Singing at St. Patrick's
These past few months I have had the privilege of doing some supplemental singing with the St. Patrick’s Catholic Church choir. The director of Seraphim, my community chorus, is Director of Music at St. Patrick’s, and arranged for some of us individually and for the whole chorus to do some singing in this magnificent church. This year St. Patrick’s celebrates the 100th anniversary of its founding. It is a big gothic old style Catholic Church located in Youngstown’s south side. In a city built on steel, the neighborhood was ethnic, blue collar and middle class. They even considered making it the Cathedral for the newly formed Diocese of Youngstown (a function it temporarily served when St. Columba’s Cathedral burned down in the early 1950’s). But the neighborhood has been in decline for years and years, and has been long considered classic inner-city surrounded by urban blight. But like several other old neighborhood Catholic churches in the area, the faithful who moved to the suburbs