The Cathedral That Nickels and Dimes Built
By Ellen MacDonald Ward
Down East Magazine
1999 Annual
It’s ironic. People fly to Europe every day to tour the great medieval cathedrals. Guidebooks in hand, they make the pilgrimage from Canterbury and Chartres to Cologne and Florence to gaze up at those huge edifices whose stout stone walls have provided a bastion for the faithful through the centuries. Yet many people – even many Mainers – don’t know about Lewiston’s own magnificent cathedral, whose great rose window was modeled after that of the cathedral at Chartres and whose heaven piercing, 168-foot-tall towers rival those of any place of worship in the Old World. Churches of all denominations abound in Lewiston; sometimes it seems as though there’s practically one on every corner, commemorating every possible saint. But this one – the largest in Maine – is impossible to miss. From its prominent site high on a granite slope, Saints Peter and Paul Church seems to dominate the whole downtown. Travelers driving through Lewiston-Auburn may see its spires disappear momentarily behind a nearer building. But then there it is again, its sheer mass towering over surrounding houses and tenements and businesses, like a massive manifestation of the Scriptures in stone, like the omnipresent voice of one’s own conscience.
Follow those spires up to their perch on the corners of Bartlett and Ash Streets, pass through the imposing doors of golden oak below and enter into the stillness of the sanctuary within. It’s like being swallowed alive. The sheer vastness inspires awe. Granite columns soar a hundred feet upwards to an immense barrel-vaulted ceiling, through which fingers of granite trace patterns, delicate looking but actually strongly supportive. Although its structure does not strictly follow the architectural principles which made possible the great cathedrals of medieval times – steel, not flying buttresses, hold up these walls – the overall effect is decidedly Gothic. Brilliant stained-glass windows strew confetti-like gleams of red and blue across the backs of enough wooded pews to seat 2,200. High above the back of the church, rears the elegant old Casavant organ, with its 4,000 pipes, whose reverberations, according to one observer, are powerful enough “to shake the fillings right out of your teeth.” Above the organ rises the cathedral’s crowning glory, the huge rose window, which seems to hover in the semi-darkness like an immense, multi-hued jewel. “Its scale, as well as its commanding location, emulate the way the medieval cathedrals dominated their own communities,” says Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr., of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission. “Certainly this church was central to the lives of the immigrants who lived in this community, but as important as the religious statement was the social statement it made – that these people were here to stay, and that they were capable of making a lasting and very beautiful contribution to the city as a whole.”
One of the most striking – if subtle – aspects of the interior occurs in the cathedral’s splendid, nearly 300-foot-long center aisle: toward the altar there is a slight – and totally unexpected – bend in it. To this day, there is a great debate over why the bend is there. Some say that it is due to a mistake made in the digging of the foundation, which was overseen by the original architect Noel Coumont, a Lewiston resident who had come from Belgium. Others contend that if the bend had been a mistake, it could easily have been fixed and that it is, in fact, intentional, meant to signify how the head of Christ fell to the right when He was on the cross. Since the interior of Saints Peter and Paul is built in a traditional design, to represent a crucifix, this explanation certainly seems plausible, especially since it is also said that the center aisles of a number of old churches in Europe contain similar bends.
If the interior of the cathedral is breathtaking, even more inspiring – if possible – is the tale of devotion and immense effort that built the place. Unlike the age-old cathedrals in Europe, Saints Peter and Paul was constructed in this century, actually during the hardest years of the Depression. Although it had been planned for three decades, and funds for it slowly set aside, it was not until the dark times during the thirties that the parishioners made the final push to build it, holding bake sales, ball games, and practically every other community event possible to raise money. In this parish of shoe-factory and textile-mill workers, there was no great benefactors available. And so the $800,000 it took to build this cathedral was raised literally nickel by nickel, dime by dime.
The cathedral is actually the second church on this site bearing the names of Saints Peter and Paul. The first was a much-smaller brick Gothic structure, with one tall tower, completed in 1873 to serve the French-Canadians, most of them from Quebec, who had been recruited to work in the Lewiston mills. Other churches had been raised in Lewiston over the years to accommodate many other religions and ethnic backgrounds: among them Trinity Episcopal Church for the many textile workers who had emigrated from Lancashire, England, and St. Joseph’s and St. Patrick’s for the Irish Catholic immigrants. By 1870, enough French-Canadians had arrived in town that they required their own place of worship. Since they also needed French-speaking priests, the bishop in Portland invited the Dominican order from Quebec to take charge. Over the next thirty years, the Franco-American community in Lewiston expanded so fast that it rapidly outgrew the original 600-seat church. Many in the parish began to dream of building a huge Gothic-style church, modeled after the cathedrals of Normandy, whence many of their ancestors had come.
By 1895, the old church had been torn down and work on the lower part of the new church was begun. From then on, however, the path to the new cathedral was a rocky one. In fact, it would take longer to realize this dream than any of the parishioners could possibly have realized.
