Decades later, body of priest is moved from church, reburied
On Wednesday, the Rev. Michael Brady went to his final rest - again. This time with the aid of a backhoe, a crane, and three laborers with shovels.
On Wednesday, the Rev. Michael Brady went to his final rest - again.
This time with the aid of a backhoe, a crane, and three laborers with shovels.
When a venerable Philadelphia church closed in 2013, more than pews and stained glass stayed behind. Also remaining was a low grave on the north side of the building, where the priest was buried in 1929.
On Wednesday, trucks pulled onto the lawn of what had been Incarnation of Our Lord Catholic Church, at Fifth Street and Lindley Avenue in Olney. The work crew was informally supervised by experts - three women who had attended services there for decades and a couple of funeral directors.
"Do you know how many times I walked past that?" Marie Grilli, who spent 54 years at the church, said as she gestured toward the grave. "This is my parish."
The Archdiocese of Philadelphia could not immediately respond to questions about why the priest's remains were being moved. But it's common practice for priests - who in older times were often buried by their churches - to be exhumed and reburied elsewhere if a church is closed - in religious parlance, desanctified.
In this case, a potential sale of the property may have created pressure to move quickly, former parishioners said.
Thomas Quinn, a funeral director with the Givnish mortuaries, came to the grave to complete a circle: His grandfather buried Brady in 1929.
"I'm following my grandfather's footsteps," he said.
Company records show the priest was buried in a solid mahogany casket with bronze trim. His funeral cost $866.
Until Wednesday, Brady lay beneath a stone slab marked by a carved cross set about 25 yards from Fifth Street. No one on the sidewalk would have noticed it without knowing where to look.
Brady was born in 1859, just before the start of the Civil War, and died just after the stock market crashed.
He was 70 when he died five days after being stricken with acute appendicitis, according to newspaper accounts. A crowd that included 120 priests attended his funeral at the church he led for 25 years.
"He was a strong person, strong faith," said Fran McFadden, who heard stories about the priest from older family members. "He started with nothing and built the church."
A nephew, the Rev. Thomas J. Brady, helped celebrate High Mass at the funeral, according to records at the Special Collections Research Center at Temple University.
Incarnation, or "Inky" as it was informally known, began as a missionary church in 1900. When Brady arrived four years later, it was a small parish set in what the Evening Bulletin called "a shabby house of worship."
Brady's ambition was to build a grand cathedral. And in August 1922, he helped break ground for a $200,000 edifice - equal to $2.8 million today - which the newspaper said was sure to be "one of the beautiful churches in the archdiocese."
It was built in a classic cruciform structure, with stone walls and soaring columns.
It opened in 1923, and remained robust for decades. But as the city changed, as jobs left and the population shrank, parishes changed, too.
In July 2013, Incarnation was merged with other churches, its building retained as an occasional worship site. Two years later, the archdiocese announced the church would close permanently.
"By the end," noted the Philadelphia Church Project, which chronicles historic religious buildings, "Inky was out of money and, physically, starting to buckle."
Today, shut and silent, it towers over the rowhouses of an evolving Olney, across the street from a Korean clothing shop and a Mexican restaurant.
Inside the church, vandals have stolen metal and plaster has fallen. Windows are boarded up at what was the church school.
Out front, not far from the grave, stands a church sign that proclaims, "Thank you Lord for 113 years of blessings!" It still advertises Mass times.
Those who gathered beside the grave on Wednesday could agree on one certainty: Brady had been buried well and fully.
It took the workers - and a crane - almost an hour to remove two great stone slabs atop the grave. The men expected that underneath the stones, they would find a hollow burial vault containing a coffin.
They didn't. They found two feet of dirt.
A backhoe was summoned. When the earth was cleared, the men from Bradbury Vault Co. probed deeper - hitting brick walls at either end of what they figured was the burial vault. Securing the brick were two slabs of stone.
"Nothing is ever easy here," one woman said.
The backhoe dug out the brick and stone, piling it carefully by the side of the grave. Another half-hour of digging and pounding enabled the crew to reach and loosen the top of the vault.
The top was in three pieces. As each was slowly pulled aside, the few in attendance crowded at the edges of the grave to see.
"Wow," said Trish Quinn, wife of Tom and herself a funeral director.
The coffin had rotted and collapsed. Time had taken most of the remains as well. All that was left was a skull, a few bones, some tattered clothing, and shoes.
A worker climbed into the grave, finding pieces of metal and handing them to those at ground level. A nameplate emerged. Then an elaborate cross, discolored by years underground.
A funeral worker gave a bright blue body bag to the workers in the hole. The men lifted what remained of the corpse into the bag and zipped it shut.
By midafternoon, on a day that broke in sunlight but turned gray and chilly, the priest's remains were on their way to be reburied at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Cheltenham.
"I'm sure he's looking down on us," McFadden said, "and saying, 'Job well done.' "
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