In Mary Sewell’s memory, her mother Della was a supportive “cane” for Lillian Reilly, an older neighbor who worshiped with her at St. Ann parish at Greenmount Avenue and 22nd Street. Mrs. Reilly was known for her regular walks to church with her pocketbook and, someone said, “her little hat.”Like the church they loved, both women are gone, passing many years ago and spared the heartbreak of seeing the church shut down by the Archdiocese of Baltimore.“After Mass, Mrs. Reilly and some other women would leave together, chatting on the way home,” said Mary, daughter of Adella Greene Whaley. “I would walk behind them and mom would steady Mrs. Reilly. She always told her ‘get some rest tonight.'”“Such gentle kindness meant the world to us,” said Anita Healy O’Neill, Mrs. Reilly’s oldest granddaughter. “Mrs. Whaley was the heart and soul of St. Ann.”At 725 East 23rd St. three blocks from the church, Della would bid her friend adieu at her front steps and walk on to her own house around the corner. The former B. Lillian O’Brien settled on 23rd Street, just north of Green Mount Cemetery, in the early 1920s after marrying Robert G. Reilly, a Cloverland milkman and former wood finisher for the Knabe Piano Company near Camden Yards. At the time, her sisters – Catherine Bennett and Agnes O’Brien – lived across the street at 706 East 23rd.Mr. Reilly died in 1982. By then, Lillian was no longer making her celebrated oyster pie on Christmas Eve or the sour beef and dumplings she learned from a German lady who lived next door.Della and Lillian were devout Catholics who attended Mass together just about every day. Their lives – Lillian born in 1900, Della in 1916 – straddled the changing demographics of St. Ann’s, its neighborhood and the larger city. They navigated the racial shift with grace and respect, virtues passed down to Mary and Anita who became friends via their elders.Said Father Joe Muth, one of the last priests to serve St. Ann, “Mrs. Reilly told me that as the neighborhood changed, her children wanted her to move somewhere safer. She said, ‘I love these people, they are good neighbors and they watch over me.’“I’m sure,” Father Joe said, “that Mrs. Whaley had a lot to do with that.” Mrs. Reilly was one of the last links to the Irish-American heritage of St. Ann, founded in 1873 by Baltimore sea captain William Kennedy near the end of his life as a thank you to God. Forty years earlier, his clipper ship Wanderer was caught in a gale off of Vera Cruz. He promised that if the ship survived, he would build a church. It did and he did; the ship’s anchor a Greenmount Avenue landmark for 150 years.The skipper’s deliverance was the beginning of a more spiritual way of life for a former slave trader, an echo of Amazing Grace composed by another slave ship captain, the Englishman John Newton.Through many dangers, toils and snares I have already come: ’tis grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.Mrs. Whaley, an Eastern Shore midwife, was one of the first African-Americans to integrate the parish in the early 1960s. She moved to Baltimore with her six children in 1962 from Unionville in Talbot County for a better life. One of the advantages was enrolling Mary – an alumni director at Johns Hopkins University living in Nottingham – in St. Ann’s grade school. The school closed in 1974.The neighborhood began changing slowly during the Kennedy Administration and then quickly in the wake of riots after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. “By the early ’70s,” said Mary, 68, “most of the White people were gone.”Anita, 74, of Glen Arm, was baptized at St. Ann. A former social worker, she grew up a few miles north near Blessed Sacrament church on Old York Road. It also closed last year in cuts that saw the Archdiocese unload 38 parishes – about two-thirds of its urban churches in and near Baltimore City. “Most of grandmom’s contemporaries had left by the 1960s,” said Anita, who spent several nights a week on 23rd Street after her grandmother’s mobility became limited. “By the time I was staying with her she was pretty much the only White face in the neighborhood.”It was a somewhat lonely time in Anita’s life and the support she received from the priests and nuns who once resided at St. Ann – and Mrs. Whaley in particular – “was love they didn’t need to express in words.”