At Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Ashburton yesterday, parishioners sang a hymn declaring "there is a sweet, sweet spirit in this place," while across town archdiocese officials announced plans to close the church Feb. 19 and sell it.
The decision wasn't news to the church's congregation. They've known for months that their 70-year-old redbrick structure, located in a neighborhood of single-family homes off Liberty Heights Avenue, would likely be the first Catholic church shuttered in Baltimore since 1986.
Most worshipers seemed to accept the decision to merge their congregation with that of All Saints Church, located about a mile away. Even in good weather only about 120 people show up for weekend services at the Ashburton church, which can seat 450. With yesterday's snow and ice, only 38 people were there.
Still, there are sharp pangs of regret.
"I was devastated, if you want to know the truth," said Helen Lee, 79, who has worshiped since 1958 in the church's sanctuary, which has a floor-to-ceiling tableaux representing the Virgin Mary appearing in the grotto at Lourdes.
"One of my daughters attended school here. All of my grandchildren were baptized here. Two of my daughters were married here. And my husband was buried from here."
"There are a lot of memories," she said, tears welling in her eyes.
The Rev. Joseph Snoha, 32, who has served at Our Lady of Lourdes for the past 18 months, said some parishioners still are sad about the decision. But, he said, "the majority of the congregation is on the path of acceptance. The process is not done. But it's on the way."
Ashburton is an upper-middle-class black neighborhood. Originally a neighborhood of wealthy white Protestants and Catholics, Ashburton became predominantly Jewish in the decades after the Great Depression. In the late 1950s, the first well-to-do black families moved there.
By 1969, Mrs. Lee said, Our Lady of Lourdes had grown to include more than 1,000 members, 97 percent of them black. But around the same time, young families stopped joining the congregation. The church's growth faltered.
Today, Father Snoha estimates, an average of about 120 people attend weekend services. More than half of them are older than 60.
Still, some are not persuaded that the church should close.
"Why can't you just have a small church?" asked Marilyn Bevans, a 45-year-old teacher in Baltimore County schools who has attended Mass at Our Lady of Lourdes since she was 12.
The archdiocese, she said, merely went through the motions of talking and negotiating with parishioners over its plans. "We were being led like sheep," she said.
Despite the planned merger with All Saints, Ms. Bevans and some other parishioners aren't sure whether they will attend the services there. "Here, they know you," Ms. Bevans said. "You go to a strange church, who will know you?"
Across the city at St. Martin's Church, parishioners learned that they have won at least a stay of execution for their imposing building of dark stone, whose square tower looms over a troubled neighborhood at the corner of Fayette Street and Fulton Avenue.
St. Martin's will be combined with two other Southwest Baltimore churches, St. Jerome's and St. Peter the Apostle, into a single "faith community" served by a unified staff and parish council. But the decision on whether one or two of the three buildings will close will not be made until next January.
About 80 people braved the snow to come to the 10 a.m. Mass -- half the usual turnout. The handsome, vaulted, drafty sanctuary, where most worshipers kept their coats on, can seat more than 400.
Completed in 1867 on the site of a Civil War hospital, St. Martin's began as a largely Irish and German church -- the city's largest parish into the first few decades of this century.
White migration out of the surrounding neighborhoods led to the closing of its school in the 1960s, and the building that housed the school and convent was sold last year to nearby Bon Secours Hospital.
But St. Martin's leadership worked over the years to preserve a racially integrated congregation, mixing gospel music with traditional hymns at services and including both blacks and whites on all parish bodies. The congregation is now about 65 percent black and 35 percent white, said the pastor, the Rev. John D. Harvey, not dramatically different from when he arrived as associate pastor in 1977.
Father Harvey, 48, whose Capuchin order is committed to serving the poor, noted that St. Martin's work goes far beyond celebrating Mass. The church operates a soup kitchen and food pantry, has two youth groups and provides a home for Narcotics Anonymous and other programs serving drug addicts in the Franklin Square neighborhood.
"People come in daily knocking on our door, looking for help paying rent or fuel bills," said Brenda Jones, 43, who will be among St. Martin's representatives on a larger committee that will struggle in the coming year with the future of the three Southwest parishes.
Ms. Jones, a dispatcher for Montgomery Ward, lives in North Baltimore, but like many parishioners returns to her old neighborhood to attend St. Martin's with her mother and other family members.