Can a life-sized photograph of this holy relic help Tacoma Catholic church stay alive?
The efforts of a Tacoma Catholic church to stay viable continue 10 months after its parish and three others were merged into one by the Seattle Archdiocese.
On Sunday, the doors will swing open once again at 101-year-old St. Rita of Cascia on Tacoma’s Hilltop for a special anniversary Mass. The Mass will have an unusual feature: A vintage life-sized photograph of the Shroud of Turin. The photo could be a key to keeping the church building open, say a group of former parishioners. Its appearance is yet another twist in the fate of the church dedicated to the saint of improbable causes.
Staying together
Now part of Pope St. John XXIII parish, the St. Rita group wants to restore their parish or at least keep their church as a chapel or shrine. Their appeal is under review by the Vatican.
Seattle Archbishop Paul Etienne consolidated the parishes to counter a combination of issues, including dwindling congregants, a lack of priests and financial issues. Etienne’s plan wasn’t embraced at St. Rita.
“It made the core people want to stick it out and fight it,” congregant Marla Grassi said Wednesday. “He really launched a sort of a revival in our own midst of dedication to our church and our parish.”
Fellow congregant Fran Jordan secured legal help for the congregation’s appeal. The church’s appeal, which requires translation services in Rome, is being financed by their private foundation. The first step in the appeal is to continue as a parish, Jordan said. If that fails, they’ll appeal to become a chapel or shrine.
The Archdiocese says that the Dicastery for the Clergy upheld Etienne’s 2022 decree of extinctive union which created Pope St. John XXIII Parish. The Dicastery deals with all matters relating to priests and deacons of the diocesan clergy.
Prayers
After St. Rita closed its doors to regular Sunday Masses in 2022, some of its former congregants — many of whom are descendants of the Italian immigrant families which built it — would meet for prayer on the church’s steps below a colorful mural of an Italian village.
Since December, the new parish’s pastor, Father Tuan Nguyen, has allowed the congregants to use the interior of the church for their prayer service, most often led by Grassi.
Some of the former congregants now attend services elsewhere.
Funeral masses are still held at the church, but Sunday’s Mass featuring the shroud photograph will be its first since June. Because the church is still consecrated, two masses are allowed to be held there per year, Jordan and Grassi said. In addition to Sunday’s mass, a mass will be held on May 22 for St. Rita’s Feast Day. The Archdiocese says Masses can be held in the building any time per the desires of Nguyen.
The display of the shroud photograph on Sunday isn’t random — its owner and the church members hope that St. Rita could become a shrine that would house the photograph.
The shroud
The Shroud of Turin is a holy relic that believers say is the burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth. It contains the image of a man, wearing a crown of thorns and inflicted with wounds from a crucifixion. The documented history of the shroud dates to at least 1354. Radiocarbon dating pegs the linen cloth as being produced around 1300.
Some believe it’s evidence of a miracle while others, even in the 1300s, have called it a fake. In 2013, Pope Francis urged his congregants to contemplate the shroud with awe but did not make a statement as to its authenticity.
For the faithful, the shroud is the real thing, and even a photograph of it has caused viewers to faint. That’s what happened when the photo’s owner put it on display in a church near his Arizona home.
“I didn’t realize how powerful it was until these people we’re trying to put rosaries against it,” former Tacoma pediatrician Ron Gallucci said Wednesday in a phone interview. “They asked me if they could touch me. It’s very, very powerful.”
Gallucci grew up attending St. Rita. Now, he’s donated the photograph to the St. Rita of Cascia Society of Tacoma, the foundation behind St. Rita which is not under the control of the archdiocese.
Photographic history
Giuseppe Enrie was a portrait photographer in Turin, Italy when he was commissioned to photograph the shroud in 1931. His careful photographic studies brought new insight and controversy to the relic.
When Gallucci was attending Bellarmine Preparatory School in 1957, his grandparents, John and Josephine Gallucci, traveled to Turin, Italy where the shroud is kept in the Chapel of the Holy Shroud. There, they purchased the 4-foot by 12-foot photo and returned with it to Washington.
“They brought it to Tacoma in a big cardboard tube,” Gallucci said Wednesday. “They traveled to other countries and it almost got confiscated every time they crossed a border, because they thought it was stolen.”
Gallucci’s grandparents never revealed what they paid for the photograph. A roughly 10-inch by 12-inch 1931 photo by Enrie showing only the face of the shroud is in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
The Galluccis gave the photograph to a Catholic priest at Bellarmine who, years later, ended up at Gonzaga University in Spokane. When the priest died, his belongings were put into storage. Because the priest had made a statement that the photograph belonged to the Gallucci family, Ron was able to recover it in 2008. He framed the folded photograph in a glass case so that it now stands 6-feet-high and shows both the front and back of the shroud.
Earlier this year, the photograph was picked up by Stan and Fran Jordan and transported back to Tacoma in their RV. It’s now housed in an undisclosed location.
The public is welcomed to attend the noon mass on Sunday which celebrates the 1924 consecration of St. Rita of Cascia Church at 1403 South Ainsworth Street and see the shroud photograph from 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m.
“It’s for everyone to see,” Jordan said.
