- Chronicles was made possible thanks to a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, SpringHill Senior Living, support by the Department of Education, and the generous support of Thomas B Hagen.

(gentle music) - This is WQLN.

(ethereal singing) - Religion, a belief in or devotion to religious faith or observance.

And, in US culture, the three religions that garner the most attention are the Abrahamic religions, Islam, Christianity, and, the oldest, Judaism.

- Religion in its earliest forms is a way of understanding human experience.

- Religions are ways of thinking and behaving in the world that gives life meaning often with relationship to some reality other than this one.

- So, if we think of human beings as a story, that I am the story that I tell about myself, religion is my story connected to a larger story that connects me into the universe.

(ethereal singing) - Drive through any city, any town, from Boston to Seattle, and you'll be hard pressed not to pass one of America's many, many churches, each one with its own unique history, many of them emptier than they once were.

So, why are there so many?

What role did they play in shaping our communities?

And, what does the future look like for these religious structures?

- Generally, those of us who study religion will argue religions are ways of thinking and behaving in the world.

This is a question that gets scholars of religion into fist fights.

So, it is a complicated question.

- I would argue that the heart of religion is this experience, this need for meaning, to have value, to be connected into something greater than myself.

But, we find in Christianity, in Judaism, in Islam, a heavy emphasis on community.

I am a part of this and so I have an obligation to the others in this community.

- My religion, my faith shapes how I look at the world, shapes how I look at myself, at my neighbors, those who are perhaps less fortunate than me.

- To make us better people, to allow us to find pathways, to help mend the world in so many different ways.

- To try to find that place that is what the Christian mystics have called the unified field, that place beyond right and wrong, up and down, left and right, that place of of love, and peace, and joy, that also helps me to be part of transforming the world around me.

- And, it happens to be the essence of a fulfilling life.

That's what religion is to me.

- The United States the world recognizes today is one born out of immigrants arriving on the shores of North America.

- Also, you had religious people leaving Europe for all kinds of reasons, arriving here in the colonies, and bringing with them their religious sensibilities, all different kinds of ways of imagining God, and worshiping that God.

- When people move places, religious communities often will function as ready made stand-ins for communities that people might have left behind.

- And, eventually, those groups needed a place.

And, sacred places are important to people because they sustain faith, they bolster faith, and they help express the faith of the resident population.

- And, so the establishment of a formal structure, a building, a leadership structure is a way to take something from where I was and reestablish it here.

- Arriving onto the shores of North America brought new religious freedoms and a need for new spaces.

The importance of these spaces has long been established throughout human history.

- The creation of religious spaces is one of the ways to hold onto identity.

There is evidence in early Mesopotamia, thousands of years before the Egyptians, of actual physical structures that were designed for religious purposes.

It's designed around the ritual life.

It marks sacred space, that as I cross a threshold from the outside of the building into the building, now I am someplace else.

I have left my ordinary life behind and I have entered the domain of the sacred.

- As America's migrant population pushes west, they eventually arrive on the banks of Lake Erie.

- So, you have folks coming to Erie, Pennsylvania, for example, in the 18th century, 19th century, French, English, other nationalities.

In the city of Erie, of course, you had an influx of immigrants in the late 19th century, early 20th century, a lot of working class Catholic people for example, from Germany, from Poland, from Italy, and elsewhere, from Ireland, creating parish communities, and neighborhood churches, and creating these wonderful buildings that really were the anchors for neighborhoods throughout the city.

- And, of the many parishes to form within Erie and the surrounding area, one of the oldest is St. John's Lutheran Memorial.

- This church traces its history back to 1808.

- Erie was literally nothing.

The city wasn't even around for another 40 years.

- But, Erie's population was growing and so was its desire for more churches.

- The original Presbyterian church in Erie was founded about 1815.

- We're sitting in the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Paul, first established in the 1820s.

- St. Patrick's was built in about 1834.

- So, Anja Hesset's been here pretty close to about 175 years in the city.

- St. James is the oldest denominational Black church within the city of Erie.

- By the late 1900s, Erie, like many places across America, has a diverse mix of denominational parishes catering to the religious needs of its population, each of which desires its own sacred building.

But, religious buildings in the new world come with new challenges.

