Our 124 years here

The 124 years of this parish’s life enraptures a very special share of American and California history. One of our most remarkable characteristics is how many changes—and basic, human changes—have taken place within our small borders. Sufficient for us to look back from our viewpoint today and see that, in effect, there have been about four different communities living together under the name “Our Lady of Mercy.”  And this is important for us to think about. And important because our community, here, today, is being called on to serve as the guardians of a very rich and diverse part of California and Catholic and American history.

Photography was getting into its early working years when the town of Richmond was first being settled in 1903. So we have a number of pictures of barren hills with a few buildings on them; small groupings of stores and a few intersections with the startings of a center to life; single houses scattered on the hillsides around them. And all of it on a mostly barren, treeless groups of hillsides.

Our new church stood there mostly alone; and the rectory near to it was really surprisingly small-looking. It has obviously been added to. The church had a tall spire—it was removed years later for fear of a collapse in an earthquake—and in those few, very early pictures, piles of wood, jumbled looking, were alongside the loose stones that all gave witness to recent construction.

Much of the human history of these first and early years has been so different from our lives today that it is historically useful to think of our  history here as a succession of different parishes. And different because the human agendas that were lived out here—the people’s sense of who they were have been so different. What it meant to be an American and a Californian, and a Catholic and Christian here ended up  really changing over the years. Our people here were faced over and over again with the needs to adapt to the great changes that never stopped facing our corner of San Francisco Bay,  California, and our country.

When we were established here, in 1903, people were coming in to make a new life on a pretty barren group of hills with the bay’s tides still lapping into areas that are now well built-on dry land. And our first people came from all over. Immigrants from foreign lands, migrants from other parts of America, Native Americans. Our baptismal records bear witness to this wide range of our origins. The church’s gifted architect, I believe was born in France. And these folks formed a community with a number of languages.

But they formed a community. Railroad workers including ferry and dock workers in the new refinery, store owners, medical people. And they built houses and stores and hotels all around here as the bay was built.

And they were smart and creative enough to get the elegant pews, and Stations of the Cross, rescued from the prosperous churches in San Francisco that were desroyed in San Francisco’s terible earthquake.

The Bay Area, as it grew into one of America’s urban centers, reflected the country’ constant changing—both in its cultures and human groups. 30 years after we were founded we were already in the middle of the great depression. Life was tough. But the refinery provided stable jobs. The human community here did what it could to survive; to take care of one another; to practice their faith in the way then taken for granted; to see to it that they and their kids could receive the sacraments; and even bit-by-bit, start adding a few of the stained glass windows we now take for granted..

And then another huge change. Overnight World War II created a very different human parish. From a little town to one of the country’s major shipyards. A major,  when Point Richmond became one of the country’s major shipyards. They say that just about every garage for miles around was renting beds to those thousands of shipyard workers who were here, buses running 24 hours a day to keep the shifts of workers taken out to rest and new ones brought in to start theirs.

And after the war, when America and California became world leaders, another human community set itself up here, and prospered. And the people here went out of their way to decorate the interior of the church, and add stained glass windows.

To put a label on it. For well over a hundred years, this church building has hosted a number of really different human and parish communities. Each one, in its own way for its own time, having to figure out in their own way what being a Catholic, an American parish has meant to them. The answers have been different, of course. They always are.

But now we, in our time and way, are facing our own generation’s challenge. We are setting out to honor our entire parish history, by repainting the interior of this church. And we are doing it as we have always done it—by continuing to welcome new people to the Sacramental and cultural and human life  of our parish. Folks from all over. And people from other lands.

Yesterday morning I baptized a tiny, new born baby boy, whose grandparents were there—are from another land. I admit that as I stood there in effect at the end of my own life. I told them that it was such a moving privilege to welcome the little child  into the sacramental life of their and his church.

I look at all our generations of history. I think of my over 20 privileged years here. And I like to think of us all here today as guardians. We are the guardians of a historic, cultural, religious and human treasure.

And we are the blessed and the privileged guardians of this treasure. And we are blessed and privileged—thank God—in a very American way. Because to serve in this role—we have no guns. So privileged, in our world, because in our guardianship here we don’t need and we don’t want guns. We have one another

David O’rourke, OP