The priest is back in town, at least for this day. He is with the flock he gave 14 years of his life to, the people of Hollins Park and Poppleton assembled before him: the young men with knotty arms and cascading hair, the weepy women bereft of all certitudes, their tumbling children. He misses these people with the unfocused pain of a ghost limb.

Father Michael J. Roach is immense upon the altar at St. Peter the Apostle Church on Poppleton Street in Baltimore.

Immensity defines his voice, which he sends into every corner of the church. This is "the mother church" of the west side, built in 1842. It is a columned grandeur, St. Peter's, but it is not big enough to contain the priest's oratory, which flows out into the golden dust of the morning. Roach is celebrating the life and death of one of those neighborhood saints who made him understand why, 27 years ago, he became a priest.

He speaks over the remains of Virginia Pilkerton. She came to this raucous enclave in 1919 when it teemed with Irish and Lithuanian railroad workers. Their meager posterity live on here. The house she moved into with her parents when she was 3 was the one she died in.

Roach came to St. Peter's in 1981 and found more than he expected. The parish, he was told, was culturally deprived. "In fact," he says, "it is a very rich culture. I would see things I hadn't seen since I was a kid."

Like?

"Funeral practices. People wear black. Whole families showing up at anniversary Masses. The wonderful floral arrangements: a bleeding heart, a telephone arrangement, with 'Jesus Called' written across it. Some people's families have been there since the houses were built on Pratt and Lombard. They are the toughest people I ever knew. They'd tell you their stories. By God, you'd weep!"

Virginia Pilkerton died on Good Friday.

"What an appropriate time to go home to God," Roach says to the family and friends scattered on the pews beneath the painted ceiling.

She was a light shining on Lombard Street for 80 years, he says, enduring pain and deprivation and happiness as they came to her, in their turn. She taught her family the ceremonies they needed to learn, especially about the end of things.

"She taught us how to die," says the priest.

About a year ago, in the same church, Roach eulogized Betty Jean Farace. "Big Bet," as she was fondly called, had cooked in rectory kitchens throughout Southwest Baltimore. At one point Roach stepped away the altar and opened his log-like arms as if to embrace all her grieving adult children. Don't weep, he admonished them.

"Big Bet's in heaven now," he said, pointing in that direction, "She's cooking for the king!"

They wept even more.

There are people in southwest Baltimore, it is said, who would bet that one of Father Roach's funeral eulogies could get a poor sinner paroled from Purgatory. Maybe, but it hasn't shortened his own time.

When he is not in the city visiting a hospital, funeral establishment, school or one of the homely parishes like St. Peter's or St. Jerome's on Hamburg Streets, Roach can be found in Manchester, a tranquil hamlet in Carroll County. There he is responsible to a congregation of 900 families attached to St. Bartholomew's Roman Catholic Church, built by Redemptorist missionaries in 1864 on a road winding out of town. He lives here alone.

"I hate it. I talk to myself. I hate to come home to an empty house."

He reads a lot.

"Constantly," he says. "It keeps me from the Devil's Tabernacle." Television.

Posted to the country

He has resigned himself to his transfer from the city, though part of him has yet to yield. How long's it been?

"Two years and three months," comes his answer quickly enough to suggest he tallies the weeks and days as well.

Roach extends backward in his chair, feet up on the desk leaf. They seem small for such a huge man. His face is large, too; his silvery beard flows down in waves off it, like fast water over rocks.

On the wall of his minute office is a painting of the B&O; roundhouse on Pratt Street (now a museum), a gift from a dying parishioner. It reminds the priest of where he is by showing him, with every glance, where he would rather be: amid the "decaying elegance" of the church on Poppleton Street, with its enclosed garden where he grew an enormous sunflower.

Outside, spring is entrenched; there is a faint buzz over the fragrant grass. It is a serene, bucolic place, its hills clotted by dark green trees with, here and there, a farmhouse among them.

You can tell Roach is unhappy in this place by the alacrity with which he praises it: "I like the culture of the county. It's a religious culture. Everybody's got a church."

Most are Lutherans or Methodists, and his job is to bring up his side. "Catholics," he says, "are the new kids on the block."

Thirty years ago there weren't a hundred Catholics here. At the turn of the century there were none. The church yard has barely 35 graves.

Sending Michael J. Roach to this arcadia was a punishment exquisite enough to impress an agent of the Inquisition. He is a city priest. He has served in urban neighborhoods all his career, each one more over-used than the previous. He went from Our Lady of Hope in Dundalk in 1971 after his graduation from St. Mary's Seminary, to St. Dominic's in Hamilton, to St. Peter's in Hollins Park. His mind is forever in the streets.

Does he feel exiled?

"Oh, sure!" he says, and adds: "But when you become a priest you surrender a lot of your autonomy. You know that when you get into it."

Each year a form is sent out by the archdiocese. It asks the recipient where he would prefer to serve. Two have reached Roach in Manchester. Both went into the trash.

"I'm too proud," he says with a recklessness not evident when he was interviewed a year ago. "I'm not going to let them tell me no."

So what did Father Michael Roach do to deserve all this?

