Our Lady Of Perpetual Help Celebrates 115 Years
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When Father Jason Charron, Pastor of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Ukrainian Catholic Church looks around his church and its congregation, celebrating 115 years this Sunday, he sees the formula that has allowed for more than a century of success.
He calls it the “three S’s” — small, service-oriented and self-sacrificing. Those tenets have kept the church in South Wheeling strong and excited for the future.
That future will be bright, Charron said, because of its devotion to tradition.
“It’s the fidelity to the tradition that they have been given,” he said. “We don’t have to reinvent ourselves. We simply have to hold fast to the tradition that we have been given by our forefathers, and that’s what makes our parish very unique.
When the church celebrates its anniversary with a special Divine Liturgy at 2 p.m. Sunday with a reception after, it will look back at the foundation built. When Ukrainian immigrants settled in Wheeling at the turn of the 20th century, they were looking for a Greek Catholic church where they could worship following their Byzantine heritage. They started in an abandoned incline station at 43rd and Wetzel in 1907. Our Lady of Perpetual Help Ukrainian Catholic Church was officially recognized as a parish on Sept. 20, 1911. The church moved out of the incline station and into its permanent home in 1913 and stayed there until 1975, when the current building was completed.
The church continues to thrive, Charron said, because of those three S’s. The congregation is small, he said, but mighty.
“They know everyone who comes through the door by first and last name,” he said. “They care about one another.”
Their work to serve the church, he continued, is tireless. Every week, congregants come together for the church’s pierogi and cabbage roll sale. And their self-sacrifice is shown in that continued hard work.
“It’s expensive to keep a church going these days,” Charron said, “and all these people do it because they have that spirit their parents gave them.”
It’s inspiring to watch that spirit at work, Charron said. When he sees it, it’s as St. Paul says, “like heaps of burning coal on top of my head.”
“I want to sometimes get lazy and take it easy,” he said. “Then I look at the work these people put in and it puts me to shame that I’m half their age and they double me in intensity. They have such a strong work ethic.”
When he speaks to the congregation Sunday, Charron said he wants to tell them to live the faith today, that it be passed on tomorrow. The event will be a celebration of the past, but also a call to keep working toward the future.
“This is not to be a sentimental reminiscence of yesterday,” he said. “this is a gratitude for what we have received today and it’s a call to ensure that it is passed on to the next generation, because it is a seed of hope in a world of despair. Our job is to ensure the baton doesn’t drop.”