7. Fish Fry

Actually, it's a repost, from my very first month blogging over at South City Musings--three years ago this month. I could rewrite it, but it wouldn't say it as well as I said it the first time. Just got back from fish fry. A woman I'd never met before asked me for my Italian Wedding Cake recipe. Made my day.

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I attend a Catholic Church in south St. Louis City named St. Pius V. Pius was a pope, and he is mostly remembered for not being St. Pius X. Actually, he was elected pope after the Reformation, when the Church was in a state of chaos. He kept things together and struggled tirelessly against the Protestants and the Turks. Pius V was integral to the counterreformation and excommunicated Elizabeth I, encouraged the new Society of Jesus (that would be the Jesuits…), and did any number of good works and, well, pious things. All fine and good; it was a long time ago and, frankly, St. Pius V in St. Louis doesn’t have real strong ties to its namesake. The front façade of the building has a carved stone mural of his good deeds (freed 10,000 Christian slaves from the Turks, for instance), but when I taught at the school, it wasn’t like Pius came up very often, as a St. Patrick’s or Our Lady of Mt. Carmel School might honor their patrons. He is kind of an underdog in the saintly world. The patron of Malta, for goodness sake. Not doctors or firemen or bullfighters (he outlawed bullfighting in Rome). Malta. You can’t walk into Catholic Supply and get a medal of St. Pius V, probably for good reason: even the depictions of him in paintings—short, hunched over, bald, with a beak nose and a long beard—make him look like an evil wizard, not a pope.

An underdog in the archdiocesan world, our church was slated to close two years ago when they came up with the new plan for the south side. There are, frankly, too many parishes, most with segregated roots (meaning that the Germans, Irish, Italians, and Poles all were Catholic (meaning “universal,” ironically), but they weren’t about to go to church together). St. Pius’ territory was carved up into two pieces, half given to Holy Family, and the other half to St. Wenceslaus. The Holy Family, on a side note, is the patron of Reno, and Wenceslaus pays attention to Bohemian brewers (like our hometown Anheuser Busch, for instance).

Obviously, we were saddened and a bit enraged, and we submitted a counter-proposal to the archdiocese. In some ways, from an outsider’s point of view, it made sense: we no longer had a parish school, having merged with the school that is on Wenceslaus’ property (and supported by 7 or more parishes). Our attendance was low, we were relatively poor, and we straddled Grand Ave, which would, perhaps, be a natural boundary for parish lines. When I’d taken the job at the parish school 6 years ago, my ex-principal told me, “well, I hope they stay open long enough for you to get a couple years in.” We are definitely urban in appearance—a big blacktop parking lot serves as a cut through for the drug dealers who live across from the old school building. There’s a broken gate between the lot and a dirty alleyway. No trees, very little landscaping at all. Rundown—sagging, perhaps.

In other ways, though, the archdiocese hadn’t looked very closely: we support immigrants and refugees, we have an active food pantry, our school was successful now that it was merged, and there was some underlying animosity between Pius and Holy Family that meant that our numbers probably wouldn’t “shore up” Holy Family’s decline like they’d hoped. We were also right on Grand Ave, and our church building, unlike the school and lot, was visible and striking. It probably wouldn’t look so good with a plastic banner over the stone mural reading “Joe’s Church of the Living God” if the building was sold, or, as would probably happen in this city, as an empty building, finally razed and replaced with another Walgreens.

The committee listened and agreed, amazingly. It was almost like being in a democracy. We stayed open, as did Wenceslaus. Holy Family closed, St. Francis de Sales became a Latin church, St. Agatha’s became a Polish center (don’t get me started on the Polish church in St. Louis and the archbishop right now, that’s for another day). Shocked by our good fortune, we welcomed some new people, watched as our parish grew just a tad, and started thinking of ourselves as a new parish, one with opportunities and potential instead of unmet needs, seedy neighbors, and dilapidated buildings.

Sr. Mary Henry decided it was time to start up the fish fry. Fish fries in St. Louis are a Lentan ritual. Every Friday, hundreds of families line up at their parish cafeterias, mostly in stale church basements or school gymnasiums reeking of bleach and government cheese, to consume blocks of fried cod and a variety of meatless sides: potato salad, spaghetti, green beans, flourescent yellow macaroni and cheese, applesauce, cole slaw. Some parishes go for french fries and fried shrimp; others serve cheese pizza to the kids. We hadn’t had a fish fry in 4 years, and at the time it shut down, it was a pathetic mockery of what a parish event should be. Bad food, low attendance, stinky church basement with bad lighting. My family went a total of one time.

Mary got a committee together. They in turn got volunteers. Norma made the menu: real fish, hand-breaded. Green beans with tarragon. Potato salad not from a can. It sounded great. Katrina asked for desserts. I don’t like to work with raw fish, so I went with Katrina and baked. I cut cakes and brownies and put them out on plates the morning before our first Fry. Mary was hoping to serve 250 dinners that night. She had no idea what to expect, and the nervous energy in the kitchen was palpable. Everyone was working hard at a new venture, one that could fail miserably as before, or could fill, as Fr. Mike said, “the fish fry gap in South St. Louis.”

I showed up to eat at 6, with husband, daughters, and friend Brian in tow. We stood in line for 30 minutes and then ate the best fish fry food I’ve ever had. Mary wanted 250 to come. We saw over 500. Then the second week, having learned our lessons, we had more food in reserve, more desserts. We set up a second line. We streamlined many things and got more volunteers. And we, again, served over 500 dinners. Fr. Mike mentioned at mass this morning that we had our first Fish Fry convert—someone picked up a registration form on Friday night while listening to our live Irish music and eating Peggy’s rum cake, and decided this was the church they’d been looking for.

So here we are. You might say we are surprised by our success. Having been, frankly, the low man on the archdiocesan totem pole for so long, we find ourselves in the wonderful position of popularity. We have arrived—debuted, as it were. I know, it’s only a fish fry. We still have bills to pay and poor to serve and buildings to repair and there’s always the specter of church closings in our future. We have a new pastor coming in June, and many things will change. It is hard to shift from underdog to top of the heap, to trust that things will work for us, after so much hasn’t worked for so long. I feel a magnitude of energy and happiness at Pius that hasn’t been there in the 8 years I’ve been attending. For the first time, I think I may be living in the “good old days.” Simply amazing.