- St. John's be... You... Is a German founded congregation and, currently, if you go to Germany, the Lutheran church is the state church.

And, so your taxes, whether you're Lutheran or not, go to pay for those churches, the pastors, the operating expenses.

- The situation when European immigrants go up to the United States is radically different.

We do not have states supporting religious institutions.

We are going to have religious institutions sort of forming at an ad hoc basis.

So, it is quite a different environment than they were leaving behind.

So, the first thing you're going to get is all the money has to come from donations, from voluntary gift giving.

And, it's not that that didn't happen in Europe, it absolutely did.

But, this is... Becomes the way that that has to happen.

- Often, they would worship in their homes.

There would be crude examples of house churches and eventually those would involve then into larger congregations.

And, eventually those groups needed a place.

- But, buildings require money, and that's never easy to come by, especially for the parish of St. Patrick in the face of anti-Catholic sentiments.

- These people were so poor when they came here that when they went to build the church, they tried with the different banks in town to get the money and no one would lend them the money.

I mean, these people didn't have anything.

And, so a group of farmers walked from here to Pittsburgh, which is 120 miles and borrowed the money down there and came back up and built the second St. Patrick's Church, which at that time served as the pro cathedral of the diocese.

They were incredibly strong-willed people.

- Before you can build, you first need land, often provided and paid for by wealthier members of the congregation.

- St. John's owns the whole block.

This block was given to the church or made available to the church through an early member named Conrad Brown.

This area was an orchard at one point in the Brown estate and this was outside the city of Erie.

We claim to be the oldest Lutheran church in the city of Erie, but the folks from Lutheran Memorial will say, well, no, you weren't in the city of Erie.

Lutheran Memorial is the oldest in the city of Erie.

When the first people were looking for some kind of religious services from, probably from a visiting pastor, because there was no building, there was no pastor established here, then in the 1830s, they became a little bit more organized.

They had a small building.

They built a larger building in 1861.

And, at the turn of the century, about 1897, that's when they dedicated this large sanctuary that we're sitting in right now.

- But, by the latter part of the 19th century, the country itself begins to coalesce certainly after the Civil War, 1860s, 1870s.

At the same time that there is an influx of immigrants from other places and congregations begin to have the monetary wherewithal to erect buildings like this one.

And, they would...

They would pay as they went along.

They would...

They would charge pew rent sometimes and charge their congregants a couple of coins to sit in a pew on a Sunday morning.

And, they were able to pool their resources to create a common house, a common house of God.

Religious organizations are able to stimulate and energize their members to commit to a certain mission.

And, that's one of the great marvels of a town like Erie.

That small congregations, small parochial organizations were able to build schools, offices, support structures, and then places of worship as beautiful as this one, contributing their own pennies voluntarily.

- This is a passion shared by Erie's Jewish community as well.

- Almost every single family in the community contributed.

And, if you look at some of the notices and the...

The sort of recognition boards, they really felt strongly that every gift was absolutely as important.

And, that because everybody contributed, it became everybody's project and everybody had buy-in.

- And, so all this happens because people feel compelled to do this.

No one twists their arm.

There's no attacks levied.

There's people going and asking, do you want to be a part of this?

- It's a true statement in the fact that when you're passionate about something, your money goes there.

And, people were passionate about their faith and what their faith community did.

And, that's where this amazing building came to be.

- One of the quickest ways to generate the sheer cash necessary to put up a building like this is memorialization, to allow families to memorialize the beloved dead by attaching their name to windows, to liturgical appointments, to furnishings, and so forth.

And, of course, in the 19th century too you begin to have in the United States mass production by means of mechanical devices of even liturgical or architectural structures.

So, you'd have factories from which you could purchase a holy table, or a rude screen, or some other kind of liturgical appointment, and family names could be attached to all of those.

The great challenge we have today, of course, is we don't necessarily have the craftsmanship any longer nor can we amass the kind of dollars necessary to erect buildings like this.

- With the provision of funds, parishes could incorporate the details and stylings of their cultural heritage.

(choir singing) - I think one of the things that make this building beautiful is its simplicity.

There's an elegance to it.

This building was built in the 1860s right across the street from the courthouse where members originally met, before there was a building in this place.

