well to begin with i have a confession to make it seems like if i'm going to talk about the catholic church i should begin with the confession well actually it's not really a confession  the genesis of this talk goes back about a year when we had vince feeney in this very same spot and vince was speaking about the irish in underhill and obviously i was in the audience and i was actually i guess you might say responsible for inviting him because you know he's a friend of mine and i was very familiar with this book and to tell you the truth this is my confession i was disappointed in his talk a little bit although i didn't tell him that afterwards because it was well received but he talked a lot about the contents of this book and the general migration of the irish to vermont and it was all interesting and scott and i talked about this but we had both heard the talk before you know and it was well done and everything but i thought at the time why doesn't he mention st thomas church because to me that seemed like the great legacy or the great present that the irish community presented to under a hill and he mentions same thomas church in the book but only in passing as one of the early catholic churches in the state about the seventh by one of his charts in here so i got the idea then that something could be done that would be really interesting about st thomas church and so  i've always been fascinated with the architecture and this is where serendipity kind of came in there just the i read a review or maybe it was on from our public radio there was an interview with the  authors of this book vermont salusa the architect george guernsey which is a book that came out just this year and it's but published by the bethel historical society and so i'm there talking about all the churches that guernsey designed and lo and behold st thomas church is i think it's just about the last picture in the book but it it got me to thinking that perhaps saying thomas church is an underappreciated artifact of the past which is still serving a vital purpose today so that prompted me to spend the summer well not the whole summer it wasn't as if i was working all the time on it but i did a little research and what helped me  out a great deal was a history of the parish that was published in one thousand nine hundred one by the our debts and this had some basic facts in it that really helped me and gave me guidance i'm trying to acknowledge my sources here and then another source that i leaned on as a friend of mine and lance harlow who is a priest and he wrote a biography of bishop louis de goes beyond an excellent biography and so i relied and actually i e mailed back and forth with lance and then also with glenn andrus of middlebury college who's in our architectural historian there so those are my sources basically and obviously many visits to the to the church itself that came in handy just to set this up though a little bit because i have a video presentation to to make well actually that's that's that's the power point but that'll be all right we can well maybe s with but not yet not quite yet but so let's see where to begin well the obvious place to begin is with the beginning of the migration of the irish to underhill which started probably in the eighteen twenties or so and that's documented very well invincibles book iris settlement road is mentioned very prominently as well as the dune family felix doon and when you look at the names of the donors  you go around the church today because almost all the windows have donors names on them you see sort of a who's who list the berets the flynns it goes on and on  it's i would say it's a who's who list but it's a very interesting list of local people who gave extra money to fund these windows and how did the church come to be well just character is all i can figure because from eight hundred thirty three down to the eight hundred fifty s he came to underhill every so often i don't know how often to celebrate mass to do the sacraments with the catholic community here and it was recognised at an early stage that a church was needed more than just meeting at martin flannery's house for mass they needed to have an actual church and it was bishop louis de goes for you and who just been appointed first bishop of vermont hundred fifty four who bought the land that same thomas church stands on today he paid three hundred dollars again this is not original research i'm depending on the blue history here he paid three hundred dollars and they moved martin flannery's house down the road so i checked due diligence i checked old maps and found that on an old map there is a martin flannery house that's very close to where cedric's market is wells corner market it sort of in the space between the post office and wells corner market but it's gone that house is gone it no longer exists and the land itself was used for the first church and i don't have a picture of the first st thomas church but i would imagine seeing churches of that period that it looked very similar to the town hall in underhill center because that was a church as well that was a methodist freewill baptist church in built in one thousand nine hundred fifty most of the churches at that time were just wooden structures not not the gothic revival style of st thomas church at all nothing close even and they were happy with that church in the way they kept it up and they would have stuck with it except it burned and it burned on a december evening in one thousand eight hundred nine and it burned to the ground at that time there was no fire department in underhill that didn't happen till nine hundred thirteen and so you can imagine a bucket brigade running down to the brook to get buckets of water and you can imagine how quickly the church burn and it did cording to the records burned to the ground the original st thomas church so at the scene had that time was a  young priest named james shannon and i got kind of interested in james shannon because he was only twenty eight years old this was his first parish when he was appointed parish priest here and he took it on  challenge i think with the encouragement of bishop goes for no doubt and also the congregation and the whole town to build something much better than the original church and i went over not with