Groundbreaking at Madison church

MADISON  Bishop Serratelli helped St. Vincent Martyr Parish here break ground May 1 on a $5.340 million renovation of the interior of its 111-year-old stone Gothic Revival church, designed to improve the worship experience of its parishioners and greatly improve handicapped accessibility to the building.

Wearing a white hard hat, a smiling Bishop Serratelli dedicated the ambitious project with prayers and the lifting of a ceremonial silver shovel filled with soil while presiding over the groundbreaking event on a rainy afternoon. Funding for the ambitious project — which St. Vincent’s anticipates will be completed by April 1 next year — will be provided by generous parishioners through the parish’s “Building Our Future” capital campaign, according to Jan Figenshu, the parish’s pastoral associate.

“The new configuration [of the church’s interior] with this renovation will lead to enhanced worship of the community as a whole,” said Msgr. George Hundt, St. Vincent’s pastor, who participated in the groundbreaking ceremony with Bishop Emeritus Rodimer and countless members of the parish community, including clergy, staff and laity — among them members of the committee that oversaw development of the project and young people. “I’m feeling grateful to everyone for his or her time, talent and treasure in working for our parish’s future. It’s been a collaborative effort. Now we put this project in God’s hands,” Msgr. Hundt said.

The renovation — the sixth in the church’s history — requires the gutting of the church interior and calls for the repositioning of the altar from its current location “in the round” at the center to the rear wall of the church. This design requires the removal some seating at the back and the doors that lead to the rear parking lot. Also, a reredos, or high altar, that was removed from a Vincentian church in Brooklyn will be installed. Also to be replaced will be the altar table, baptismal font, the ambo and the tabernacle, which will be re-positioned behind the altar, Figenshu said.

The project also calls for pews to replace some of the chairs in the 475-seat worship space to be placed at an angle, “so that people can see each other” and to promote a “greater sense of gathering.” The church will not lose seating. Workers will build a new entrance onto the front of the church that will include a vesting room for clergy, Figenshu said.

To make the church more handicapped accessible, the worship space will feature an elevator and a lift inside and grading outside on the property. Its interior also will include four handicapped-accessible restrooms. The building will feature other upgrades, such as a new air-conditioning system, Figenshu said.

Last weekend, St. Vincent’s held a Ritual to Reverence the Altar to bid farewell in a prayerful way to the altar that had served as the center of the faith community for 40 years. After the homily at Masses, parishioners were invited to reverence the altar by approaching it as individuals or in groups and place their hands in prayer upon the altar, which will be reverently and carefully dismantled and placed in safe keeping with the intent of finding a sacred purpose for it in the future, Figenshu said.

The ambitious renovations to St. Vincent’s join work that has been ongoing for a $2 million, two-story addition to parish school, which broke ground at a ceremony presided at by Bishop Serratelli this past January. The school project, scheduled for completion by August, will provide six more classrooms for a student population that has grown fourfold in recent years since the re-establishment of its middle-school grades, Msgr. Hundt said.

St. Vincent’s developed these two renovation projects — and many other initiatives — as products of its ongoing “Envision: Planning Our Parish Future,” a comprehensive, results-driven planning process that already has inspired the parish to expand further its reach in spreading the “Good News” of the Gospel.” Planning for the church project included extensive discussions with every sector of the parish community, Msgr. Hundt said.

While the church undergoes renovations, St. Vincent’s has mapped out the following schedule of worship:

• Weekend and holy day worship and Baptisms in the school gym;

• Daily Mass at 8:30 a.m. and noon (no noon Mass on Saturdays) at St. Paul Inside the Walls: the Diocesan Center for Evangelization, also in Madison;

• Funerals and weddings at St. Thomas More Church, Convent Station, and neighboring churches;

• Special events at Holy Family Chapel at the College of St. Elizabeth, Convent Station; and

• Reservation of the Blessed Sacrament in St. Vincent’s rectory.

St. Vincent’s has asked that parishioners volunteer to organize into teams to spearhead the transformation of the auditorium into the weekend worship space.

The renovation project makes improvements to the current church, which was built in 1905 as the third church of the parish, which this year marks 177 years since its founding. Its original design was taken from Church of Oxford, England, a 13th century structure. Jeremiah O’Rourke, who designed the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart, Newark, and is considered the father of American church architecture, designed St. Vincent’s current church, according to the parish history.

“The renovations of the church combine a connected sense of community with a transcendental experience. It will allow for more movement [of Mass participants] on the altar. Also, Catholic symbols will be more visible to people throughout the church,” Figenshu said. “St. Vincent’s has always reacted to the liturgical needs of the parish. With the renovation, it continues to address those needs,” she said.