Going back

It’s difficult to let go of a place, even when you already have done so officially. Mrs. D and I have not been members of St. Adalbert Parish in St. Paul since 2002. It will always be a big part of our lives. We were married there on this day in 1991, and both of our children were baptized there. The twin spires of the church have been a recognizable landmark in the Frogtown neighborhood for nearly 110 years. As the crow flies, it is closer to the State Capitol than the Cathedral is. The Polish immigrants who arrived in St. Paul around the turn of the 20th Century built the church, but they have long since moved on. These days, it is a parish that serves another immigrant community, the Vietnamese, who have been its primary parishioners for over 25 years.

St. Adalbert is at a crossroads. Its community is thriving, but the old church has seen better days and isn’t adequate to serve the needs of the community. The building would require millions to in repairs to ensure long-term viability for the building and there’s no way the congregation can do that. Frogtown has never been a glamorous address, but in recent years it has become an even more dangerous place than it once was, which complicates matters even more. The police blotter usually has numerous entries from the area just to the west of the parish, with drug deals, prostitution and murder often on the docket. And, while the church is where the community gathers to worship, many parishioners live elsewhere in town. While the Vietnamese are immigrants, some have been in Twin Cities for over 30 years and their children are moving away and finding a better life all over the metro area.

Given those challenges, it’s hardly surprising that the community is looking for a new home and recently the Archdiocese approached our sister parish, Corpus Christi in Roseville, about the possibility of providing a new home for the St. Adalbert congregation. Corpus Christi used to be in the St. Anthony Park neighborhood of St. Paul that houses the University of Minnesota, but the parish built a new church about a mile or two north in Roseville, moving there in the 1980s. Corpus Christi is a small congregation, but it has a modern church building and plenty of space to grow, in a prime location just to the south of the Rosedale Mall complex. It also has a well-deserved reputation as a welcoming community. It sounded like a good match.

It’s not going to happen, though. It can't really. The St. Adalbert community is larger than Corpus Christi and while the Corpus Christi church building is newer, it is far too small to accommodate everyone who would want to attend Mass. You simply can’t fit more than 400 people in the sanctuary at Corpus Christi, while a typical St. Adalbert gathering of Vietnamese parishioners would be almost double that number. For the parishioners at Corpus Christi, the proposal felt less like a merger and more like a takeover. That’s not how anyone intended it, but perceptions matter. We are all one Church, but we are also humans and we care about the temporal things, even though we know Jesus calls us to set those things aside.

We haven’t been back to St. Adalbert in many years. We’re going today, for 4:30 Mass. I am eager to see it again.

A half-cent here, a half-cent there

It's the little funding engine that could:

The Metropolitan Council is rapidly running out of options to come up with $135 million needed to lock in critical federal funding for Southwest light-rail transit. GOP House Speaker Kurt Daudt’s refusal to put state dollars toward the project has left few viable alternatives with only four days left in the session.

Gov. Mark Dayton, DFL legislators, local mayors and business groups are making a last-ditch effort to raise a half-cent sales tax in the seven-county metro region to expand a transit system that must accommodate 750,000 new residents who are expected here in 25 years.

“We think this is a long-term, sustainable solution,” said Adam Duininck, chairman of the Metropolitan Council, which manages the transit system used by about 275,000 people in the region on the average weekday.

Will a train that runs from downtown Minneapolis to Eden Prairie help the traffic in Forest Lake? What's in it for Hastings? How do you like your rail, St. Michael? The Met Council thinks you should pay for it, even if you never use it.

But it's only a half-cent. You won't even notice. And that's the point. You should notice the impact of taxes. After a while, it does become noticeable. Back to the linked Star Tribune article:

If the increase is approved, the Minneapolis sales tax would rise to 8.275 percent, with rates well above 10 percent for liquor, hotels, restaurants and entertainment.

St. Paul’s sales tax would also go north of 8 percent.

