REQUIEM FOR A VERY GOOD ITALIAN FRIEND!

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At the end of my vacation, a very good Italian friend of mine who was my former parishioner at the Church of the Most Holy Trinity in Augusta died. She had been our parish's "hostess" for parish receptions and major dinners at the rectory. She was also active in the Council of Catholic Women and past president of that organization.

Her Requiem was videoed since her Italian siblings and other relatives could not come to Augusta from Italy.

Most Holy Trinity was completed and consecrated in April of 1863. The Jardine pipe organ you hear could not be shipped from New York because of the Union blockade of the Confederacy. But it arrived in 1866 due in large part to Most Holy Trinity's associate pastor at the time, Father Abram Ryan, the priest-poet of the Confederacy who offered poetry recitals of his poems in Augusta and raised the funds to have it shipped.

The Church has remained untouched since its consecration except the altar table was pulled from the reredos. But as you can see, this Church is ideal for both the Extraordinary Form of the Mass and the modern Ordinary Form and Mass technically could still be celebrated ad orientem quite easily. The altar railing is completely in tact and has marvelous brass gates that came from a Church in France in the 1860's. So no telling how old these are.

The parish was founded on its current property in 1810 and primarily was composed of Catholics of French origin. In the 1840's due to an influx of Irish immigrants to Augusta to escape the potato famine and to find work in the textile industry and cotton fields and also to build Augusta's canal, the small frame church was expanded. By the middle of the 1850's the pastor realized that a new and larger Church needed to be built and so the corner stone of the new Church as it is still called, was laid in 1857 and dedicated to St. Vincent de Paul. The pastor who had been there since the 1840's, Father John Barry, realized that the Irish were eclipsing the French and had taken over the parish so to placate the French he laid the corner stone honoring a French saint. By that time he was also the second Bishop of the Diocese of Savannah having been established in 1850. Prior to that it was under the Diocese of Charleston, SC and prior to Charleston's erection as a diocese, it was under Baltimore.

Most Holy Trinity was also a large part of the trustee movement in the USA in the 1860's and has an interesting checkered history in that regard.

When the Church was consecrated at the height of the War between the States, also known as the Civil War, an Irish pastor was in place. The following week by vote of the clergy and laity, yes, laity, the parish took on a new patron saint, Saint Patrick of Ireland! And yes, without officially changing the name of the parish, it was called St. Patrick's Catholic Church until 1970 when two parishes in downtown Augusta were closed and merged into "Saint Patrick" and the original name, never officially changed, was restored to the Church of the Most Holy Trinity.

The Irish went so far as to remove a cast iron statue of Saint Vincent de Paul that was nearly 6 feet tall, and quite heavey, crushed it and buried it behind the Church so as to poke in the eye the horrified French who had their patron saint, Saint Vincent de Paul de-throned as the patron saint of the parish.

I discovered poor old Saint Vincent de Paul when construction workers building the foundation for the church's new sacristy in 1998 hit it as the dug the ground and I asked them to unearth it to find out what it was. And sure enough it was Saint Vincent de Paul! He was re-interred at the same spot, so damaged was it by deliberate violence of the Irish!

I thought I gave a rather nice homily for the funeral of Cheti Warner!