“My cousin [Daniel Gagliardi] was killed by a drunk driver in 1974, he was a senior in high school and my grandmother was devastated,” said Anita. “By early the next year she was ill with pneumonia. That’s when I moved in with her. Mrs. Whaley would come and visit and talk about church stuff.”[Additional installments in Rafael Alvarez’s “A City To Come” series on Catholic church upheaval include The Closing of St. Rose of Lima, The Shrine of the Little Flower, and more on the closing of St. Ann.]St. Ann celebrated its final Mass a week before Thanksgiving last year. The congregation mounted a vigorous fight to stay open, even offering to buy the church. The Archdiocese denied its appeals.A historic marker at St Ann Church Credit: Jim BurgerNot long after the last service, Mary and Anita reminisced in the rectory – “the Anchorage,” complete with chapel – where Mrs. Whaley cooked many a meal. Once home to as many as eight priests and parishioners – back when Baltimore, the first Archdiocese in the United States, was truly Catholic – St. Ann had not been staffed with a full-time pastor since the 1990s.   “My mother worked here in the rectory, she worked for the priests and was like a mother to them,” said Mary, who would be sent to Mrs. Reilly’s house on errands like dropping off a potted plant or a plate of food. “I don’t know what she didn’t do here.” Very simply, while raising six children as a single mom, Della Whaley did every little thing.Mary’s daughter was married at St. Ann by the late Rev. Samuel J. Lupico, the priest who gave Mrs. Reilly last rites, a rosary on the table beside her bed.“Father Sam” died of a heart attack on January 6th while clearing snow from his car to help out at an addiction recovery house, a cornerstone of his priesthood. In 2022, he had been removed from ministry by the Archdiocese on allegations that he sexually abused a minor at St. Ann almost a half-century earlier.While the accusation tarnished his reputation – he denied the charges, which were never prosecuted – it did not diminish the love parishioners had for him. After his death, Anita called him “my new favorite saint.”Considering other denominationsFather Sam’s funeral Mass was held at St. Matthew’s on Loch Raven Boulevard, the church into which six closed parishes in northeast Baltimore have been folded. It was celebrated by his friend and one time St. Ann colleague, the Rev. Joseph Muth.The church, Anita said, “was packed, a beautiful tribute to a man of God and a man of the people, especially the poor, ill, addicted, dying, marginalized or suffering in any way.”The closing of so many parishes at once marginalized many faithful Catholics who aren’t sure where they will worship in the future. Anita was already looking for a new parish when one of her favorite sanctuaries – St. Mary of the Assumption, long known as “St. Mary’s Govans” – got the axe.“I wasn’t a regular at St. Ann but I stayed connected because it had been so good to my grandparents. I grew up in the city, my heart is in the city,” she said, noting a number of modest scholarship funds she created to help city kids attend Catholic schools, one of which is Mother Seton Academy which operates out of the old St. Ann classrooms.  Mary Sewell is “considering other denominations.”  “My mother was Methodist back in Unionville. We became Catholic when we started coming to St. Ann,” said Mary. “I am still in search of a church home.”Other long closed Catholic churches in Baltimore, like St. Stanislaus in Fells Point and St. Michael the Archangel on Lombard Street, became a yoga studio and a craft brewery respectively. When Theodore Roosevelt was president, Mrs. Reilly was baptized at St. John the Evangelist near the Maryland Penitentiary at Valley and Eager streets. It closed in 1966, was turned into a rec center by the City of Baltimore and is now a private social hall.While the church that defined the lives of Mary Sewell and Anita Healy O’Neill awaits its fate, their faith abides.“The true legacy of St. Ann lies not in its beautiful statues, arches and stained glass windows,” said Anita, “but in all the meaningful relationships nurtured there.”Friends joined by history at St. Ann Credit: Jim BurgerRafael Alvarez is currently aboard the cargo ship Maersk Ohio in the North Atlantic. He will be sending dispatches from sea and can be reached via [email protected]