with surveillance cameras and alarms.
“The last thing you want is to find one of those pieces in some antique shop or on eBay,” said Msgr. Louis A. D’Addezio of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, whose artefact-swap program was set up in 1991, one of the first in the nation.
Often, the items move from a shuttered church to an active one without much notice or protest. But there are times when those transfers end up entangled in legal disputes, as was the case with the windows from St. Thomas.
In 2004, former St. Thomas parishioners sued the Archdiocese of New York to keep it from razing their church, arguing that they should have a say on what happens to the property.
Politicians asked preservation officials to grant the church landmark status, and a descendant of the German windows’ maker wrote a letter to the archdiocese, calling the proposed demolition of St. Thomas a “barbaric act.”
“We were trying to prevent what’s been a house of worship and architectural icon for more than a century from being picked apart and destroyed,” said Eric V. Tait Jr., 68, a former altar boy at St. Thomas who has helped lead the fight to save the church, which is on West 118th Street near St. Nicholas Avenue. The church is still standing, but its future is doubtful.
In most cases, once church officials decide to close a parish, workers visit the building to catalogie what is inside, photographing the objects, noting their origin and artistic or religious significance.
Priests are allowed to give small items to other priests, preferably from neighbouring parishes; whatever is not distributed is wrapped and stored in empty convents, schoolhouses or warehouses.
The Philadelphia Archdiocese, which has closed 22 churches since 1992, opens its storage vault once a month for two hours, and priests from all over have come by to look at the offerings. “We’ve placed items in Florida, Delaware, Nebraska and in New Mexico,” Monsignor D’Addezio said.
Two years ago, the Archdiocese of Newark hired an architectural historian, Troy Simmons, to manage its property. The job includes retrieving the artwork and sacred items that had been left inside closed churches there, some of which had been locked for decades.
“We found these beautiful oil paintings gathering dust under the stairs at St. John’s Church in Newark, probably since the church’s renovation in the 1960s,” Mr. Simmons said as he stood in a second-floor room at a former convent in East Orange, N.J., where the paintings are stored behind locked doors.
“There are treasures like this hidden all around,” he said.
The paintings, century-old portraits of female saints, share the space with statues, vestments, brass tabernacles and carved wooden crucifixes, which lie side by side on a pine floor.
Visits to the storage space must be arranged in advance. Some of the items, like the paintings (prices upon request) and a reed organ ($300), can be viewed on the archdiocese’s Web site, though they are for sale only to parishes and religious institutions, Mr. Simmons said.
The Archdiocese of Boston introduced a program to relocate religious objects in 2004, ahead of a vast reorganization that led to the closing of 44 churches.
At one point, there were hundreds of objects: pews, statues, Stations of the Cross and altars, stored in an empty church equipped with a climate-control system and a burglar alarm, said Kathleen Heck, who is in charge of the program.
“We try to be very good custodians,” Ms. Heck said.
Little by little, she said, the items have found new homes.
St. Patrick’s Church in Stoneham, Mass., a Boston suburb, concluded a $6.7 million expansion project in 2005. Its new building has several items from shuttered churches, including an altar from Nuestra Señora del Carmen in Lowell, 21 miles away, and a lectern from St. Joseph’s parish in the Hyde Park section of Boston, about nine miles south.
In Weymouth, Mass., another Boston suburb, Sacred Heart Church, which was destroyed by fire in 2005, reopened last December with stained-glass windows and Stations of the Cross — the sequence of scenes portraying Jesus’s journey to his crucifixion — culled from six closed churches.
“We had all these people call us and visit us to tell us how great they felt that the religious objects they had in their churches are now in our church and not relegated to storage,” said Sacred Heart’s pastor, the Rev. Daniel J. Riley.
Here, at the new Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, space for the stained-glass windows from St. Thomas the Apostle has already been carved into the walls, but for now, the voids remain filled by clear glass.
In August 2005, a judge dismissed the lawsuit filed by the parishioners at St. Thomas on grounds that interfering in the internal operations of the Catholic Church would violate the separation of church and state.
The parishioners have not appealed the ruling, said Mr. Tait, the former altar boy who is one of the founders of the Harlem Preservation Foundation, partly because they do not have money for a lawyer.
The efforts to turn the church into a historic landmark have also stalled. Peg Breen, president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, a preservationist group, said that the city has so far declined to entertain the request, though last year it designated two other Harlem Catholic churches as landmarks: All Saints, on East 129th Street, and St. Aloysius, on West 132nd Street.
The New York Archdiocese, for its part, has suspended its plans to build apartments for senior citizens at the St. Thomas site and has not yet applied for a full demolition permit.
A spokesman, Joseph Zwilling, said in an interview that demolition remains “at least the most plausible and likely ultimate disposition” for the church and that the windows are still expected to be moved from there to here, even if he does not know when.
The cost to build the new church here and refurbish the old one right next to it amounts to $12 million; $8 million of it borrowed from the archdiocese, the rest a gift from the archdiocese. The work includes converting the 350-seat nave in the old Blessed Kateri into meeting rooms.
Dedicated in 1999, the old church is now too small for the 1,600 families who are members of the parish and the 770 children enrolled in its religious education programme.
If all goes as planned, Monsignor O’Connor, the pastor at Blessed Kateri, said that he would celebrate the first Mass at the new church in September.
“We might not have the windows in place by then,” he added. “But we’ll have them at some point. They’ll look beautiful.”
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