great diligence but some what  the the financial receipts that i saw from that period and they just didn't add up i have to say that is that they didn't bring in enough money to build build the church they had to borrow extra money to build st thomas church the way it is  period of many years they would build a foundation then they would raise money and then they would build you know a wall then they would build a steeple but they built st thomas church for the groundbreaking was in may one thousand nine hundred one and the that magnitude and i i do think it's a very big church for underhill center i mean it's just big it's one hundred forty one feet long and so many feet wide but anyway let's take a look at the slides and since they're up motif which you see in the vertical windows the book i'm sorry this is shaking so much maybe my hand touching it and then this would be the rose window in the center which there's a duplications of these windows that is if you walk into the church one side of the church matches or compliments the other side and that's that was a clue to me to look at both windows the one on the right and the one on the left because they're meant to be viewed that way i believe the steeple is one hundred feet from the ground i believe or thereabouts guernsey held back a little bit because he built a much bigger steeple in the church that he built the following year in bennington and that steeple th had to take down to it was too high it was going to collapse they thought in a windstorm so i think we should be grateful that he didn't go too much higher then then this next site so there when you enter the church there actually two of these windows with roman cross and this is a sign or a symbol in order to make the sign of the cross as you enter the church as catholics do next i love these windows although this is not the whole window these are the windows that were given by the sunday school class of eight hundred ninety two the boys and the girls the boys on one side and the girls on the other side of other than the bottom dedication the windows are exactly the same and interior of the church with the although you really can't see it will see a closer up later on the eye of god window above and the cross i might mention was made by a local resident roy kennedy who lived next to  thomas church and it's really a work of art as many of popes as all of his sculptures are next so this is what i meant by the first by the complement terry nature of the windows when you walk into the church a new look to your left you see an anchor and then turning to the right you see and this is on top of the vertical window the the vaulted arches we call it you see an open book which is obviously the holy bible the relationship between these two windows in my humble understanding and believing i'm not an authority on this has to do with the fact that an anchor is a symbol of face steadfast faith and also i had to think in my poetic imagination that for the irish immigrants this me sort of dropping anchor here you know settling down this is a home base kind of thing or at least a spiritual home base and that the spirit the the faith is based on the scripture so that's an example of the complimentary nature of the windows and then when you step forward a little bit you come to in my view these represent the early stages of the sacraments that would be baptism the  confirmation of the descent of the dove from heaven that spoken of in the new testament there not too many animals in the windows of st thomas i will say compared to other stained glass windows that i've seen but what animals there are and there are no human beings there not unlike the windows in st patrick's cathedral and other catholic church is no in human images that i found but the animal images are limited and this is one that the descending dove and father harlow pointed out the goal behind it is an indication that it's coming down from heaven now we come to the middle part the whole thing is like a pilgrimage down the down the aisle that's the way i sort of approached it and in the middle you have the six petal rows windows facing each other at first sight to the untrained eye they look exactly the same but if you look closer one is the immaculate heart of mary which has the white roses and that's on the far side and the other is a sacred heart of jesus which has thorns around the heart so this is something that i found difficult to write about in the book because with a lot of the symbolism it's so profound that you don't really know what to say you just sort of say this is the macula heart of mary this is sacred heart of jesus and they somehow complement each other and i said they represent extreme love and devotion and  well i guess that's where you stop words were sort of fall off but i love rose windows the actual name rose window is from the seventeenth century the early gothic churches didn't call them rose windows which i found out during my research and i don't actually know why they got started calling them rose windows but that's what they call it so there are three rows windows that same thomas of the two are right here and the other is a spectacular eight petal rosewood no which will see shortly next  w i found if you look closer at the windows these are not big windows this is just detail work here you find symbols like the alpha and the omega and this one i'm not actually sure what that one means but i put it in anyway because i thought it was an interesting design alpha and omega is a statement coming from the new testament i am the alpha in the make of the beginning and the end and so that all of these i felt like i was seeing almost like a scripture in glass that's what i felt when i visited there and i visited there several times but every time i felt as if i was entering a space that was not just ordinary space that it actually was a sort of a sacred space no not even sort of a sacred space it is a sacred space and and therefore it set apart from the monday in world and in my view the stained glass windows by filtering the light out of the ordinary daylight out inhance is this feeling of being sort of one step away from just everyday ordinary reality in ordinary time now that may be in my imagination but i was raised catholic so i guess i'm entitled to have