Some of the first stones to bestrew the path of the church’s progress were the parish’s difficulties with the original architect. Early on during the construction, Noel Coumont was fired. Some say that he was removed from the job because he laid out the foundation the wrong way. Others say that there was some sort of misunderstanding between Coumont and the parish priests. In any event, after Coumont left the scene, he was followed by other architects who managed to get the basement of the church completed in 1906 so that mass could be regularly held there. But work to build the upper structure was never begun. The actual reason for this delay is, again, hard to pin down, but the story goes that the bishop in Portland, who was Irish, was reluctant to have his own Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception upstaged by a French-Catholic church in Lewiston. And so things remained for the next three decades. (Actually, the bishop needn’t have worried: only the church where he resided could technically be called a cathedral. Given Saints Peter and Paul’s immensity and Old-World grandeur, nevertheless, many find it difficult to refer to it as anything but.)
Perhaps the church never would have been built at all had it not been for the Dominican priests, who saw the Depression as a way to accomplish two goals: to finish the church and to provide desperately needed work, both for the residents of the Twin Cities, and for many other Mainers. Fundraising, fathering up all those nickels and dimes, once again became the dominant focus of the parish, and before long, in the midst of the Depression, work on the church resumed, under the supervision of Boston architect T.G. O’Connell. Because of this great enterprise some 700 Lewiston-Auburn men were able to earn a living in those hard times, and many other communities found the construction work a blessing as well. Filling 515 trucks with granite for the church’s exterior kept quarries open in North Jay, for example. Extracting the limestone provided work for still other Maine quarries, and cutting the red oak and red maple for the interior put bread and baked beans on the plate of many a North Woodsman. When the work was finally done, the new church was consecrated on October 23, 1938.
Instantly, the great cathedral was woven into a way of life that is only a memory today. Not only did virtually everyone in the community go to church, the parish was the community. Children attended classes at St. Peter’s School and St. Dominic’s High School. Adults banked at the parish credit union; the needy sought help from the church’s social-services programs. For socializing as well as hockey, there was the parish-owned ice arena. In the 1940s, as many as thirty-five priests served the 18,000 parishioners. “I grew up with that church and my folks grew up with that church, and my grandparents went there as well,” says Ed Leveque, a retired Texaco distributor, who was raised in the close-knit community that surrounded the church. “In the forties and fifties, you had to buy a ticket before Thanksgiving in order to attend midnight mass on Christmas Eve.”
“Even on just regular Sundays, the place was filled to capacity,” remembers Marcel Dagneau, who also grew up in the parish during the forties. “There would be masses – all in French, of course, they really stressed the French – being held simultaneously both upstairs and in the basement church, and the place was packed. Very few people in those days had cars, so there was no need for parking lots. After mass, there would be a huge procession pouring out of the church and through the streets to their homes, almost like a parade.”
“As a kid, I almost never saw a dollar bill anywhere,” Dagneau continues. “It was always nickels and dimes at home and in the collection plate at church. The cathedral was built on the backs of the millworkers, with those nickels and dimes. That was how everything in the parish was run, through the nickels and dimes in the collection plate. And boy, didn’t that give the taxpayers a break,” he recalls with a chuckle. In those days, many Catholic churches – throughout the state, not just in Lewiston – operated their own parochial schools. It was the collection plate, not taxes, that paid for the parochial schools. “And every parochial school was run by the Brothers and Sisters,” Dagneau notes, “who didn’t get paid a cent. But were they ever dedicated. And weren’t they strict!”
Over the years, however, the community at the center of Lewiston changed. Many parishioners moved away from the downtown area, which the cathedral dominated, and into more suburban neighborhoods in the city, transferring their allegiance to newer, smaller churches. As the neighborhood turned over, the amount of French spoken declined. (Today only one French mass a week is offered.) Everywhere church attendance also declined. And as the sixties turned into the seventies, the great church of Saints Peter and Paul itself began to deteriorate. Huge cracks appeared in the front towers. All around the base lay bits of stone that had crumbled off. By the 1980s, it was clear that the church needed major restoration, but with the congregation having dwindled to a mere 4,000, with only three priests to perform services, the future looked grim. At one point the parish council even investigated demolishing Saints Peter and Paul Church altogether and replacing it with a smaller, more manageable structure. But the cost of tearing down the cathedral was itself prohibitive: an estimated $1.5 million. Ironically, that is part of the reason why the church that almost did not get built ended up getting saved. And here the amazing tale of the parishioners’ dedication to Saints Peter and Paul grows even more amazing.
The original estimate was that the restoration would require $2 million, a huge sum for an inner city parish that was continuing to dwindle. By the end of 1998, almost miraculously, more than $2.3 million had been raised, with still more pledged. Ninety-five percent of the money has come from parishioners themselves. Just as during the church’s initial construction, the effort required sacrifice. “People have been so generous,” says Ed Leveque. “I’ve seen little old ladies who’ve worked in the mills all their lives giving three or four thousand dollars. Given their finances, that’s the equivalent of John Rockefeller handing over $50 million.” Leveque himself lives outside the parish nowadays but, still an active church member, undertook the job of chairing the fund-raising committee. At this point, he says, the exterior of the cathedral has been completely restored, a new zoned heating system and handicapped-access elevator have been installed, and work has just begun to repaint and replaster the flaking and peeling water-damaged walls within the church. Funds have also been set aside to continue regular maintenance, including a stone-sealing process on the exterior which will begin next spring. “We’ve really been very fortunate that people have been so generous,” Ed Leveque explains. “It’s just like it was in the thirties. The people here may not have much for themselves, but together we have been able to build – and restore – an incredible work of art.”
