Despite years of planning and bingo fund-raisers, a grass-roots group's hopes of turning its former Fells Point church into a Slavic heritage museum were dashed yesterday.
St. Stanislaus Kostka Church Museum Inc. found out that it had lost its bid to buy the church from the Franciscan friars. Instead, the South Ann Street property will go to Mother Seton Academy, a Catholic school next to it that wants to expand.
Late last year the likelihood of a deal between the museum group and the friars appeared unlikely. The friars worried that the former parishioners, devastated by the 2000 closing of St. Stanislaus, wanted to open a renegade church. And the increasingly frustrated museum group felt that the friars were stringing it along, looking for a reason not to sell the group the property.
Yesterday, those feelings intensified.
"They just weren't bargaining in good faith," said Michael Sarnecki, a leader of the museum group. "They just played us along. They're supposed to be people of God. Where is the honesty and integrity?"
The friars said that if anyone was strung along, they were. The Rev. Robert A. Twele, treasurer of the Franciscan friars' St. Anthony of Padua Province, based in Ellicott City, said he bent over backward negotiating with the museum group, which, he said, never seemed to accept the contract's restrictive religion clause.
Though the museum group agreed in writing to the restriction late last year, Twele said a cover letter the group attached to that contract continued to question the clause.
"So that was a little bit of a mixed signal, actually a big mixed signal," Twele said. "I was beginning to lose heart."
The Archdiocese Of Baltimore closed St. Stanislaus Kostka Roman Catholic Church in 2000 because of dwindling attendance. Since then, former parishioners have struggled to save the 130-year-old building, once the heart of Fells Point's robust Polish community.
History at stake
With a museum, the group wanted to tell the story of Polish immigrants in America and preserve the spot that was once so meaningful to those people.
With bingo games and Polish music concerts, the group had raised more than $30,000 toward buying the property from the friars for $400,000.
Twele said the decision to sell to Mother Seton Academy had nothing to do with money. Rather, the friars preferred the school's plan for the property and, as Twele put it, "their cooperation with the process."
The money from the sale will go toward caring for senior members of the Franciscan order and to support the ministry, Twele said.
The church is part of a valuable complex of former St. Stanislaus buildings, prime Fells Point real estate, that the school and a development group associated with it are buying. There's a former rectory, a former school and a social hall.
Officials at Mother Seton could not be reached for comment.
The Rev. Jan Ivan Dornic, the museum group's chaplain, said losing the building is a blow to the Polish community.
First, he said, so many Polish people were displaced from Fells Point and Canton in the late 1960s when homes were torn down for a planned superhighway that never came to be. Then in 2000 their iconic church was shuttered.
"If it's not bad enough, now they're going to deny people ... to at least preserve the first monument they had here," he said. "They are trying to push the Polish, Slavic people out of the community. It's ethnic cleansing."
What's next
The museum group is trying to decide its next move. Without having the church, the idea for a museum just isn't as enticing, Sarnecki said. Plus, he's disillusioned that their years of hard work didn't pay off.
"The manhours and sweat and meetings," he said. "You just can't imagine the time and effort we put into this."
However, the retired Baltimore City firefighter said he and the 30 or so members of his group will meet soon to decide their next move.
"We haven't given up yet," he said. "We're not rolling over
