St. Agatha - St. James Church Tour
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St. Agatha - St. James Church Tour |
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Let's begin our tour outside, along 38th Street. If you walk up that street toward the north and Chestnut street, you get a good sense of the structure of the church building. It is large, tall and complex. The building rises in layers of granite at the base and marble above, topped off by steeply pitched slate roofs. As you walk up 38th Street, your view is dominated by the curved wall of the apse, or sanctuary. There are lesser chapels on both sides, a former baptistery on your left and to your right, the present sacristy. The sanctuary abuts against the high flat walls of the transept, running the width of the church. The sanctuary roof is crowned by a gilded cross. Thanks to a recent gift from two of our parishioners, its gold has been renewed. That cross now shines, like a beacon, as you travel up 38th Street.
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To enter the church, you go to its north side, facing Chestnut Street. Two towers rise there to greet you. They frame a deeply recessed entrance portal, raised on a steep flight of steps. Above the entrance rises a great rose window. There are also lesser entrances, with shorter flights of steps, in the bases of the towers at the east, beside the rectory, and the west, on 38th Street. Behind the great towers rise the walls of the nave, or congregation space. The nave meets the transept at an angle of ninety degrees. When you approach the church, then, you perceive that its essential form is that of the cross: the nave and the sanctuary are like the cross' upright beam; the transept is the transverse arm. The basic shape of our church is highly traditional, occurring in Christian churches from the 4th century onwards. Similarly, the building's architectural style, a kind of French Gothic, reflects the fashions of church architecture in western Europe around 1200, where the governing structural shape is the pointed arch, as in the main entrance doors. So the exterior shapes of St. Agatha-St. James remind passers-by that this is a Christian church, maintaining traditions, forms and ideas that are very old. |
When you climb up the steps on Chestnut street, you are confronted by
the great entrance doors, elaborately fashioned in wood. These are
also well-known; they appear in a recent poster celebrating famous
doors of Philadelphia! These doors
have also been newly refurbished, and their woodwork is beautiful to
behold. There is an exuberant play on the theme of the pointed arch
in the section above the doors proper, and between them appears a Greek
cross, a cross whose arms are equal in length. That same Greek cross
also appears in the coat-of-arms of St. Agatha-St. James. |
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The doors nestle in a deep recess of stone, under a great and ornate pointed arch of marble. Attached columns of colored marble frame the main entrance. Their tones provide a kind of fanfare, proclaiming the church through polychromy. If you look carefully at the column capitals, you will see here and there shamrocks carved in stone. Our church began its life in 1850 as an Irish parish, shortly after the Great Famine in Ireland, and those stone plants acknowledge what was then a recent and great emigration. Moreover, if you run your eye along the capitals, you can pick out cockle-shells amid the foliage. This shell (just like the old logo for Shell Oil!) is an old symbol for our church's patron saint, James the Greater. That symbol developed nearly eight centuries ago as an emblem of pilgrimage. Those who travelled to the great shrine of St. James in Compostella, Spain, came back with metal badges in the form of cockle-shells. St. James is, among other things, the patron of travellers.
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Far above the main entrance and its framing arch, and above the rose window, stands our patron saint. Carved in Italy in 1887, the statue of St. James is nearly eight feet tall. If you look up at the figure in his niche you may see that St. James appears as a robust, bearded man. He did lead an outdoor life for James, the son of Zebedee and the brother of St. John the Evangelist, was a fisherman whom Christ called to be an apostle as he mended his nets beside the sea of Galilee (Matthew 4:21-22). Here in Philadelphia James wears a traveller's cloak and holds a staff in his right hand: he is the patron of wayfarers, as we have seen. Up there in his niche, our saint turns to our right, looks downwards, and thrusts his left hand outwards. St. James himself is bidding us welcome, as latter-day pilgrims, to his church. |
| Now we enter the church. The great doors on Chestnut Street and those in the bases of the towers all take us into the entrance vestibule, or narthex. We come into a narrow austere space, marked by white-washed walls. The narthex offers us a breathing space after the exuberance of the entrance and its carvings and before the festivity of the church's interior. The narthex is narrow, plain but also beautiful by virtue of the great curving staircases that guide us down to the basement and up to the choir loft. |
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St. Agatha - St. James Church Tour |
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entrance, Chestnut St.
