50 years ‘rolling on the river’ in Secretary, Md.

For The Dialog

Watermen, farmers and retirees help sustain Our Lady of Good Counsel’s small community

SECRETARY, Md. – Our Lady of Good Counsel Church lies nestled between Main Street and the Warwick River, an appropriate setting for the small Dorchester County parish.

The land on which it sits is symbolic of the farmers who till the soil of the Lower Eastern Shore. The river frontage is symbolic of the watermen who play the waterways of the Chesapeake Bay system in search of clams, crabs, oysters, shrimp and fish.

“I think we’re the only church in the diocese with waterfront property,” said Father Stephen Lonek, pastor since 2009. “Our congregation consists of a lot of retired folks, a lot of watermen, and farmers.”

200 households

Last month the parish of about 200 registered households celebrated its 50th anniversary as a parish at a special Sunday Mass. Afterward more than 160 people participated in the annual pig roast, which this year was moved to coincide with the anniversary celebration. The turnout was very good for a church that averages between 76 and 78 people for each of its three weekend Masses, at 5 p.m. Saturday and 8 and 10:30 a.m. Sunday.

The pig roast and a beef roast are annual events at the parish, which also has occasional spaghetti dinners. Every year Our Lady of Good Counsel joins with other churches in the area for ecumenical Thanksgiving, Advent and Lenten services.

Church grounds also include a church hall, rectory and a cemetery at the rear of the property that overlooks the river.

Parishioners teach the religious education program that this year has 38 students.

Parish Council president Howard Cogle quickly discovered that one can be as active as desired in a small parish as soon as he moved here, from a 2,800-family parish in Catonsville, in 2006. On his first Sunday at Good Counsel he met then-pastor Father Anthony Greco. The next Sunday, before Mass, Father Greco beckoned him. Cogle had told the priest he was a Eucharistic minister, and this Sunday Father Greco needed one. Not long after Cogle was on the parish council.

There he learned of a continuous tide of challenges that ebb and flow about Good Counsel.

Idyllic setting

“What’s wrong with Our Lady of Good Counsel is the same thing that’s right about it,” Cogle said. “It’s a small congregation.”

“It’s a ‘Catch 22,’” Father Lonek said. “You get to know the people and the people are very supportive. The downside is, we’re economically challenged. The collection is good for the people we have. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough people.”

Our Lady of Good Counsel’s seemingly idyllic setting, on a Rockwellesque Main Street in a town of some 530 residents along a charming river, accounts for part of its challenges. Secretary lies in northern Dorchester County, which has the fourth-lowest per capita income among Maryland counties. While many sections of the Eastern Shore have grown rapidly as bedroom communities in the past several decades, Secretary lies just beyond the growth zone. Few, if any, industries — read jobs — exist outside of farming and fishing.

“Young families are hard to come by here,” Father Lonek said. Outside of limited education and health industry positions, “there’s no work. It’s primarily farmers and watermen.”

Combined, those factors result in constant challenges to maintain aging buildings and infrastructure while offering usual parish ministries.

Father Lonek came from larger parishes with a good parish staff to support the priests’ efforts. At Good Counsel, he has a part-time secretary and “whatever the parishioners can do.” That coincides well with his basic philosophy about a parish: “The parish belongs to the parishioners. It is theirs, not mine.”

It also connects to the feeling of many parishioners who are from long-standing families in the Our Lady of Good Counsel community, whose families donated the stained glass windows that line each side of the present church, which was dedicated in 1940 and lie in the parish cemetery.

There may not always be funds available for all the maintenance and other projects that are needed, such as $37,000 to redo the parking lot, which Father Lonek said is “out of our neighborhood,” but when faced with an emergency parishioners respond.

Sandy From-knecht, who is on the parish finance council, learned that “when we need something they (parishioners) are right there.” She recalled how, two or three years ago, just before Christmas, when the boiler went out. Father Lonek mentioned the situation from the altar, and the money started coming in. By Christmas a new boiler was in place.

Another example came when the floor in the parish hall needed to be replaced. “The people responded so well that the windows were replaced, too,” Father Lonek said.

Such is the way of life among Catholics in Secretary, many of whom struggle with the whims of nature as they make modest livings. “They don’t have much,” Father Lonek said of his parishioners.

One thing they do have is a love for their Catholic faith as seen in the history of Our Lady of Good Counsel Church.

In the late 1800s, they wanted to have Mass in their town. Priests from Cambridge came once a month to celebrate Mass, first at a local institution and later in the Phelan family home. Parishioners ferried priests from and back to Cambridge; going by water was quicker than traveling the 12 miles by land.

Baltimore Sun Abells

Soon the Catholics in town wanted a church of their own. With $150 donated by “Miss Abell of the Baltimore Sun Abells,” $25 from the heads of Catholic families in the area, donations such as the altar, and the use of empty crate boxes as side altars, the mission church was built and dedicated on Dec. 6, 1891, according to a recollection written by Jennie Phelan Webster as the parish prepared to open its second church in 1940.

Miss Abell asked that the church be named in honor of Our Lady of Good Counsel, to whom she had a special devotion.

In the early years burials took place around the church. When the building was enlarged in 1907 there was no more room for burials. Jennie Phelan Webster’s mother got an option for land next to the church property for $400, then persuaded 10 men in the parish to put up $40 each. The bodies buried around the church were reinterred in the cemetery.

Parishioners, many of whom worked in oyster packing houses, became known for parish oyster dinners.

A new, larger church was needed by the late 1930s. Construction costs were covered by the Diocesan Foundation; parishioners provided for the pews, organ and other interior furnishings, as well as the stained-glass windows. An arched stained-glass window over the church entrance is a replica of the fresco of Our Lady of Good Counsel in Genazzano, Italy.

The church was dedicated Sept. 8, 1940.

That history, combined with the church’s “strong faith community,” leave Father Lonek optimistic for the future despite the many challenges Our Lady of Good Counsel faces.

The watermen, farmers, and retirees who comprise a large part of his parish “are bound and determined that this parish is going to survive,” he said.