October 17, 2009
Festivities mark centennial of St. Elizabeth Parish in Sacramento
By Denise MacLachlan
Herald staff
Dancers from the Portuguese Youth Council of Sacramento prepare to carry their banner in the procession. Denise MacLachlan/Herald photo
Portuguese communities from across Northern California gathered in Sacramento
on the weekend of Oct. 10-11 to celebrate the centennial of St. Elizabeth
Parish, the oldest Portuguese national church west of New England.
Bishop Jaime Soto celebrated Mass on Saturday evening in St. Elizabeth Carish with Stigmatine Fathers Giancarlo Mittempergher, pastor, and Antonio Luiz Medeiros Dos Santos, parochial vicar, and with a community that crowded into every space in the building and spilled out the church doors.
Mass was followed by a candlelight procession, a traditional Portuguese feast featuring cacoila or stewed beef, and traditional Portuguese music and dancing.
The celebration continued on Sunday, when the parish community at the 10 a.m. Mass, again overwhelming the small church’s capacity, carried statues of the saints out of the church for a traditional festival procession around four city blocks in the neighborhood. The neighborhood families, many of them recent immigrants from Asia, watched respectfully while the St. Elizabeth Portuguese community prayed the rosary and sang hymns as they carried the images of the saints “who are the patterns for us to follow,” as Father Mittempergher noted in his instructions to the waiting crowd before the procession began.
A 24-piece Portuguese band from Tracy, Nova Artisto Acoreana, accompanied the parishioners and marchers who carried banners from dozens of Portuguese Catholic organizations from Oakland to Stockton to Placer County.
Many organizations sponsored “queens,” girls dressed in white who represented St. Elizabeth, Queen of Portugal, and Mary, Queen of Heaven. Some children were dressed as the three children to whom Our Lady of Fatima appeared in Portugal in 1917. Other children carried a large rosary 18 feet across.
The event was covered by RTP, the Portuguese national television network, and by Tribuna Portuguesa, the Portuguese language newspaper for California.
Named for the patron saint of Portugal, St. Elizabeth Parish was established on Oct. 24, 1909. Father Joao V. Azevedo, a native of the Azorean Island of Pico, Portugal, ordained at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in 1904, was appointed the parish’s first pastor.
At a time when “national” parishes — those focused around a single immigrating ethnic or language group — flourished, St. Elizabeth Parish became the cultural and religious center for Portuguese Americans throughout central California. Until 2005, the community was shepherded by an unbroken line of Portuguese pastors.
Father Azevedo, later Msgr. Azevedo, remained pastor for 36 years, retiring in 1955. He was succeeded by Father Valdemiro M. Fagundes, who was born in Santa Barbara on Terceira Island, Portugal and ordained in the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in Sacramento. Father Fagundes, later Msgr. Fagundes, served the parish for 34 years until his retirement in 1985.
Another Portuguese priest, Jesuit Father Jose Rebeiro, served the community for a comparatively brief six years until 1991, when Father Eduino Silveira, also Portuguese, was assigned as pastor of the parish, where he remained for 14 years. When Stigmatine Father Mittempergher, a native of Italy, succeeded Father Silveira in 2005, he became the first non-Portuguese pastor in the parish’s history. But the parochial vicar, Stigmatine Father Dos Santos, hails from Brazil, where the national language is Portuguese.
Father Mittempergher told The Herald that parishioners of St. Elizabeth are proud of their Portuguese heritage and consistent in the practice of their Catholic faith. There are many small, well-established groups within the Catholic Portuguese community, he said, but they all know each other and celebrate together at feast days and festivals like a family.
San Francisco architects Frank Shea and John Lofquist designed the church building after a church in the Azorean Island of Terceira. Portugal. Its unusual diagonal setting faces the corner of 12th and S Streets, on a lot donated by the Portuguese American family of Manuel Williams. The church was dedicated in 1913 and restored in 1982.