He complained, he says. He complained specifically about the reorganization of Baltimore's urban parishes in 1995-1996; he complains generally about the withdrawal of priests from the city. He estimates that the number of priests has fallen in the central and inner city by 20 percent over the past 15 years. He may underestimate: The Official Catholic Directory reports that 295 priests were working in the city in 1977, only 167 in 1997.

Roach says he began speaking out during his last year and a half at St. Peter's.

"We saw the writing on the wall," he said. "Terms were being used like 'clustering' parishes." This described one element of the archdiocese's restructuring plan, devised to respond to shrinking Catholic congregations, shortages of religious personnel and deteriorating church buildings all over the city.

When it was finished certain parishes wound up for the first time being served by priests who lived off-premises. For instance, St. Peter's, St. Martin's (Fulton Avenue) and St. Jerome's today are served by two Capuchin friars who live at St. Ambrose, in Pimlico. They say Mass, hear confessions, baptize and marry people.

This goes to another Roach complaint: Too many of the city parishes are run by priests from the religious orders (Capuchins, Redemptorists, Franciscans) who, by the rules of their orders, must live communally in a rectory or friary, often removed from the churches they are responsible for.

No one answers

A parishioner with a spiritual emergency can knock on the church door all night to no avail, or a mother looking for a priest's help to get her son out of jail. No one's there.

Those who implemented the plan, people like Bishop John H. Ricard, who was in charge, believe it was necessary. Ricard describes the level of resistance to restructuring as "normal" for such things. Some people expected their parishes to disappear.

Ricard, currently serving in Florida, concedes that a resident pastor in every parish is the more desirable staffing, but economically untenable. "That was the model in Baltimore when the parishes were founded," he said. "However, the overriding factor was that the Catholic population of Baltimore was far greater than it is today."

Despite the apprehensions, the outcome was not so bad as many had feared. Today only 10 of the city's 54 parishes do without live-in pastors, nine more than before the change. Only one parish disappeared, Our Lady of Lourdes on Liberty Road, its buildings sold.

Father John Harvey, one of the two priests covering Roach's old parish of St. Peter's as well as St. Jerome's and St. Martin's, takes exception to suggestions the congregations are ill-served. Both priests are reachable by telephone at any hour, he says. "We're as present as any priest in the diocese."

Roach says he was warned that his outspokenness could get him in trouble. "Several people, including religious, nuns, said, 'Be careful, you're making people angry.' "

Roach is determined to be obedient. But he thinks he could be better used.

"The need for priests is more striking in the city," he says. "Out here the families are intact. Prosperous. They have more hope. That's what the church is for, bringing hope. In many city neighborhoods, many of the institutions have left. The church is all that's left."

Roach is a scholarly, conservative man. He teaches church history at Mount St. Mary's College in Emmitsburg. He is writing an article on the Irish in Baltimore for an encyclopedia on the Irish in America published at Notre Dame University, in Indiana. He remains uncomfortable with many of the renovations brought by Vatican II.

"When changes were made we went too far."

He is dismayed by much of the rewriting of the religious liturgy. "The revised baptismal liturgy is beautiful. The revised confessional liturgy is terrible; the English is banal."

He is dismissive of "feminist cant" among nuns. He doesn't want girls serving the Mass. "I think having altar girls raises false hopes of ordination. We never had it at St. Peter's because the boys needed the sense of identification and bonding it gave."

And the girls?

"They had the nuns."

Michael Roach, 52, was born in a rowhouse on Edmondson Avenue in West Baltimore. When he was 4 his family moved to the posher precincts of Ten Hills. His family, pre-famine Irish, arrived in 1830. His father was a doctor. His older brother, Thomas, also became a priest; he is a Jesuit, president of Georgetown Prep in Rockville. One of Roach's sisters is a nurse, the other a teacher.

It was not inevitable that Michael Roach would be a priest, but nearly so. His father treated many religious; priests and nuns were always in the house. He played at being a priest as a boy. His mother was devout. But his father was skeptical.

"I sure hope you guys are right about all this," he would say to his two ordained sons.

Planning for growth

Between restorative visits to the city, Roach does his job at St. Bartholomew's. He is raising money to build a larger church for his congregation, which grows 7 percent a year.

He does not expect it to turn out to be an inspiring edifice like St. Peter's, nor one so charming as the old church there now. St. Bartholomew's is an intimate country chapel with a silver tin roof. Roach likes things like that, which have been kindly used by time.

He gazes across the church's small crop of tombstones, four of which date to the Civil War. One of the newer stones is awash in flowers and small Irish flags. Father Patrick J. Begley, Roach's predecessor, lies there. He died last May. Born in Ireland, he had served at St. Bartholomew's since the 1960s. After he retired five years ago he got cancer. Being provident, he bought a headstone, had his name and birth date (March 31, 1913) inscribed, and put the stone on his plot. What better place for a gravestone than a grave, empty or otherwise?

But he lived on, and would visit regularly to buck up the glum new pastor from Baltimore, and to check on his tombstone. He always found flowers there.

"They think I'm dead," he'd complain.

Begley was happy in Carroll County, says Roach. It reminded him of Ireland. He promised Roach that he would be, too.

"He said to me, 'You'll come to love it,' " Roach recalls.

The priest from West Baltimore is still waiting.

Pub Date: 5/28/98