swallowing the 12-year-old whole.
The fire had exposed a mineshaft
hundreds of feet down. He survived
by grabbing a tree root before being
pulled to safety.
That was the beginning of the end
for Centralia. In 1984, citing the dan-
ger to its citizens, state and federal of-
ficials began buying up properties and
ordered the town evacuated. Streets
were emptied. Homes were leveled. A
bulldozer knocked down the Roman
Catholic church, then went after the
Methodists’.
But Assumption stayed. The entire
property, it turned out, sat on one of
the massive slabs of sandstone that
forms the backbone of the region’s
mountains. The stone protected the
church from the burning anthracite
that sat below the rest of the town.W
hen Father Hutsko took
over Assumption in 2010, he
found a building in rough
shape and a small congregation badly
in need of assurance. Now scattered
around the region, the parishioners
would drive back to Centralia every
Sunday wondering, “Who keeps a
church in a town that
doesn’t exist anymore?”
Father Hutsko does.
A Pennsylvania native,
he knew the value of the
church in coal-country
towns. The priest and his
flock dug in for the long
haul. They tore downFather Hutsko refused
to abandon his flock.the abandoned and crumbling rec-
tory. They fixed the roof and its blue
dome. They added new siding to keep
vandals out of the basement. They
scrubbed their jewel until it shone.
In late 2015, the archbishop of
the Ukrainian Catholic Church—its
patriarch—visited America and re-
quested to see the church in the now-
famous burning town. The archbishop
had been entranced by the way its
survival story echoed the Gospel of
Matthew: “On this rock I will build
my church, and the gates of Hades will
not prevail against it.”
When he entered the tiny jewel
box—with its gilt-framed paintings,
its cozy pews and ornate sanctu-
ary, its thick, soft carpet and scent of
incense—the archbishop was moved
to establish Assumption as the site of
an annual pilgrimage.
“As soon as we went in, he was just
in awe,” Hutsko remembers. “He said,
‘This is a holy place ... It has to be a
place to call people to prayer.’”
At last, Assumption’s mission was
clear. The church wasn’t to be just a fi-
nal refuge for the scattered residents of
a lost town. It was to be a symbol of
hope for people of faith
everywhere.
“The church had
found its purpose,”
Hutsko says.62 dec 2018 )jan 2019
Reader’s Digest Cover Story
courtesy bill hangley jr.