A Catholic Anchor in the Glenville Mill Country
St. Paul Roman Catholic Church stands at 84 Sherwood Avenue in Greenwich, Connecticut, on the border with New York, drawing its worshippers from the backcountry of Greenwich and from across the state line. Founded in 1902 and established as a parish eight years later in 1910, the church remains, in the words of its pastor, Reverend Michael J. V. Clark, an intentional Catholic community seeking to grow in faithful discipleship, offering beautiful worship to God in Spirit and in Truth.
It would be a mistake, however, to read St. Paul's as simply one more commuter-town Catholic church. It is a parish with deep roots among the Irish and Polish families who once worked the Glenville woolen and felt mills along the Byram River. It is a parish that is putting in a pipe organ by the Noack Organ Company and building a Cathedral-style chorister school, the Tallis Academy, on the model of the great English choral foundations. It is a parish that runs a Friday soup kitchen and a 600-client-a-week food pantry for the immigrant poor in Port Chester, just over the New York line. And with the only fully professional Catholic church choir in the Diocese of Bridgeport, it is a parish where the music is not an optional extra but the very mode by which the Body of Christ is offered to the Father in sacrifice and praise.
The church is open every day for prayer. Sunday Masses are celebrated at 7:30 AM (Low Mass), 9:30 AM (Sung Mass), 11:30 AM (Solemn Mass, with the St. Paul's Consort), and 5:00 PM (Low Mass). The Saturday Vigil Mass is at 4:00 PM, and weekday Mass is at 8:00 AM Monday through Friday. Confessions are heard every weekday at 7:30 AM and on Saturday afternoons from 3:00 until 3:45.
From the Glenville Mills to a Parish of Its Own
The earliest records show Catholic families living in what was then called Sherwood's Bridge from 1854 onwards. English settlers during colonial times had been drawn to the area by the water power of the Byram River; the first grist mill was built on Riversville Road in 1784, and the neighborhood took the name Glenville. When the first woolen mill went up in 1814, Irish families began settling in Greenwich, and from the 1880s Catholics of Polish extraction followed. In 1892 the American Felt Company took over the Glenville mills, and the neighborhood's Catholic population grew with the workforce.
For decades the Catholics of Glenville were a mission. They worshipped in private homes and meeting halls, and from 1889 they were served from St. Mary's in the borough of Greenwich. When Sacred Heart Parish was carved out of St. Mary's in 1900 for what was then East Port Chester, Glenville became a mission of the new parish. Its energetic pastor, the Reverend Thomas Finn, purchased land from the American Felt Company on the south side of Glenville Street, and on June 1, 1902, the cornerstone of the new church was blessed before a thousand people by the Right Reverend Michael Tierney, Sixth Bishop of Hartford. The architect was Joseph Jackson; the builder Max A. Dunschmidt, aided by Patrick Finn. The new church was a wooden-framed Gothic building with clerestory, sixty-eight feet long and forty-eight feet wide, with a brick basement, three Gothic altars, opalescent windows donated by parishioners, and seating for about two hundred and forty-five. Solemn High Mass was celebrated for the first time on October 19, 1902, the Reverend Charles J. McElroy singing the Mass, with the Reverend T. H. Shanley as deacon and the Reverend Frank Havey as subdeacon.
Glenville remained a mission of East Port Chester until 1910, when, at the urgent request of Father Finn, it became a separate parish under the name St. Paul's Church of Glenville, Connecticut. Bishop J. J. Nilan appointed the Reverend John J. Burke, curate of Sacred Heart, as the first pastor. Father Burke had been sent to Poland by Bishop Tierney to study the language, and he was thought well-suited to a flock that included a large Polish community; the mission had about eight hundred communicants at the time. He set about building a rectory, the previous one having been across the Byram on Riversville Road, and in 1924 he was reassigned to St. Thomas's in Thomaston, where he was given a farewell reception that filled the Glenville school auditorium.
