St. Mary’s Church Renovation

As communicated via last weekend’s Mass pulpit announcements, our St. Mary’s Church site is back open for business effective Friday, July 18. Consequently, along with 10:30 AM Sunday Mass, our Wednesday Rosary and weekday Mass (8:00/8:30 AM) will resume at St. Mary’s on July 23, followed by Eucharistic Adoration until 5:30 PM Benediction.

With this reopening, we have now completed phase two of our St. Mary’s Church reflooring and painting upgrades. Phase one involved significant repainting and new vinyl flooring in the church vestibule and gathering areas, and now we have re-carpeted the worship space up to the first stepleading to the main and side altars while also repairing and repainting the pillar bases and side baseboards.

By far the biggest challenge presented by this latest project was moving the pews. Doing so, however, presented us with the opportunity to address two significant shortcomings with our former pew layout – too little space between pews, and a lack of accommodation for special seating needs. While the new overall layout of the pews appears similar to what had been in place, two full rows of pews were removed, enabling us to add four additional inches between the remaining 20 rows, matching the pew-to-pew distance in place at our Immaculate Conception Church site. Moreover, rather than maintaining the double-wide pews throughout the worship space, we reduced six of them to single-wide to create special seating spaces around the main pillars.

We hope this latest round of improvements will be well received, and inspire us to proceed in like fashion, especially for the sake of those areas still in need of reflooring attention (side and main altars, sacristy, servers’ room, and choir loft stairways). As stated upon the conclusion of our first phase reflooring project, your patience and flexibility as we continue in our efforts to upgrade our St. Mary’s Church site are greatly appreciated!

P.S. Our new marble holy water stoups are nearly completed, and with any luck will be installed prior to the Port Washington Historical Society tour of our St. Mary’s Church on July 26.