Saving the steeples

by Lori Bradley

Fortunately, the South Coast is home to awe-inspiring architecture in St. Anne’s Church and Shrine in Fall River.

It is a magnificent example of Romanesque sacred architecture. There are only a few other churches sharing these rounded arches, thick walls, pillars, ambulatory aisles, and sculptural details inspired by medieval European sacred architecture.

French-Canadian immigrants paid for and built St. Anne’s Church out of blue Vermont granite intending it to be a lasting religious and social center for their community. Their labor in Fall River textile mills helped build the entire region. The loss of the local textile industry naturally resulted in reduced numbers of parishioners, but the Church still stands as tribute to immigrant history in America.

St. Anne’s Church and Shrine is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is considered a national shrine to the mother of Mary. The exterior of the Church features 115-foot-high bulbous bell towers atop two main turrets that are dramatically visible to anyone crossing the Braga bridge. The stunning cross-shaped Church was designed by architect Napoléon Bourassa of Quebec, and was supervised by Fall River architect Louis G. Destremps, a native of Quebec. St. Anne’s became the cultural and religious center to Fall River’s FrenchCanadian Flint Village neighborhood, roughly bound by Watuppa Pond and Quarry Street. Destremps also designed the spectacular Notre Dame De Lourdes Church in Fall River which sadly burned to the ground in 1982.

Saving St. Anne’s

Today, St. Anne’s faces its own set of challenges. The upper church hasn’t been open to the public since 2015 because of the deteriorating condition consumerism that involves demonstrations, sit-ins and, I kid you not because I’m afraid of them, a “Zombie Walk,” where volunteer zombies wander malls with blank stares and explain “Buy Nothing Day” to befuddled shoppers before, I assume, eating their flesh.

Fortunately, Fall River Bishop Edgar M. da Cunha and representatives of the recently organized St. Anne’s Preservation Society signed an agreement with the Fall River Diocese in 2019 to allow the Society a 10-year lease on the building and begin independent fundraising efforts to restore this important space.

Robert Gauvin is President of the St. Anne Shrine Preservation Society. On the St. Anne’s Shrine website, he details some of the work needed to renovate and fully reopen the Church which includes repairs to the slate roof to eliminate water leaks, repairs to the upper church plaster walls, maintaining and renewing the magnificent Casavant Organ, repairing and maintaining the physical plant, operating the Shrine Gift Shop, and expanding social media outreach. This daunting list of tasks is enthusiastically undertaken by Gauvin with a volunteer board of ten people.

Artistic architecture

The St. Anne’s upper and lower shrines are designed in the ambulatory style of church architecture. This is a feature of Romanesque sacred architecture and unusual in North America. Common in France and Spain, ambulatory architecture welcomed the exhausted, faithful traveling on foot and horseback.

Visitors can gaze up into the rocky high reaches of the upper Church to feel the expansiveness of the universal spirit. For a more personal and intimate experience, visitors can then walk around the side of the Church and enter the lower Shrine. It’s housed in the basement of St. Anne’s and has dark wooden ceilings. The atmosphere is intimate, with individual stations for saints housing beautiful sacred sculpture. The light is dim and lit by dozens of flickering candles dedicated to individual saints.

Frank Grace, a renowned photographer who was born in Fall River, recently documented the St. Anne’s church architecture and donated the photographs to the Preservation Society to publicize the beauty of the interiors. As an artist, the experience of St. Anne’s Shrine had both aesthetic and emotional impact. “While my intention was to photograph the main Church,” Grace said, “I knew about the Shrine but really was not prepared for what is down there. The artistry of the statues, sculptures, stained glass windows, and memorials are all stunning. The Shrine is set up in such a way that its overall presentation quietly demands respect and even awe. It is a perfect example of how art can convey not only emotions, but also elicit introspection and reverence for a subject.”

Many locals still remember feeling awe as children as they gazed up into the immense upper Church ceilings and saw hanging crutches and braces left in thanks for the healing of their various afflictions. Some of these devices still stand clustered in tribute around various saints in the lower Church. Architect Frank Gehry said, “Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.” The South Coast community needs to care for St. Anne’s so the Church can continue to speak of its time and place in our history.