St. Teresa of Avila Catholic Church, a diverse parish in the heart of the Brooklyn Diocese, will close this year due to various financial and personnel factors, according to an announcement from the chancery.
Parishioners were informed on the weekend of Pentecost Sunday, June 8, a month and a half after the diocese first warned the Crown Heights congregation that closure was imminent.
Bishop Robert J. Brennan reportedly cited the church’s declining weekly attendance, the ongoing need for costly repairs, and a shortage of priests in the diocese—which covers the New York boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens and has more Black Catholics than any other in the country.
“This news has hit us like a ton of bricks and words cannot describe how painful this news is,” said Mike Delouis, the lead cantor at St. Teresa, in a post on social media.
“We are losing these churches built with so much faith and love.”
Built in the late 19th century to serve Irish and Italian immigrants, St. Teresa has in recent decades been a haven for the Black diaspora, including African Americans and Caribbeans. It also serves Latinos and a larger working-class population, according to a petition seeking the church’s preservation.
St. Teresa is known as the first in America to welcome Haitian migrants fleeing the violence of the repressive Duvalier regime in the 1970s, and soon became the first stateside to offer Mass in the Haitian Creole language.
A parish school also served the diverse local community until its closure in 2002, one of several odes of change in the parish landscape. The school building was for many years leased to Brooklyn Jesuit Prep, and a second school building also helped the church maintain its financial standing.
While St. Teresa itself has long been in need of major repairs, some parishioners have said they could be covered by continued income from the church’s rented properties.
Nevertheless, officials told parishioners in early April that the combination of financial factors and a wider priest shortage would likely spell doom for the church, which was merged into the Co-Cathedral of St. Joseph parish in 2018.
“We are going through this throughout the diocese,” Msgr Joseph Grimaldi, vicar general for the Brooklyn chancery, told attendees at a parish town hall.
While the diocese has not publicly announced the closure or signaled plans for St. Teresa’s historic church building, it has recently made moves indicating an intent to sell property and raise cash. These include the impending closure of Transfiguration Catholic Church in Maspeth and St. Camillus Church in Rockaway Park, as well as the closure of five Catholic schools since last year.
No date has been set for the closure of St. Teresa, though it will reportedly occur by the end of the year. The outgoing pastor, Fr Christopher Heanue, announced this month that weekday Masses at the church will be reduced to Mondays and Fridays, and that a 6pm Sunday Mass will be relocated to the co-cathedral, effective June 29.
It is unclear what will become of the social services hosted at St. Teresa, including twelve-step meetings and other events.
“This church is more than a house of worship—it is a historical, spiritual, and cultural sanctuary,” reads the petition calling for the reversal of the closure decision.
Delouis emphasized that, beyond the concern of preserving a building, the plight of St. Teresa is part of an alarming trend in U.S. Catholic parish life, and specifically the Diocese of Brooklyn.
“We are the church. The buildings are nothing without us in them. We are only going to see more of this happening,” he wrote, calling for a resurgence of faith practice to stem the tide of closures.
“If not us, then who?”
Nate Tinner-Williams is co-founder and editor of Black Catholic Messenger.
