A 151-year-old Catholic church to shutter in Delco

Come March 1, Delaware County will be down a Catholic church.

That’s when Chester’s Immaculate Heart of Mary will be relegated by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Word of the forthcoming closure was shared with parishioners at Mass this weekend, the archdiocese said in a news release Sunday.

The decision followed a request made in August by the pastor of the St. Katharine Drexel parish, which has claimed the 151-year-old church at 1408 W. Second St. since 1993 but used it increasingly sparingly for liturgical services since 2002. Immaculate Heart, for instance, had not been used for a baptism since 2017, and Mass was held there just twice in 2023.

Immaculate Heart’s closure has been years in the making, and its story traces the decades-long path of contractions in the Catholic Church.

St. Katharine Drexel Parish was formed from the 1993 merger of six Catholic parishes, all in Chester, into one. (Three Catholic elementary schools also merged.) The move, which coincided with the consolidation and closure of parishes and schools in North Philadelphia, was the first in a series of cost-cutting measures made in the 1990s by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia under Archbishop Anthony Bevilacqua. While the decision was prompted by marked declines in parish and school populations, it was nonetheless met with vocal resistance: More than 300 protesters showed up to the first Mass at St. Katharine Drexel, singing “Ave Maria” and bearing signs that read “Bevilacqua Kills Viable Parishes.”

For the last 30 years, St. Katharine Drexel congregants have primarily worshiped at the former St. Robert’s Church on Providence Avenue in Chester. But the new parish retained Immaculate Heart’s church and other buildings after the merger, and in 2000 renamed it the St. Katharine Drexel Center for Evangelization. A food pantry the parish operated there moved last fall to a Catholic Social Services site in Chester. The building has been vacant since.

While St. Katharine Drexel Parish, which currently has about 300 active parishioners, endeavored to keep the satellite site in good repair over the years, the historic Immaculate Heart building proved increasingly costly to maintain. Significant roof damage was recently discovered, and mold and water damage in other buildings on the property made the space unfit to rent out for other uses, according to the news release from the archdiocese. On top of that, St. Katharine Drexel is facing a substantial budget deficit.

As a result, Archbishop Nelson Pérez issued a decree this month relegating the church to “profane but not sordid use,” representing the church’s official language for selling the church to someone who will repurpose the property for a secular, but not immoral, use.

This fate has befallen other Catholic churches in the Philadelphia area in the last decade, including Olney’s Incarnation of our Lord, Our Mother of Sorrows in Bridgeport, Holy Saviour Church in Linwood, and West Philly’s Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament. Another notable former Catholic church, St. Laurentius in Fishtown, was relegated in 2014 and demolished in 2022, making way for an eight-story multifamily residential building.