The second pastor, the Reverend O. S. Beaumister, arrived in September 1924. He laid out an attractive courtyard between the church and the rectory, and in May 1925 the Glenville Fire Company presented the parish with a new bell, marched up the road under Fire Chief Johnson and dedicated after Father Beaumister read aloud the names of each member of the company. The bell, though no longer at the church, survives as part of a memorial in front of the Fire House. In 1927, the Silver Jubilee of the construction of the church, Father Beaumister had the interior completely renovated by the people of the parish, installed a new Estey organ, and founded the St. Paul's Choir. A Solemn High Mass of Jubilee was sung on October 16, 1927, before a flag-and-flower-bedecked church filled to capacity, and a memorial book, Silver Jubilee, was printed for the occasion. In 1931 Father Beaumister also founded a Men's League of thirty men, whose purpose was to serve as a parish agency, take an interest in younger members, and sponsor sports teams.
The next decades brought a procession of pastors. The Reverend William J. Topor, who took over in 1938, organized Monday-evening meetings to support the war effort. The Reverend Felix Werpechowski, who succeeded him in 1948, presided over the Golden Jubilee of the Mission in October 1952, with the Most Reverend Henry J. O'Brien, Bishop of Hartford, singing Solemn High Mass. In December 1956 Father Werpechowski announced the purchase of forty acres of farmland on the corner of King Street and Sherwood Avenue, in an area once known as Brundage Corners, as a future home for a possible parochial school. By this time the parish had also become part of the new Diocese of Bridgeport, established in 1953.
Under the fifth pastor, the Reverend Austin Saunders, who arrived in 1959, the parish built and opened St. Paul's School in 1963, with classes for grades one through three staffed by the Sisters of the Resurrection. The split-level white-brick school had eight classrooms and an auditorium seating five hundred, and was formally dedicated on March 15, 1964, by the Most Reverend Walter W. Curtis, Bishop of Bridgeport. In June 1967 a devastating fire reduced the 1902 wooden church on Glenville Street to ashes. Sunday Masses were held in the school auditorium while the parish raised money to build again. The new church was built on the King Street property under the sixth pastor, the Reverend Boleslaus J. Rarus, and ground was broken on March 16, 1969. The school survived only through the class of 1970: the restructuring of Catholic schools in the diocese closed it that year, leaving the parish with the distinction of a single, lonely eighth-grade graduating class.
Today, the parish gathers at the church it built in 1970 on the corner of King Street and Sherwood Avenue. The school building still stands on the original Glenville Street campus, the rectory having long been moved close to the present church, and the surrounding neighborhoods of Glenville still form the heart of the parish. The mission, the founders of 1902 might note, has kept the appointment they set.
Sunday Mass and the Rhythm of the Liturgical Week
For the people of St. Paul's, the week turns around the Mass. Father Clark describes the parish as a family of families, nourished by Word and Sacrament, and the way the services are spaced through the week bears that out. There are four Sunday Masses, with a distinct musical character for the principal one. The 7:30 and 5:00 PM Sunday Masses are Low Masses; the 9:30 is a Sung Mass; the 11:30 is the Solemn Mass of the parish, with Gregorian chant and sacred polyphony sung by the St. Paul's Consort. The Saturday Vigil at 4:00 PM is sung by the St. Paul's Singers, a volunteer choir that meets thirty minutes before Mass for warm-up and a run-through, and that exists, in the words of the parish, to serve the prayer of the parish, not to perform. As St. Augustine said, whoever sings prays twice.
Weekday Masses are at 8:00 AM Monday through Friday, and confessions are heard every weekday morning at 7:30, before Mass. Saturday afternoon confessions are heard between 3:00 and 3:45. The parish also offers First Friday Devotions in honor of the Sacred Heart, with Confessions from 7:30 AM, Mass at 8:00 AM, Exposition, the Litany and Chaplet of Divine Mercy, and Benediction around 8:45 AM, and First Saturday Devotions at 9:00 AM with the Rosary in honor of the Blessed Mother, in line with the recommendation of Our Lady of Fatima in 1917. Masses on Holy Days of Obligation are at 8:00 AM and 12:00 PM (Low Mass) and 5:30 PM (Solemn Mass).
