BREEZY POINT — Laurie McGuire recalled on Easter Sunday growing up “five doors down” from St. Edmund Church, which was gutted on April 19, Holy Saturday, by a three-alarm fire.
This is the same church that survived the ravages of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and subsequently became home to the “clamshell” statue of Mary that was salvaged from the “burn zone,” where 135 homes were razed..
McGuire said she was married in that church, as were her three sisters. Their father didn’t just escort them down the aisle; he first strolled with them “down the block.”
The neighbors joyfully watched these processions from their decks and porches before following the wedding parties into the church.
“It was beautiful,” McGuire said. “And now we have generations at Mass every Sunday together. We meet there and start our Sunday, always at 10:30.”
But an electrical issue is believed to have caused the Holy Saturday blaze that scuttled everyone’s plans for Easter, according to the pastor, Father Michael Gelfant.
Instead, the Mass was held at St. Edmund’s sister church, St. Thomas More, with the main celebrant, Bishop Robert Brennan.
“It’s like everything keeps happening to this poor little church,” Father Gelfant said after the Mass. “This church just keeps getting rocked — Hurricane Sandy and some windstorms, and now this.
“But it keeps bouncing back.”
St. Edmund, St. Thomas More, and St. Genevieve are the three churches that make up Blessed Trinity Parish on the Rockaway Peninsula. Father Gelfant and Father Michael Falce, parochial vicar for the church, concelebrated the 10:30 a.m. Mass.
St. Edmund, built in 1937, originally accommodated crowds of vacationers. It subsequently became an important spiritual base for the families that came to work in the tourism industry, but stayed year-round to establish roots.
McGuire was joined at the Mass by her mother, Cathy Hickey, who raised seven children in the community.
She noted that, in addition to her four daughters being married at St. Edmund, “a bunch of the grandchildren were baptized there.”
Hickey said she was sitting on her deck around 2 p.m. on Holy Saturday when the church fire alarms sounded.
“It was just very unreal,” Hickey said. “I thought, ‘This can’t be happening,’ especially when you think about Hurricane Sandy. This church always played a big part in bringing people together and helping us.”
During Mass, Bishop Brennan and Father Gelfant praised the swift responses of the local volunteer fire departments from Point Breeze, Rockaway Point, and Roxbury, as well as the assistance from 144 firefighters from 33 units of the New York City Fire Department.
They also praised the leadership of FDNY Commissioner Robert Tucker, who attended the Mass.
Father Gelfant said he was especially moved by the parish staffers who all came in and worked, including some who were out of town for the Easter holiday.
“That’s probably when I lost it,” he said. “When the staff showed up, I knew that we were going to be okay.”
Still, he noted, it was too early to say whether the wooden church would be demolished, rebuilt, or renovated.
“We know what happened,” Father Gelfant said during the Mass about the electrical issue. “It was no one’s fault. The question now is whether the building is structurally sound. We know that it most likely is.
“For now, we pray like we prayed during Hurricane Sandy.”
Later, during a tour of the fire-gutted church, Bishop Brennan echoed Father Gelfant’s comments about future plans.
“Right now, we’re in a moment of grief,” he said. “We’re reacting and we’re praying.
Bishop Brennan said he well remembers Hurricane Sandy, which pummeled Long Island on Oct. 29, 2012. He was then a brand-new auxiliary bishop in the Diocese of Rockville Center, which also faced massive destruction to its parishes.
However, the bishop stated that he had never visited Breezy Point until after he became the bishop of the Diocese of Brooklyn in 2021.
Still, he knew the story of how the storm pushed waves of seawater over Breezy Point.
In one home, saltwater flooded an electrical outlet, causing an arc that emitted sparks and ignited nearby combustibles.
A resulting conflagration swallowed 135 of the community’s 2,000 homes. Firefighters, including those from Breezy Point, kept that fire from spreading.
It was a miracle attributed to the “Hail Mary” prayer that was recited by the volunteers who were stranded at the station. The engine compartments on their trucks were flooded and couldn’t start — until they did. The trucks roared to life, carrying their volunteer crews into the fight.
The story is recounted in the 2022 book, “Flood, Fire, and a Superstorm,” by Marty Ingram, the department’s chief at the time.
He died in June of last year. His book, however, describes how, among the ravaged homes, a statue of Mary with a shell-like background stood unscathed, except for soot.
It was cleaned up and positioned outside St. Edmund Church to commemorate the firefighters’ heroism and the community’s resilience.
The April 19 blaze was confined to the building’s interior, so the “clamshell” Mary outside was not damaged. But like that statue, the one inside the church was covered with soot.
The church staff salvaged it on Saturday and placed it before the lectern in St. Thomas More Church during the 10:30 a.m. Easter Mass for the displaced congregation.
Afterward, parishioners gathered before the statue to snap photos and gaze at its darkened exterior.
“This is what they did with Hurricane Sandy,” Father Gelfant said later. “There was only the one statue left from those fires, so that’s why we did the same thing here.”
The fire also uprooted Bishop Brennan’s plans because he was originally scheduled to celebrate Easter Mass at the Basilica Cathedral of St. James in Downtown Brooklyn.
Instead, the cathedral’s rector, Father Joseph Gibino, was the celebrant at that Mass.
“It’s not what we expected to be doing today,” Bishop Brennan said later while inspecting the damage at St. Edmund. “But, boy, I’m glad I was here. It was necessary to be here.
“I felt close to this community, and I wanted to be close.”