LEWISTON — For nearly a hundred years, a large medallion of the Blessed Virgin Mary gazed down upon worshipers at St. Mary’s Church in the section of the city known as Little Canada.
The medallion was adored. Venerated. Revered.
“It was always there,” said Roger Caron, who was an altar server at the church in the mid-1960s. “It was beautiful. It was part of the church and it was part of us.”
And then for more than a decade, after the closing of St. Mary’s at 46 Cedar St. in 2000, the Blessed Virgin gazed down upon comedians cracking off-color jokes, Halloween parties, Broadway shows, rock bands and a host of other events that were decidedly non-Catholic in nature.
The events were being offered by the Franco American Heritage Center, which had taken over the church, and it was generally agreed that the Mother Mary, known officially as Our Lady of Perpetual Help, was out of place.
“Groups would come in from out of town,” said Paul Dube, whose late wife, Rita, took an interest in the medallion. “They were non-Catholic groups and they didn’t want that statue up there. Rita had a nice curtain that could be lowered over it when there was one of those groups coming in.”
The thought of the Blessed Mother being concealed in such a manner was appalling to some, including Rita, who was a founding member of the Franco Center board.
Almost everybody agreed that the grand medallion, carved of wood and roughly 5 feet tall and 3 feet wide, should be taken down from the spot it had occupied since St. Mary’s was built in the early 1900s.
But what to do with such a magnificent statue of such a sacred religious figure?
One member of the Franco board thought it should be taken down and shipped to a mission in Haiti.
“Rita was totally against that,” Paul said. The medallion “was part of the church; part of the history. She fought that for a year and won.”
Eventually Elaine Roop, then board president of what had become the Franco Center, reached out to the Very Rev. Daniel Greenleaf, pastor of the Prince of Peace Parish, to see if he was interested in taking possession of the medallion.
He was. Very interested, as it turns out.
“It was such a significant piece for the people who went to Mass down in Little Canada,” said Greenleaf, whose Prince of Peace Parish includes the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul on Ash Street in Lewiston. “It was a central piece of the church. And so we had some discussions and I said, ‘We’ll take it.’”
The rest of the congregation felt the same. The medallion needed to be preserved no matter what it took.
“We said, ‘We will not let this thing go to waste,’” said Caron, a longtime parishioner at St. Mary’s and now the basilica. “‘We will not have it destroyed or cut into pieces. Somehow, we’re going to preserve it and find a place for it.”
And the will of those people was strong enough to see the matter through. In 2022, the medallion was moved out of the former St. Mary’s Church and brought to the basilica.
Not that it was as simple as it sounds.
‘Awe-inspiring’‘
The medallion is estimated to weigh at least 500 pounds. Moving it was delicate work and required special equipment.
Since then, the medallion has been propped on saw horses while awaiting its new home in the basilica’s chapel. That’s another five years of strange history for The Blessed Virgin, but that part is almost over.
On Wednesday, the medallion will be on full display in the chapel, placed lovingly within an altar hand carved by 22-year-old Dave Madore, of Gray, the same carpenter who carved an altar for a Nativity scene brought from The Holy Land in 2023 by Greenleaf and a group of his parishioners. Madore, who is a member of the parish, produced the ornate table in front of the medallion as well as the reredos — the ornamental wooden wall that displays the medallion.
And on that same Wednesday, the Most Rev. James Ruggieri, bishop of the Diocese of Portland, will be at the basilica to consecrate the medallion — a Catholic service in which the statue will be deemed holy.
After that, at 6 p.m., the altar and its medallion will be presiding over Mass in the basilica’s lower chapel, with the Blessed Virgin Mary once again gazing down upon those who adore her.
“I got a sneak peak of it last week,” said Caron. “And I was just taken aback by how beautiful it looked, and how awe-inspiring. It’s a perfect fit for the chapel. It’s going to be a great addition to the basilica, and the history of St. Mary’s is going to be maintained and preserved.”
The chapel wall needed to be reinforced to accept the weight of the medallion, but everybody involved in the process considers it a labor of the very deepest kind of love.
“Placing the Blessed Virgin medallion from the former St. Mary’s Church in the refurbished lower chapel of the basilica,” said parishioner Maura Murphy, “shows us where the past, present and future of Lewiston’s Catholic and cultural heritage come together in a most meaningful, lovely way.”
Origins unknown
The medallion features the carved figure of Mother Mary cradling a baby Jesus. The precise history of the piece is elusive — most of those familiar with it only know that it was part of St. Mary’s Church from the very beginning.
Construction of the church began 1907 and wasn’t completed until 20 years later, with worshipers gathering in a basement for services in the years between.
St. Mary’s had been established after the Saints Peter and Paul Parish was divided in 1907 to accommodate the quickly growing French-speaking mill-worker population. Located at the corner of Cedar and Oxford streets, the church would eventually become a cornerstone of the city’s Franco-American “Little Canada” neighborhood.
And the Blessed Virgin was the centerpiece of the church.
In 1930, a Boston newspaper published a photo of St. Mary’s and deemed it the most beautiful Church in New England. Until the day it closed in 2000, St. Mary’s continued to hold Masses in English and French.
The Norman-Gotchic-style church was designed by a pair of architects from Boston, according to historical sources. It is generally presumed that they also commissioned the creation of the grand medallion that became such an integral part of worship at St. Mary’s.
But who created the iconic medallion of Our Lady of Perpetual Help? Was it some studio, individual or an active member of the architectural firm O’Connell & Shaw?
Those details seem lost to history. But those who have adored the medallion for years are plenty happy that the Virgin Mother has a new home that is properly suited for her.
In fact, for some, the storied medallion features prominently in the best of their earliest memories.
“It had a lot of effect on me as a Franco-American boy growing up in Lewiston,” said Caron.
Elaine Roop, who spent 15 years trying to get the medallion into a proper home, said in a 2022 interview that it had always bothered her that the Virgin Mother had to be covered with a curtain for certain events at the Franco Center.
“It was such an important thing for me to see that she received the respect so rightfully deserved,” Roop said. “I wanted to find a proper place for her, not just some afterthought.
“I have been waiting for this moment,” she said, “since I made a promise to Mary that I would find her a proper place.”
This story was originally published by the Maine Trust for Local News. Mark LaFlamme can be reached at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.