The Sunday bulletin is published weekly, and the live Mass is broadcast each day from the church on a dedicated livestream feed. Online giving is available through the parish's OSV Hub giving portal, and Flocknote keeps parishioners in touch with weekly news and information. The parish office is open from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM Monday through Thursday and 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM on Fridays.
The Choir, the Organ, and the Tallis Academy
Music is central to the life of St. Paul's, and the parish is unusual in the Diocese of Bridgeport in the seriousness with which it pursues it. The St. Paul's Consort, the parish's principal choral ensemble, is made up of professional singers and sings for the 11:30 AM Solemn Mass and other major liturgical celebrations. Its repertoire draws from the Church's rich musical tradition, including Gregorian chant and sacred polyphony, chosen to reflect the liturgical season and the solemnity of the rite. The Consort is the only fully professional Catholic church choir in the Diocese. The published fall music list, for example, ranges from Andrea Gabrieli and Josquin Desprez through Palestrina, Byrd, Tallis, and Haydn, and forward to Rachmaninoff, Howells, Rorem, and MacMillan.
The professional singers of the Consort are joined by an organist and master of the choristers, Maksymilian Adach, who trained as a chorister at the London Orory and as organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and who most recently served as Assistant Organist and Associate for Musical Studies at Saint Thomas Church and Choir School in New York. The parish also has an organ fellow, Haniel Neves, currently completing graduate studies at the Yale School of Music and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.
The instruments that support the choir have been carefully chosen. The parish already possesses a continuo organ by Bennett and Giuttari, their Opus 12, a three-rank instrument based on the Kistenorgeln, or box organs, of seventeenth-century Germany, with a transposing keyboard and a cherrywood case with hand-painted door panels. From September the parish has been putting in a pipe organ by the Noack Organ Company, their Opus 109, originally built in 1987 for Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Memphis, Tennessee, and donated to St. Paul's as Holy Trinity's congregation prepares to merge with neighboring parishes. The Noack organ will be dismantled in Memphis by its original builders, transported to Connecticut, and reassembled in late summer, in readiness to lead the worship of the parish from autumn onwards. The present electronic instrument, for its part, is to be reinstalled at St. Cecilia's Church in Stamford, where the parish hopes it will serve the congregation for many years to come.
The bigger musical project, however, is the Tallis Academy. Named for the English Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis, who lived and worked in Greenwich, England, and whose portrait the parish describes as the father of the English choral tradition, the Academy is being built in the style of the great English cathedral choir schools. Bishop Frank J. Caggiano of the Diocese of Bridgeport has described the model in words the parish holds dear: Music is where art and science meet, because through music, reason is clothed in beauty; thus Christ's invitation is presented in such a way that is both compelling, and convicting. Children in grades three through eight will receive expert instruction in vocal technique, sight-singing, music theory, music history, and musicianship, alongside age-appropriate Catholic liturgical formation, cultivating confidence, discipline, leadership, and creativity while acquiring the skills necessary to perform great choral music to a high standard.
The Academy is being introduced in stages. A series of day-long Choir Camps was held in summer and early autumn, each ending with the chanting of Vespers, the Church's ancient evening prayer, to which parents and parishioners were warmly invited. An Exploratory Year is set to launch on Wednesday evenings from 5:00 to 6:30 PM beginning in the autumn, and the full Tallis Academy is to follow. No prior musical experience is required; the parish is looking for children who enjoy singing, are eager to learn, and are excited by the prospect of being part of something special. Thanks to the generosity of anonymous founding donors, scholarships are available to all participants, so that no child with enthusiasm, commitment, and potential is unable to participate for financial reasons.
