Godforsaken churches are able teachers
Reflections on abandoned churches stateside and overseas.
When I pitched my National Catholic Reporter editor on the “ecclesiastical exchange” at Philadelphia’s St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in 2015, I riffed on the final “Raiders of the Lost Ark” scene. The exchange was a sacred-dollar store in the seminary basement, where objects from shuttered churches arrived to be resold—at deep discount—to priests for re…