that feeling sometime but it is this feeling of assurance somehow you get from these windows let alone the beautiful artwork i mean no next on yet let alone the beautiful artwork now now we're moving to the front of the church and there are two symbols here that the crowd obviously is a symbol of kingship and it relates to christ kingship over heaven and earth and this one is a little bit trickier this is the lamb of god who takes away the sins of the earth and i don't know if you can count him but there are seven crosses here underneath the lamb of god which may represent the seven sacraments in the catholic church or they may represent the seven seals in the book of revelation i am or maybe both you can have multivalent symbolism yeah that's true but you see how he complement each other ok next this is just some detail work here again the celtic cross this  this part of the window is only maybe four inches by four inches so this is a detail piece but i thought it was very significant to find a cult across so in so many places and then they floral imagery the lilies obviously relate to easter and rebirth and regeneration of life resurrection those imageries are there so they can be appreciated either from a spiritual perspective or just the i call this ultimate concerns of our lives because this relates to the last supper but also the eucharist that's the hose there and the chalice and then opposite that is father shannon's vaulted window he paid he paid for this he sponsored this window and it has obviously the crucifix in i h s the monogram for jesus at the center of it which to me my represent the resurrection or life after death perhaps so that's what i call ultimate concerns of our life you see what i was trying to get out here is that there's a progression from birth to death and beyon here it least in my in my view so that brings us up to the next one which is where we're facing the eye of god window and this was the trickiest one for me as a photographer to take a picture of i've taken many pictures of the stained glass window and none of them have met my expectations because it's a hard window to take a picture of that i guess is the best way to say or if we want to get a little bit mystical it's just it's just a difficult phenomenon to to record but there you see it the center is an eye and it's too interlaced triangles there and then surrounded by a circle indicating sort of infinity and this window actually catches early morning light because it's on the eastern side of the church and the church is catholic churches are ranged in that fashion purposely they are there not there's nothing chancy about you the placement of the church it's a range that way and i understand from that preceded i think that certain mornings that the sun shines directly through there i didn't take a picture of that but i'm sure it must happen some time and then the next one directly opposite is i didn't get this full frame because it's so big this is the spectacular eight petal rose window and this has a musical theme you'll see it in the video when we get to the video and this is a harp which is it said which is kind of sweet and there are trumpets in there all kind you almost feel like that window could make a lot of noise if you wanted to like it's all said i think that's all  now a pause for a second to change media here are there any questions so far i've done a lot of talking up to now yes question i did a little research thanks to the blue book as well the company is george morgan i'm sorry john morgan and sons out of new york city and they  went online and searched and they were one of the major manufacturers of stained glass along with tiffany and fart in the late eighteenth hundreds they started in one thousand nine hundred two or thereabouts and they were out of business i think by nine hundred ten but they did a lot of the stained glass windows in the churches throughout new england in the country even if the famous eight pedal rose window in st patrick's cathedral was made by john morgans and sun so the same company that did the spectacular the one on fifth avenue that looks out on fifth avenue they made that window as well as the windows in st thomas when i found that out i just a chill went down my spine because i was baptized in st patrick's cathedral i said this to father and he said it might be providence i don't know it would be yeah but that i would settle in vermont in it next to a church that had windows there it's always to sounds fictional because the windows wonder if they did on the windows or be that i don't know if this is part of the research where i really felt like i could have more time and maybe a staffer or something i could have ferreted that out but i don't i don't know that i imagine because i talked to lawrence really key who is the stained glass studio in burlington he's repaired these windows several times he said that they were probably shipped via rail from new york and because i said who would have put them together and he said probably they came in big chunks you know like an erector set and they were shipped by rail to the flats and then brought by a horse drawn wagon down to the church so i imagine that in my article that how the congregation felt when they first saw the windows you know they must 've been thrilled is what i thought i would suspect i don't know if they were kept under wraps and then all of a sudden shown to them at once but it must have been thrilled and according to the parish records each window costs thirty five dollars and i don't know how that but so it to the donor in other words if the donor let's say they shanley's dedicated a window there which they did they paid thirty five dollars above their subscription to the the building project in today's dollars so if that isn't even that much that maybe five hundred six hundred dollars something like in today's dollars i didn't do the arithmetic but  o john morgan and sons to them so should we go to the video the video i might add is as well as the long form article is on the same thomas website so you can watch the video anytime it's a five minute production to a trained eye for architecture st thomas church is easily recognizable as a gothic revival structure designed by one of vermont's foremost architects george guernsey it dates from