Faith Formation for Children and Adults
Faith formation at St. Paul's is the work of the Director of Education, Kevin Johnson, and is centered, in the parish's own words, on the Eucharist, with Sunday Mass as the foundation of faith and family life. The religious education program offers two pathways: a Word of Life track for grades one through eight, with classes on Wednesdays and Sundays in the Parish Hall and the Upper Classroom, and a homeschool track for families who teach the faith at home. Schedules vary by grade: grades one through four meet on Wednesdays from 4:15 to 5:15 PM; grades five through eight from 5:30 to 6:45 PM; grades one and two also gather on Sundays from 10:30 to 11:30 AM. The parish holds the Wednesday evening time open for Adoration, Confession, and Benediction after class, an arrangement that makes the whole evening a single rhythm of formation, prayer, and worship.
Registration is run through Ministry Platform, the parish's all-in-house church management system, and tuition is on a sliding scale ($325 for one child, $450 for two, $575 for three or more) with the clear assurance that no child will be turned away for financial reasons. Religious-education classes are canceled when Greenwich Public Schools cancel after-school activities due to weather, and notifications are sent to the family email on file.
Alongside Word of Life, the parish runs the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, an approach to the religious formation of children that takes its name from the scriptural image of Christ as the Good Shepherd and that uses a hands-on atrium, or prepared environment, to help children ponder the deep questions of Christian faith. The Interim Coordinator of the program is Michelle J. Antenucci. Adult formation is also taken seriously, with the parish pointing interested adults toward FORMED.org (a subscription service with Catholic movies, programs, audiobooks, and studies, free to parishioners), the Bible in a Year podcast with Father Mike Schmitz, Ascension's Rosary in a Year with Father Mark-Mary Ames, and The Catechism in a Year.
Mercy at Don Bosco and Across the Border
On Friday mornings, a team of St. Paul's parishioners drives the short distance to Port Chester, New York, to lend a hand at the soup kitchen and food pantry of the Don Bosco Community Center, a ministry that has served the immigrant poor of the area for nearly eighty years. The St. Paul's Mercy Volunteers, a dynamic group of men and women, are on site from 8:30 AM to 12:30 PM, helping the kitchen staff serve a hot lunch to nearly a hundred clients and working in the food pantry that serves more than six hundred clients weekly.
On the last Wednesday of each month, the Mercy Volunteers turn the ministry over to the parish's teenagers, who load up fifty to seventy-five bags of food at the Don Bosco Center and deliver them to seniors living in low-income housing. The teen-led activity, run from 4:30 to 6:00 PM, is a quick and easy way for young people to earn community-service hours, whether for the Boy Scouts or for school. The program is flexible, with no long-term commitment required, and welcomes adults who can only help after work or on weekends. It is a striking example of the parish's straddling of the state line: a Connecticut parish running a regular volunteer presence in a New York ministry, drawing in the next generation along the way.
The Women's Guild, Walking with Purpose, and Family Life
Inside the parish itself, the largest single lay organization is the St. Paul's Women's Guild, which meets on the third Wednesday of the month from September through June at 1:00 PM in the Parish Center. Its mission is to build community among all women of the parish through spiritual, social, and parish activities. The Guild hosts bake sales, sells flowers for the altar on Mother's Day and Father's Day, and runs raffles throughout the year; social events include an annual Mass and breakfast in October, a Christmas luncheon, and an end-of-year celebration in June. Members of the Guild also help care for the altar linens. The Women's Guild is open to all women of the parish; those interested can simply complete an enrollment form, and the Guild's secretary Kerry Dunn is available to answer questions.
A second women's ministry, Walking with Purpose, is also active. The program, which describes itself as enabling women to know Christ personally through Scripture, meets at St. Paul's on Thursday mornings at 8:45 AM and offers two studies. Touching the Divine is a thoughtful walk through the Gospel of John, asking whether people's opinions of you cause your feelings to fluctuate, whether you have based your worth on something other than what God thinks of you, and whether you find it hard to feel close to Christ because you just don't know him very well. Opening Your Heart is the starting-point study, exploring the fundamental questions of Catholic faith and the relationship with Jesus Christ. Coordinators Luisa Mendoza, Nicole Sotire, and Debbie Parker can be reached through the program's own email address.