And, when this parish was established and this building came into being first in the 1820s, and then in the 1860s, a group of people who believed that it was necessary to find a place to gather, they began to think about what they could do for the community and how they could engage the community and their own personal faith.

- It is large.

When you just look at the sanctuary yourself, it's like, wow, that's really big.

But, then there is a whole a Christian education wing and then there was an addition on to that wing some years later.

And, so it's an enormous building.

There's lots of motifs that are carried throughout this sanctuary and throughout the whole building.

Over the doors, you'll see a lot of this sort of grape and vine motif that's in every room of this church.

This idea of Jesus says, I am the vine and you are the branches, about bearing fruit.

The detail that went into this to me is just staggering.

- The Irish Catholic population presence here in Erie was over on the east side.

There was a wood frame building on that side of town that was the pro cathedral that represented sort of ecclesiastical authority for Irish Catholics in this city.

It was replaced in 1907 by the current mason rebuilding that we see there, that's got that very powerful external granite facade, with little crenelated battlements up above.

The irony about St. Patrick's is that it's kind of a bipolar building.

The exterior is very intimidating.

The blocks of stone were carved in such a way that they look incredibly strong and heavy.

And, yet you go into that building and it's open, and diaphanous, and there's all that lovely classical detailing which again points to the eclecticism of American religious church architecture.

The other peculiar thing about St. Patrick Church and most folks in Erie know about that building is that it really was fairly progressive for its time within Catholic circles.

It's got a slope floor, which you rarely saw in Catholic liturgical design.

It doesn't have a longitudinal plan.

In fact, there are no load-bearing columns within the nave of that building.

- The pastor at the time, when he had it designed around the stations also stipulated that there'd be no pillars in the church.

And, so if you go into the attic above that roof, it's 17 feet high, and the ceiling that we see is supported by 18 inch square hemlock beams that hang down from the roof of the church and hold this roof up, the ceiling up.

- The granite walls do all the work of carrying everything in that structure.

And, then the congregation is allowed to see all of its members as well as all the elements in the liturgical appointments in the sanctuary.

- The outside of the church went up in one year, the building was enclosed, and then there were nine Italian craftsmen who didn't speak a word of English, and they spent two and a half years in here.

All of this is hand carved.

Every bit that you see of the bric-a-brac is hand carved.

- Of the many features of St. Patrick, the most attention grabbing are the stations of the cross.

- The parish was founded in 1837.

There were four priests brothers here, the Colley brothers, from 1892 to 1954.

And, Father Peter Colley, the oldest, went to Chicago for the World's Fair, and he saw a set of stations of the cross that had been hand carved in Munich, Germany.

And, he commissioned the set that we now have, which is the second set.

He put them in storage and he hired an architect when he had the money and designed the church around the stations of the cross.

And, they're incredible.

He paid $600 a piece for them.

- $600 is the equivalent of roughly $20,000 in today's money, an estimated total of $300,000 for the entire set.

But, they're worth far more to the church.

- Today, they're insured for $6.8 million and each one is carved down to two pieces of hemlock hand carved in Munich, Germany.

And, they're priceless.

Well, after 12 years being here, I just stand in awe at the magnificent of this building.

Aside from it being a place of worship, it's just an incredible, amazing building.

It's a piece of art.

- These buildings are not the houses of mere mortals.

These are houses of God in the imaginations of the people who erected them, houses of God's people.

And, so they have to have a certain extraordinary character to them just as somebody might dress up or put on formal wear for a particular performance, or for a particular event, for a wedding, for some other kind of a ritual.

These buildings are dressed up in a special way too.

- But, that is why those buildings are built that way.

It is meant to evoke a kind of awe.

It is meant to use aesthetics as a medium to try to get one in a different head space, get one in a different physical space than the world outside.

- And, so I'm grateful for those who built this, this sanctuary.

It's...

It's nothing you would ever build today.

Nothing you could build today.

You wouldn't be able to pull the resources together.

So, we take care of it.

We're stewards of it, because we want it to continue to be a blessing to everybody in the neighborhood.

- To create a structure, for example, like St. Peter's Cathedral, would cost a great deal of money, just in labor cost, materials, all of that.

It probably couldn't be done.

That's why a lot of modern churches are built the way they are with more simplicity.

- But, I think the economics trumps that every day.