Is that a competitive disadvantage for those cities? Yes, eventually it is. An example -- if I want to buy something at Home Depot, I have two locations that are nearby. The closest location is in Northeast Minneapolis, while there's another one in Fridley that is a few miles further away. Currently, the sales tax rate in Fridley is 7.125%. It's 7.775% in Nordeast. If I'm buying something inexpensive, it doesn't make a lot of difference. If I'm buying new carpeting, or building materials for a remodel project, it starts to add up. And if the Minneapolis City Council decides they'd like a sales tax hike to fund some other scheme, the Nordeast location faces even a greater challenge. And since it's highly likely that a Minneapolis business faces larger costs in other ways, especially if the Minneapolis City Council jacks up the minimum wage to $15 an hour, it's increasingly difficult to run a business there.

But I'm sure it wall be fine. We can trust the Met Council to do the right thing. After all, they are accountable to the people, right? There's no chance that the Met Council chairman would be the husband of the governor's chief of staff, right? It's all on the up and up.

Confirmation Day

Fearless Maria gets confirmed at the Cathedral of St. Paul:

Right in front of the bishop

If you've never been to the Cathedral of St. Paul, you really should visit it if you get a chance. It is a magnificent Beaux Arts structure that was completed just over a hundred years ago, mostly the product of the persistence of Archbishop John Ireland and the wallet of James J. Hill, the railroad magnate whose mansion home is down the street.

I've lived in the Twin Cities for over 23 years and I've only been to the Cathedral three times -- once for the ordination of a family friend, another as part of teaching a Boy Scout merit badge, and yesterday. As a symbol of the majesty of the Church, the Cathedral is unsurpassed, at least in the Midwest. It's a subjective judgment, but to my eye the Cathedral of St. Paul is a significantly more impressive structure than Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago. It certainly has a better location -- Holy Name Cathedral sits on Wabash Avenue and is part of the grid pattern of streets in the area, while the Cathedral in St. Paul has a commanding perch on top of Cathedral Hill.

Confirmation is a hugely important sacrament in the Catholic Church, as those who are confirmed are full members of the Church. The issue for many Catholics is that they don't take that membership as seriously as they ought to. Following Jesus means putting aside your own desires and listening to something other than the sirens of the larger world. It's never easy to do. In his homily, Bishop Cozzens spoke of his own challenges as a young person and how he struggled to hear God's voice. It's possible that someone in the group pictured above could have a religious vocation some day. It's a path not often chosen, but as we've seen throughout the past year, lay people within the Church play a large role in faith formation as well. The challenge in the bishop's message is to listen more closely and find the role God plays in our lives.

I was confirmed a long time ago, back in 1979. In those days, the practice in our diocese was that Bishop would come to your parish, instead of traveling to the cathedral. I'm glad that we go to the Cathedral now; it serves as a reminder of the glories of the past, along with the challenges ahead. We don't have to rehearse the many scandals that priests and other religious have caused and the tremendous pain involved; it is an ongoing challenge and represents a stain that is impossible to remove. We build cathedrals to celebrate glories of God. We emerge from the cathedrals to find a world where God is always present, but also a world where it is often difficult to see the hand of God or the workings of the Holy Spirit. Those who were confirmed yesterday face that challenge today. Those who love and support those who were confirmed have the same challenge.

Don't follow leaders, watch your parking meters

Chris Coleman and his pals got an earful last night about the plan to add meters to Grand Avenue:

For weeks, the green “No Meters” signs posted on Grand Avenue storefronts told St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman and other city officials how most business owners and neighbors view a plan to install parking meters along one of the Twin Cities’ best known shopping avenues.

On Monday night, a raucous crowd of several hundred people took the opportunity to tell him in person.

It wasn’t pretty.

It rarely is pretty. A businessman on the street understood what's going on:

“What we need is honest politicians,” Mike Schumann, owner of Traditions on Grand, a home furnishings store, said to loud cheers from the crowd. “This is not about parking, this is about raising revenue.”

Of course it is. As the Star Tribune's James Walsh explains, the meters are the camel's nose:

The Grand Avenue plan would serve as a pilot program for potentially adding meters elsewhere in St. Paul. The city already has increased hours and raised parking rates at meters around Xcel Energy Center and CHS Field in Lowertown.

If you can put meters on Grand Avenue, you can put them on a number of other commercial corridors in St. Paul -- Snelling Avenue, Payne Avenue, Larpenteur Avenue, Cleveland Avenue -- and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

Just a guess -- parking will remain free in Roseville, Eagan and Maplewood.