Family life is a third area of active lay ministry. The Marriage and Parenting group, a community of family parishioners who want to support one another in raising children and keeping marriages together, gathers around three ideas: communication, faith as the center of family life, and unity and support. The group recommends books such as Parenting with Grace by Gregory K. Popcak and Preparing for Adolescence by James B. Stenson, and offers a weekly thought of the week along with a roster of past events. The parish also maintains a wide range of liturgical ministries, including altar servers, lay readers mandated by the Bishop, extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion who also bring Communion to the sick and homebound, and ushers who greet and seat parishioners, take up the collection, assist at Communion, and hand out bulletins. The Parish Pastoral Council acts as an advisory board to the pastor, and the Parish Finance Council prepares and reviews the annual budget and oversees the Capital Improvement Fund.
Adoration and the Quiet Devotional Week
On Wednesday afternoons, the parish keeps one of the most distinctive rhythms of its week. From 4:00 to 7:00 PM, the Blessed Sacrament is exposed on the altar for Eucharistic Adoration, a time to sit silently and simply be in the presence of God, inspired by Jesus's time in the Garden of Gethsemane. Committed adorers sign up through SignUp Genius to fill each hour, with the expectation that they will arrive on time, stay until the next adorer arrives, and never assume that visitors will remain for the full hour. Benediction is held at 6:45 PM to close the devotion. Adoration is suspended for a handful of dates through the year, including Thanksgiving Break, Christmas Eve, Christmas Break, Ash Wednesday, Holy Week, and the days of First Holy Communion Practices.
The parish's wider devotional life includes the regular devotions of the Catholic year: First Friday Devotions to the Sacred Heart, First Saturday Devotions with the Rosary in honor of the Blessed Mother, and the daily rhythm of weekday Mass and morning confessions that frames the rest of the working week. Together with the Sunday Masses, the Solemn Mass with the Consort, the Saturday Vigil with the Singers, the children's formation on Wednesdays, the Thursday Walking with Purpose Bible study, the Friday soup kitchen, the monthly teen-led food delivery, and the daily Mass livestream, the parish keeps a week that is, in the words of the prayer inscribed in the church, eager to respond to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, day after day, in this holy temple.
The Pastor and the Preaching of the Word
The Reverend Michael J. V. Clark, who holds an MA from Cambridge, leads the parish as its Parochial Administrator, supported by a small staff that includes the Director of Education, the Director of OCIA (formerly RCIA), the Organist and Master of the Choristers, and the Interim Coordinator of the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. Father Clark is a homilist in the Catholic intellectual tradition, and his Sunday sermons are published in full on the parish's sermons page. The range of his preaching is wide. He has preached on the multiplication of the loaves and the apostolic ministry of breaking and gathering the fragments, on St. Augustine's fifth-century North African sermon about the wind and the waves and the Barque of Peter, on the seventy-times-seven of forgiveness as a reversal of the vengeance of Lamech, on the vineyard workers and the eternal denarius, and on the connection between the American story and the call of Abraham.
Theology at St. Paul's is taken in its full classical register, and the parish's preaching is anchored in the writings of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. The homiletic principle, as Father Clark often puts it, is that the Scriptures are not self-interpreting: they are brought to Christ, who opens them, and then entrusted to the Apostles to feed the Church. The congregation is encouraged, with St. Ignatius, not to remain sitting in the pew as a spectator at the theater, but to inhabit the Gospel scenes, to see with the sight of the imagination the physical place. The Catholic tradition, in the parish's telling, is not a private reading of texts but a communal reception of Word and Sacrament, in which the beauty of the liturgy is essential to the integrity of the faith: the Church must be beautiful, because the pearl of great price is beautiful, and ugly churches and ugly liturgies are not faithful to the Kingdom.
The people of St. Paul's are, in the parish's own self-understanding, an intentional Catholic community. They are not asked to be anything other than what they are: a worshipping community in a small Connecticut town on the New York border, whose roots go back to the Irish and Polish millworkers of 1902, whose music is professional, whose choir school is in formation, and whose Friday morning goes, week by week, to a soup kitchen in Port Chester. The church is open every day for prayer, and has been so for more than a hundred and twenty years.