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"Don't go there"
Richard Szathmary, Alum
Columbia College 1967


When I attended Columbia, my core Catholicism after 13 years of Catholic schooling was weakish, but still strong enough to send me into the arms of the Newman Club, and to keep me attending Mass on Sundays and even such "holydays of obligation" as November 1, All Saints Day. (Which wasn't always that easy after a night of Halloween faux-debauchery at the Psi U house.)

But for some reason, even though there seemed to be a perfecttly good RC church called (I believe) Notre Dame at the juncture of 116th and Morningside, Columbia Catholics were always funneled into services at Corpus Christi on 120th Street, farther away. Even official University literature seemed to mark Corpus Christi as at least a quasi-official home for CU Papists. The "other near-campus church," as I began to call it, was mentioned, yes, but never endorsed as an equally good place in which to express devotion.

Which made me in turn very curious why Notre Dame was so ignored. I used to walk by it sometimes on my way to and from gym classes in Morningside Park (those truly were the days!), yet never once did I see anyone coming or going from its dark, semi-Gothic precincts.

I also used to walk up to its notice board and stare at its list of services. Now, in my native NJ at that time, that gesture alone in my parish-dappled state was enough to spur a "helpful" nun or priest to approach (out of seemingly nowhere) even the most apprehensive of possible parishoners, so I expected that kind of treatment there, too. No chance. Notre Dame (if that was/is in fact its name) sat silent and unwelcoming.

And I even asked both fellow Newman Club members (during the one year of my membership) and its faculty advisers, English prof Robert Hanning and his wife, about Notre Dame. Not one of them, apparently, had ever attended Mass there, certainly none admitted to it in any case. As Hanning said to me, "Corpus Christi is our church." His tone seemed to say that, well, that ended that.

Years later, I began a post-collegiate friendship with a Christian Brother who'd been one of my high school teachers. He resided in Manhattan, taught English lit and theology at Manhattan College and had a keen interest in inter-Church politics in the NY Archdiocese. He told me that the "ecclesiastical word" was that Notre Dame was a kind of, in his words, "outlaw parish," one infected with the curiously French and curiously secular French belief in "spiritism," which involves both "automatic writing" and thus contact with spirits of the dead. (Spiritism arose in France in the late 19th century, and remains strong in, of all places, Brazil.) Brother Thomas also told me that, while strange goings-on reputedly thus took place at Notre Dame's "prayer services," the NY Archdiocese permitted them to because the church remained so popular with French diplomats stationed in NYC, and also with monied French and Caribbean expats.

"But don't go there," Richard," he also told me. "Whatever your religious belief level is, you won't feel at all comfortable there."

So I never did go there. Not once as either a student or someone living and working in Manhattan did I set foot inside this church. And the last 25 or so years, I've never even walked in that direction, so I have no idea if the church even still exists or Brother Thomas was telling the truth.

This is my most unsettling memory of Columbia, a church that no one would attend, that seemed so unwelcoming, that, according to a supposedly informed source, housed believers in mediums. There may not be any ghosts haunting Columbia, but the memory of an ostensibly Roman Catholic church that I never set foot in still haunts me.

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