FOCUS: RELIGION
Gift from local parish shines in Nicaragua
Parish makes the most of church merger by donating stained-glass windows and pews to Nicaragua shrine
The parishioners of St. Joseph Church in North Tonawanda regularly shipped food, clothes and furnishings to Nicaragua in support of a local woman’s mission efforts in the impoverished nation.
But after the church closed last year, parishioners discovered they had even more to send.
The parish donated 30 of the church’s striking stained-glass windows, and the windows are now being reused in the Jesus de Rescate shrine in Popoyuarpa, Nicaragua, along with dozens of oak pews from the North Tonawanda church.
The colorful windows, which feature images of Jesus, Mary and a variety of saints, have been a marvel for shrine visitors, who rarely get a glimpse of stained glass.
“There’s no church in all of Nicaragua that has stained-glass windows,” said Ann Marie Zon, who hails from East Amherst and lives most of the year in Nicaragua.
At least not until now.
“Our people stand there looking at them in awe,” said Zon. “The idea of something that religious depicted in such a beautiful way means so much to them.”
Zon’s Nicaragua Mission Project began sending necessities from Western New York to Nicaragua 26 years ago.
The nonprofit organization now loads a full trailer each week during the summer months for shipment to Nicaragua.
After St. Joseph Parish celebrated a final Mass in the Payne Avenue church last June, the Rev. Louis Dolinic, pastor, made an intriguing offer to Zon.
“I asked, ‘Would you have any need for the windows or the pews?’ ” Dolinic recalled. “She said, ‘Are you crazy? Of course.’ ”
The windows, which measure as much as 7 feet tall and 4 feet wide, were crafted by Images in Glass, a Hamburg firm, and originally installed in the 1980s. Dolinic checked with the original donors to make sure it was OK to ship them to the Nicaragua church.
All of the windows were removed, and a few were relocated to other spaces in Western New York, including the Buffalo Religious Arts Center in Black Rock, a mausoleum at St. Joseph Parish Cemetery in Niagara Falls and North Tonawanda Catholic School.
The rest were carefully crated and shipped to Nicaragua in the fall of 2008, complete with instructions from Images in Glass on how to put them back together.
The stained-glass pieces don’t fit into the window openings of the shrine, where it is too hot to shut the openings completely anyway.
Instead, the pieces were installed over the openings by attaching the glass to metal frames. The frames allow for fresh air to flow freely into the shrine.
The shrine is used frequently, so the windows are not expected to have to move again for a long, long time.
Thousands of people visit the national shrine each year, particularly during the week of sorrows prior to Easter Sunday and during the Easter season, said Zon, who recently returned to the Buffalo area for the summer.
Zon said the windows are in a place where they will be appreciated.
“A lot of Nicaraguans will see them now,” she said. “People here [in Western New York] should know that things are not being discarded or put in a basement someplace.”
More than two decades ago, Steve Kurbiel and his wife donated a window to St. Joseph Church depicting two Gospel writers.
“It was a natural thing,” he said, to have the window move on to the Nicaragua church.
“This is our donation to a church over there,” said Kurbiel, a longtime parishioner of St. Joseph who now is a trustee of a merged parish at Our Lady of Czestochowa Church, located at Oliver Street and Center Avenue in North Tonawanda.
He and his wife hope someday to visit the Nicaragua shrine, he added.
What to do with religious artwork, furnishings and sacred objects from dozens of Catholic churches closed in the past two years has been an ongoing concern for many Catholics and area preservationists, who worry that vacant churches will be susceptible to theft and vandalism.
St. Joseph Church is in the process of being sold to a nonprofit organization that doesn’t intend to use the building for worship, said Dolinic.
The windows and pews, meanwhile, are benefiting another group of people immediately, he said.
“We’ll benefit from the prayers of those people,” he added.
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