The Serious Appeal of St. Therese
Hail Mary full of grace, the lord is with Thee...
The rosary begins half an hour before the service. The lights are dimmed. The candles and incense unlit. The reverend is still getting dressed.
Blessed art Thou among women...
The 12 women sitting in the pews of St. Therese Byzantine Catholic Church continue praying aloud for 25 minutes. More voices join in. Teen-age girls clatter in. The pews fill with parents and their children.
And blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus...
At Sunday Mass, one woman wears a veil, and two men walk in wearing jeans. The white-haired women wear pants or long skirts. The girls wear sundresses and sandals.
An influx of younger members is keeping the 180-member St. Therese alive, but it is the church’s adherence to strict liturgy and doctrine that attracts new congregants. People upset by the political changes they see occurring in the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant denominations find traditional doctrine and practices at St. Therese, 4265 13th Ave. N. No steeple tops St. Therese. Byzantine churches are adorned with onion domes.
While contemporary churches use guitars and movie screens, St. Therese offers historically accurate Mass every day.
“If you go to a Byzantine liturgy versus a modern Roman Catholic liturgy,” member David Finzer says, “ours feels more serious, more reverential.”
The Byzantine Church doesn’t change, Finzer says. “As a church we move at a glacial pace.”
Father Robert Evancho says he sees no grays. Church doctrine defines what is sinful and what is not. The highly ritualistic liturgy appeals to what member Kevin Tally says is a “sense of dignity and majesty.”
The liturgy is strict, and the Eucharist, which is the taking of Christ’s body and blood for forgiveness, is offered every day.
The Byzantine Church takes authority from the pope, but its architecture and art reflect Orthodox traditions.
The walls are mauve and blue with brightly colored depictions of Christ and other biblical figures -- Christ’s nativity, Christ rising from the dead. The windows are stained glass, and surrounding the altar are golden gates.
When Tally’s eye wanders in church, the icons remind him of the mysteries of God. “All the distractions,” he says, “lead you back to what is going on,” in the liturgy.
In church the sound of trained voices mixes with the off-key, while the voices of older congregants mingle with the young. At St. Therese, there is no organ. The members sing the liturgy -- all of it. One person leads.
“We don’t use an instrument,” Father Evancho says, “because nothing surpasses the human voice.”
When Father Evancho came to St. Therese almost 25 years ago as an assistant, the congregation was 75 percent Eastern European. When he returned to lead the church in 1991, it was less than half. The church now has more young neighborhood families and Roman Catholics as members.
Many of the older members of St. Therese hail from the northeast United States and grew up in the Byzantine Church. For Audrey Gochmonosky, St. Therese was a natural choice. It was her church.
“When I came here, and I walked into the church and heard the Mass it was like coming home,” Gochmonosky says.
Members come from as far as Bradenton to enjoy Mass at St. Therese. Tally grew up in the Roman Catholic Church but drives across the bay because he prefers the Byzantine rite. Dale Kimball and his family make a pilgrimage to St. Petersburg from Tampa every Sunday.
Sixteen years ago, God helped Kimball resolve a marriage difficulty, he says.
“I turned my heart to God after a Saturday morning in Tampa,” Kimball says. After a Mass, Kimball looked up at the cross and began a conversation with God.
“I felt the knots in my stomach go away,” he says. “I’d never done drugs before, but this is what drugs must feel like.”
In Kimball’s life, family and business come after God. He attends Mass and says the rosary daily. Kimball and his wife are considering moving farther south, but the family still plans on making its pilgrimage to St. Therese every Sunday.
During Sunday coffee hour, conversation ranges from fishing to social issues to doctrine. An openly gay couple attends St. Therese. The congregation welcomes them, but, true to Catholic doctrine and Father Evancho’s black-and-white counseling, homosexuality is a sin in the Byzantine Church. With repentance, Father Evancho says, “God forgives all sins,” including homosexuality.
Tally can spend an hour discussing one line of liturgy and its historical validity. But for Tally, faith is more than doctrine.
“The way you look at the world -- the way I make sense of what goes on outside the parish, is my faith,” Tally says. “In face of good and terrible things, true Christian belief precludes despair.”