eight hundred ninety one and it reflects the guernsey style a robust gothic revival style there are many remarkable features of st thomas the very fact of its existence in a small from on village nestled under mount mansfield is remarkable how did such a parish consisting of only two hundred or so irish immigrant families raise the money to build such a church and how did they attract vermont's preeminent architect to design it and where did those windows come from those magnificent windows inside there many questions like this about this church and we'll explore them in this video let's take a look inside the church as it cannot be fully appreciated from the outside the first stained glass windows you encounter are on either side of the tower entryway they were donated by the sunday school class of eight hundred ninety two the entryway windows are but a foretaste of the larger windows on the inside of the church there are total of eight vertical windows with pointed arches on the top two six petal rows windows one eight petal rose window and the smaller  god window above the sanctuary there is a clear order of progression evident in the symbols depicted in the windows as one moves towards the front of the church in the catholic religion this progression is representative of the individual's lifelong assent to communion with god the vertical windows on each side relate to the windows on the opposite side of the church so for example the first window on your left depicts an anchor s and to the right is a symbol of a descending from heaven the dove represents the holy spirit which came down from heaven at the time of jesus baptism by john on the river jordan midway down the aisle one comes to the two six petal rose windows facing each other at the center of each window is a hard one for mary and one for jesus the symbolism of these sacred hearts complement each other is profound they represent extreme devotion love and purity of thought in words the next door windows relate to the ultimate concerns of our lives you are right as you stand before the sanctuary is a window depicting a chalice and a host this symbol relates to the last supper and also to the celebration of the mass this is the sacrament called the eucharist one of the seven sacraments the catholics believe were instituted by jesus the left you will see the image of the lamb of god jesus who sacrificed takes away the sins of the world according to the catholic teachings the final two vertical windows represent our ultimate victory over sin and death the one on the l a crown symbolizing christ kingship over heaven and earth the one on the right as you stand before the sanctuary depicts a cross with a jesus monogram i h s at the center this window was donated by jean shannon parish priest of st thomas at the time of the construction of the church now having completed our walk down the aisle we find ourselves looking up at a small stained glass window above the sanctuary this is the mysterious god window the window has no donor's name associated with it like the rose windows it is a pointed arch with a circle in the center and at the center of the circle is a single eye looking on all that is going on below this signifies god's present st thomas church came to be as a result of a fire that destroyed the original church in december eight hundred ninety but in replacing it the congregation reach for a church much bigger and better than the original reach almost beyond their means and in so doing they gave us an architectural treasure lovingly maintained b the video was not an afterthought exactly because in my previous job at fletcher allen i was involved with the media production department there and so i and now in my present job at champlain as an educator i use video quite a bit as well because i find it gets students attention and and i enjoy making them so i might mention the music is by full circle the recorder group and i first heard them in this very same space sunday afternoon concert few years ago and was so impressed by their music that and also they they're very liberal in allowing me to use their music in my videos that helps as well but i've used it in a couple of videos there  record of music i was after kind of not a medieval feel with it but i don't know what's the right word poetic kind of a backward looking feel to it but i also want to emphasize and i think in the last line of the video it says that this church exists today because people have maintained it lovingly over these years it's had major renovations one occurred in the late one nine hundred eighty s to get ready for the hundredth anniversary and i i just am very impressed with how well it is maintained because without that constant maintenance we wouldn't be as proud of it as we are i think  so i worried about father shannon though because i wish i knew more about him to tell you but there's a picture of him in i know you can't see it but he is this fairly young looking man down here in the pictures and very i did to my way of thinking very idealistic looking and so i wanted to find out was he a first generation irish immigrant i imagine him coming down from irish settlement road but he actually came from in a spur from on and i found how to find this out oh i call the i've somehow i got that he was from in his burg and i call the inner spirit historical society if you ever want to find out anything about a community just call the historical society because you'll get somebody there will tell if you're off i guarantee you just about and so i got the president of the historical society he says she said oh i know the shannon family i know it yes and he's buried right next to st john's church here in eunice bird with the rest of the shannon's and his sister was a teacher at st joseph's school in burlington her and she showed us around and we actually visited the home now i didn't go inside the home where he grew up jamestown and grew up in is for and he went on this was his first par she was here for about a decade then he went to middlebury and the curious thing with the middlebury one is that they were in a financial dilemma they had started designed by george guernsey george guernsey had died in the meantime but they were trying to finish the and i think the diocese moved father shannon there to help them