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By: Mary Ellen Schoonmaker, The Record editorial writer and columnist © 2006 “The Record” Reprinted with permission.
The small chapel hidden in the basement of the old Bergen Mall is a well-known secret. It is so popular that Masses there—three each weekday and four on Saturday— are often standing-room-only.
On a recent Saturday, all 107 seats were filled and 270 more people stood outside in the hall and watched the 4 p.m. service on closed-circuit TV.
There is a constant line for the confessional, and a priest is always available for anyone who wants to talk. More than a dozen volunteers— half of them widows—staff the small office and the gift shop. On Saturdays, a Ramapo College student provides the music, and a jazz pianist plays at some of the weekday Masses.
Someone is always stopping by Saint Therese Chapel to say a rosary, novena or silent prayer—a shopper with packages, a salesman on his break, seniors on their way to lunch, a troubled soul who appreciates the anonymity.
The buzz these days concerns the chapel’s future. It has been a fixture of the mall for 36 years, but now the. oldest mall in the county is about to be transformed. Already renamed the Bergen Town Center, it will go from tired and a little tacky to a collection of major retailers and big stand-alone stores when the $171 million renovation project is complete. Whole Foods and Target are already on board.
But God will no longer be found at the bottom of the escalator. The mall’s basement will be emptied, and the chapel’s director, Father Eugene Bettinger, has not been told where in the town center Saint Therese will be relocated or when. Construction on the first phase of the huge project is scheduled to start in the Spring, and Bettinger, who runs the chapel for the Carmelite order, says for now he is basically operating on a month-tomonth basis.
He says the chapel has been asked to stay by the mall’s owner, Vornado Realty Trust, and he is optimistic it will eventually have a new home somewhere in the mall. Bigger would be nice. But the uncertainty has gone on for almost two years.
There is something very appealing about the idea of a chapel in a mall. North Jersey’s malls have all kinds of stores and services that cater to one’s physical health and appearance: spas, hair salons, vitamin shops, places where you can buy tennis outfits, golf clubs, running shoes, chairs that massage and bath oils that relax.
Why not a place that caters to one’s spiritual health? Why not a refuge from the crowds and the noise, a place both peaceful and soothing? You could call the chapel the quiet, beating heart of the mall.
The philosophy behind putting a chapel in a mall is meeting people where they are. That convenience works for shoppers and store employees, and the chapel has a regular community of several hundred worshippers. But it is also there for lost sheep.
If for whatever reason, they cannot come to God in a traditional church, then God will come to them. Maybe they have been away for a long time. Maybe they do not feel quite ready or quite right going to Mass every Sunday or joining a parish. Maybe they want to talk to a priest who does not know them. The most rejoicing in heaven is over the lost sheep.
Bettinger says there are regulars who come to the sacrament of Reconciliation at the chapel, and there are those who come after not having gone to confession for many years. The chapel’s confessional is old-fashioned. You kneel in a small, dark space hidden by a curtain. You speak to the priest, who is on the other side of a screen. That privacy can be comforting when you have something to tell that is between you and God alone.
A priest is usually at the chapel from before the 9:30 Mass in the morning to after the 4:00 Mass in the afternoon. A good deal of his time is spent listening to those who want to talk about marriage, work, family, children, illness, death, alcoholism, suicide, whatever—the emotional issues that we all carry around like so many shopping bags.
You can put your shopping bags down when you stop at Saint Therese. The solace is free.
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