Poet Richard Newman takes his 11-year-old daughter on a bicycle pilgrimage—through an urban wasteland—to a victory of sorts
I am not and never have been religious, but I feel drawn to this place. My 11-year-old daughter and I live in Soulard, and to get here by bike we must ride through an industrial wasteland of broken streets, dirty bricks and abandoned factories. In fact, my daughter and I joke about opening up a bike-tour business, Ugly Bike Tours Inc., to guide people through the detritus that surrounds our neighborhood.
“On our right, please note the mammoth vacant Nooter factory and, to our left, some overturned orange barrels and a Johnny-on-the-Spot,” we’d say.
Riding on Third Street, we cross Chouteau and pedal beneath the massive highway system, where I-55, I-70 and I-64 converge. Several train tracks tower overhead on steel girders. The highway roars overhead, its colossal cement columns and arches dwarfing the crumbling brick buildings scattered here and there. A St. Louis Blues billboard rises from a fenced-in gravel lot. Trash clings to slouching chainlink and barbed-wire fences, and there is nothing natural as far as the eye can see, except for a few gray pigeons littering the huge cement slabs.
At last we arrive. Carefully tended flowers greet us across the street, bright yellows and light purples flourishing in flowerpots and along the immaculately groomed lawn. It is St. Mary of Victories Church, and St. Mary herself stands on the corner of Third and Gratiot, weathering the smog and exhaust little better than the grimy highway ramp does. Across the street, on the church’s north side, a seven-story skeleton of a building blisters blood-red paint, scabby, chipped and ugly as sin.
But here we can see the stained-glass windows, and, just to the north of the church, there is a courtyard containing a small bench, well-trimmed walkways, rosebushes and more little spurts of yellow flowers. Somebody loves us. Somebody loves us all! Beside a statue of St. Stephen of Hungary, a dead pigeon lies on the pathway. By the large wooden doors and up the front steps, behind a wrought-iron gate, a signboard older than Hades reads:
FOUNDED IN 1843
ST. MARY OF VICTORIES
MASSES
SUNDAYS 11:30
Below these words there are ghost letters showing past Mass days and times of past Masses, luncheons and tours. There is also a number at the bottom: 231-8101. We call on my secular phone, but an automated male voice says, “Hello. We are not available now. Please leave your name and number after the tone.” I leave a message but wonder whether it can be heard above the roar of trucks on the ramp next to us and the rattle of the graffiti-covered freight train on the bridge down the street.
A day or two later, Ken Meyer calls me back. He is a parishioner and church volunteer. He cooks, cleans, repairs, opens, closes and calls people back. He invites me over to visit, and he tells me all about St. Mary of Victories, built in 1843 by Germans but now called “Magyar Templom” or “the Hungarian church.”
“If the Hungarians hadn’t accepted the church in 1957,” he says between drags on a Marlboro Light and sips of coffee, “it would have closed.” We sit at a bar in an old parish lunchroom. Meyer brings me an old Life special edition with graphic black-and-white photos of people rioting, police officers being shot or hanged—the 1956 Revolt in Hungary.
“This is an ethnic church—now, I guess, technically a chapel,” says Meyer, explaining that it was given to the Hungarian immigrants after the revolt was crushed by the Soviets.
“Do people still come here?” I ask.
“The congregation is small, 30 to 40.”
It’s larger than I might have guessed, riding past on Ugly Bike Tours Inc. The congregation is made up of people who fled Hungary in 1956, “after the Spark of Freedom,” says Meyer. No one has lived in this district since the ’50s and ’60s, when they built the highways and stadium and Arch grounds. The churchgoers are scattered across the area—South County, Wildwood, West County, Ladue.
Finally Meyer takes me into the church itself. As Philip Larkin said, “It pleases me to stand in silence here; A serious house on serious earth it is.” Eight tall stained-glass windows and two smaller ones let in the autumn light. Intricate hand-carved wooden altar rails, pews, confessionals, and a baptismal font decorate the apse and ambulatory. Bone fragments and relics of saints and other miracles are enshrined in candlelit altars everywhere.
“So what do you think of our great lady?” he asks.
I tell him it’s beautiful, more even than I’d hoped.
“I don’t know if you were raised Catholic ...” he says.
“Actually, my father raised me a devout atheist,” I say. “One of the few things that stuck.”
“Well, it’s our paradise in the middle of nowhere, an oasis,” he says.
A semi snorts up the I-64 entrance ramp and rattles the windows. On the alcove above us, I read the words “our lady of victories, pray for us.” Even here, under these grimy highways and rusting train bridges, someone loves us; someone is praying for us at all times. Even for me.