finish the church and he did and then they moved him to bennington and he helped in bennington as well and then kind of news mean monsignor at a certain point i don't know when but the let's see i was told this may not be true that he was even considered to be the bishop of vermont but he was he turned it down or didn't work out one one way or another but he got very close to being  here and then we actually visited this site the shannon burial site in a spur which has a celtic cross over it i should have brought my sides of that but it has a celtic cross over it and i felt like i was coming full circle with this man and he  he wrote some sort of memoir which i it was unable to find i looked and i know it exists somewhere but it was a memoir about building his years in underhill and maybe eventually i will come across it he talked about how satisfied he was at the end of his career or the end of his stay here and i just wanted to reach one little quote from him and he says  that he hopes that his inclusion on the list of donors to the church will be found to possess some local interested at least for the descendants of those who by their generous deeds and uncompromising catholic life aided in planting and maintaining the old faith in this man and in this locality the names of those subscribers are given here and then you you have in this history the list of the original subscribers that i thought that was interesting maintaining the old faith in this locality and i might have made a little bit much of this in the booklet because i tried to relate the idea of the gothic revival movement in architecture to an attempt to revive the values that hearken back to an earlier time and hearken back to the old faith remember one thousand century time of darwin time of industrial revolution time of robber barrons time a civil war time of a lot of social upheaval and all of a sudden you see popping up in all over this country gothic revival churches i don't think that's a coincidence i mean they're beautiful let but they're they hearken back to an earlier time a time of greater spirituality if you will or whatever it doesn't mean i don't mean they're conservative in the political sense of conservative but in the values sense of conservative to to take what is really good and pass it and pass it on that sense of conservative or more questions we had some french canadians two that rounded out the catholic community and i think it increased even more by the end of the century one thing that i said in the article because the question that i asked is how did this church come to be i mean that was my question and i realized when i got to the end of writing it that i hadn't answered that question because i still didn't have all the answers but i said that it had to do with a variety of factors and one was obviously father shannon that i think that he must have been a charismatic leader of the community in the church and very devoted and also a good scholar of latin because he kept notes in latin i noticed from some of the old manuscripts copies that i looked at  free and i mentioned him before i think he played a major role i think underhill was close to his heart because he visited here right after he became a bishop and he bought the original land and he did come of from a very wealthy  in college but he did he had nothing he did he managed to give away everything and i think that key although i can't guarantee this historically i think that he contributed a lot to building st thomas church because they are as i say there's a shortfall of many thousands of dollars there but who knows i think maybe one of the mysteries when you do local history you realize there's certain threads you're going to be able to tease out and others that you're just not going to you're not going to get and so what i said is it had to also to do with the states from one hundred twenty five about yeah and so what i see there and also in terms of numbers were pushing one hundred thousand or more throughout the state it must've been a vibrant period for the faith at that time and st thomas church is a shining artifact of that period that it it came out of that and i know i can redundant here but i mean when you walk into the church now it's almost like a time capsule where you can go back to a different period a sort of a timeless period but a period there that reflects a very strong community spirit i think that's the right way to say it because they all the other thing i might mention is that same time as church  serve the community in many different ways like when there were fire happened in number five school house where did they move the classes to well they moved into st thomas church to into the basement likewise when the fire happened in  the church where they move the services they moved to green mountain academy so which is just up the hill so vermont vermont is have always been resourceful in sharing resources and i think st thomas has played a role in that and when you have a very sacred or meaningful community event like let's say i think of the funeral of david sullivan with all the firemen there and stuff it it's the place that it has that sank sanctified terrorist sancta feel to it that i think every community needs one i think that kind of a place you know not every community has it though and i don't mean it has to be catholic necessarily but something like that a place where didn't attend that particular church the earlier one was burned down or moved or something so so i did include in the book and make out just close with this big bit of poetry now my poetry but walter hard who was of one of the founders of vermont life magazine wrote some wonderful poem everyone thinks of robert valley yet friend they're the stages of their life stages it's drama tragedy comedy nobility beside self seeking petty crimes against the spirit the wise serenity of old age the rebellious passion of youth there the whole of life unfolds from childhood careful days to the hillside with the white stones fifty houses offering the life of the race and somehow i paragraph there said under thomas church in our village has seen all of life on full without and within its walls over the past hundred twenty five years if these walls could talk you know what would they say what they what they've