What does $20 dollars a year buy? Some decades ago, it bought a year’s tuition at St. William of York Catholic School. The west Baltimore school closed in 2010 — the tuition had increased a little in sixty years — but now the church, and what’s left of the parish, is closing too.

I remember my mother giving me a $1 bill every Monday morning for twenty weeks with firm instructions to make sure Sister noted the payment in her black book, where everything in Sister’s teaching life seemed to go; and, a dollar being a dollar, my mother also recorded the date of the payment in a pad she kept in our dining room cabinet. A dollar being a dollar, this was a time when her weekly grocery budget for a family of four was $20. Go ahead, say “A&P” in your best Baltimore accent, or ask your parents to say it.

As part of the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s wildly misnamed “Seek the City to Come” reorganization of its Baltimore city parishes, St. William of York parish will celebrate its last Mass on November 24; a fellow parishioner says Seek the City should properly be named “Abandon the City.” According to the almost undecipherable “Seek the City to Come” website, likely a purposeful word salad, St. William of York would be an ideal “worship site,” that is, a smaller, less well attended parish that is financially self-sufficient, whose church and grounds are in excellent condition, with a thriving yet smaller Mass attendance. But that isn’t the decision made by the archdiocese.

Parishioner volunteers maintain the grounds at St. Williams, as well as the church’s interior. The school building and the former convent are leased (though those leases are winding down because of the parish closing), providing income to the parish. St. Williams has made budget every recent year by about $25,000, according to the weekly parish bulletin, although the current year-to-date numbers, curiously, have stopped being published in the bulletin over the past several months.

Remember pea shooters? They were, essentially, metal straws designed for boys to fire, from their mouths, dried, hardened, pebble-like peas — best not swallow any — at a target. They could easily put out an eye, break a tooth, even a classroom window. Or nearly the window of a diplomat’s car, which is what I remember happening on a class field trip to D.C. in the early 1960s.

On that field trip, well-armed boys sat in the back of the bus, slyly opened the bus windows, aimed their weapons outside, then began their pea assault on anything, moving or not; cars were the most desired target. One of those vehicles hit, we found out in a few minutes, was a diplomat’s limousine, the driver of which notified police pretty quickly considering this was well before cell phones. Before we knew it, our bus was on the side of the road after being stopped by police officers who, after talking to Sister, realized we weren’t terrorists, international incident averted. After-school detention, however, was not averted.

St. William of York church is as lovely a small church as I’ve ever been in with beautiful stained glass, especially the large stained glass feature above the east-facing front door, stunning on a sunny Sunday morning it could light the entire church. St. Williams’ church, physically compact yet filled with spiritual warmth and parishioners of all races, seemed overwhelmed with stained glass. Where will all that glass artwork go? To auction? Or to Satan’s wrecking ball?

Current SWOY parishioners are being urged by the archdiocese to attend neighboring St. Agnes, with which St. Williams has been merged for about 15 years. Whenever I attend services at St. Agnes church I feel as if I’m in an oversized shoe box. I may attend there occasionally to keep up with St. Williams’ friends, but I’ll become a floater from parish to parish with no spiritual home or abandon the archdiocese altogether, as it has abandoned St. William of York parish, and me.

— Bernard Haske, Catonsville