Archbishop dedicates new chapel

MOUNT CLEMENS — A new chapter for St. Mary’s Catholic School began on April 16 as the first Mass was held in the school’s new chapel.

Conducted by Archbishop Allen Vigneron, the Mass marked the culmination of a two-year effort by the Rev. John Maksym of the St. Peter Parish to turn a gymnasium into a chapel for the students. Maksym’s goal of building the chapel was based on two issues he noticed.

“First, Gratiot Avenue is very dangerous now and people are driving dangerously, and we’ve had a few close calls with getting my children, over 500 kids, over to St. Peter Church for Mass,” Maksym said. “We have Mass for the kids once a week, and now we’re going to have it twice a week because we have a chapel in the school.”

Maksym’s second issue was the general lack of a chapel in an ostensibly religious-oriented school.

“When I got there, it resembled a little more of a private school than a parochial Catholic school, and I wanted to make sure that the Catholicity of the school was underscored,” Maksym said. “Having a chapel there will be wonderful for our teachers and our students to have God’s house in the middle of the school structure itself.”

St. Mary’s auxiliary gym was the site chosen for the new chapel. With the help of donations from the Jaboro and Wieczorek families, work began on retrofitting the old gym. The entire heating, ventilation and air conditioning system had to be redone to accommodate the expected capacity increase from 30 to 300 people at a time.

“It also had been used as a part-time cafeteria, so you literally had … the tables inserting into the wall,” Maksym said. “That posed a real problem during the reconstruction of the place because what are you going to do with these formerly inserted tables? What we did was remove them and inserted what appeared to be blackboards, and on each of these blackboards is a painting of the Virgin Mary in one of her titles.”

The school worked with the Archdiocese of Detroit to furnish the chapel using elements from closed parishes around the region. St. Stanislaus Kostka in Wyandotte provided midcentury modern light fixtures and a baldacchino that is fixed above the altar, itself the former St. Peter Church’s altar. Pews were sourced from the Chapel of the Little Flower in Detroit while various other furnishings were provided by the Archdiocese of Saginaw.

Despite all the work that went into the retrofitting, the school’s principal, Patrick Adams Jr., said activities went on as normal during the year of construction.

“There was no real disruption,” Adams said. “We rearranged schedules and made it work during the winter season, so all the kids had an opportunity to play in the big gym.”

When it came time for the inaugural Mass, it appeared everything went as planned for the new Our Lady of the Annunciation Chapel — including high marks from the archbishop.

“I do a lot of school visits; I would say this is the nicest school chapel I’ve ever been in,” Vigneron said.

The chapel is the most recent project undertaken at the St. Mary Catholic School and in the St. Peter Parish. In 2018, the school began the construction of a new 12,500-square-foot gymnasium. In 2022, the church took in a new Italian marble altar to replace the wooden one that had been used since the 1960s. The rectory and confessionals at St. Peter were remodeled, and a warming center was established.

With all the projects in the past few years, Maksym expects it will be some time before the next big undertaking.

“Construction-wise, I think I’m going to give my staff a break for a couple years,” Maksym said. “Then we’ll think what else we can do to make our footprint more effective here in Mount Clemens.”