For an example, to have a 30 foot high ceiling, you have... That's a whole new building.

You think about it.

It's literally a whole new building that you have to heat up.

You will find in many of the larger cathedrals, it's not just to keep the people cool, it's to bring that hot air back down to ground level, because it costs a lot of money to heat the volume of a building like that.

- For some of these larger buildings, the bill for heating will be in excess of $50,000 a year, with increasing energy costs, building expenses continue to grow.

These tall ceilings pose a very real financial burden and an absolute nightmare when it comes to replacing light bulbs.

But the designers of these buildings had a different priority in mind.

- So, for example, you enter a church and churches tend to have vaulted ceilings, particularly cathedrals.

It draws the eye upward, in this notion of raising the mind to God.

And, mosques will do very similar things.

So, if you enter a space that is built as a mosque, you have these domed, these elaborate mosaics that the patterns themselves are meant to reflect the theology of the oneness of God.

- Despite the shared origins and commonality between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, there has always been division and exclusion, even within the same church.

- Christianity does not have a history in spite of its embrace of unity and one faith of being unified on most anything.

We found a reason to fight about absolutely everything and to split off and to different groups just for just about anything that you can think of.

- One of the sad and dark aspects of Roman Catholicism here in the States is that the Irish often would require Italians to worship in the basements of their churches.

The Italians actually came up with a phrase, (speaking in foreign language) means an upstairs church.

They aspire to have an upstairs church.

You'll find Italian Catholics here in this city talking about St. Michael's Church or St. Paul's, which really were places of pride and national identity as much as they were places of religious identity.

- The church, church has baggage in our culture and church has baggage in a lot of people's lives.

- Churches changed policy over the years.

Presbyterian churches did not have women in leadership until the 1970s.

And, when that happens, every time there's a change in the top policy, church.. People tend to break away, because I don't like that.

- Some people don't want that, right?

Some people want the traditional service.

There are those who want their Catholic mass to be in Latin - But, in an ever-changing society, many of the denominational leaders recognize that they too must change or risk being left behind.

- The two biggest problems are, first of all, we exclude women, and, second, we exclude gay, lesbian, transgender people, and we're not a complete family when we exclude anybody.

So, we've gotta be inclusive if we're gonna do what we think Jesus asks us to do.

- The church is always like 50 years behind.

The church has finally sort of come to the place where it's realized that the church doesn't have the luxury of being selfish.

It's not called to be selfish in the first place.

And, so the question for the church is, if the culture isn't gonna help prop us up, we better take very seriously what it means to walk faithfully in the world today.

We don't have the cultural luxury of cultural Christianity anymore.

- But, in an ever-changing society, many of the denominational leaders recognize that they too must change or risk being left behind.

- What the civil rights leaders used to say is that the church hour, the 11 o'clock church hour is the most segregated hour in America.

And, I think that's a stain on our faith.

I think it's something that we have to continue to work on and address and own our own complicity.

Much of the money that... That is used to build these and maybe even fund the endowments comes from places we shouldn't be proud of.

And, possibly, many of our churches across our nation are built by slave labor.

- Many of these large structures within the community were built by Black folk, slave labor.

The White House was built by Black folk, slaves.

United States Congress building, the Capitol Building was built by slaves.

So, that, I mean, that's a part of our history.

- And, these are matters that we have to reckon with and we have a lot of work to do.

- Each community has the resources it needs within itself, in the people that are in that community, and the ideas and the creativity within that community, to address its issues.

- Erie's religious communities helped build the city of Erie.

Now, from within these impressive structures, religious leaders are working hard to find new ways to serve those that call the city of Erie home.

(choir singing) Coming up on our next episode of Houses of Faith... - I think possibly since World War II, I think the Jewish world has been possibly somewhat traumatized.

- So, we're seeing some real significant losses for some of those communities.

- The building is nice, but if we didn't have the building, we'd find another way to worship God.

- What's going to become eventually of these buildings?

- We've earned the cynicism and distrust.

- And, no matter how painful it is, we need to have the conversations.

- Because, there's a special place in hell waiting for what those men did.

- Chronicles was made possible thanks to a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, SpringHill Senior Living, support by the Department of Education, and the generous support of Thomas B Hagen.

(gentle music) - This is WQLN.