This is the Assumption of the
Blessed Virgin Mary church in Cen-
tralia, Pennsylvania. In 1962, an
underground mine caught fire, its
fumes and heat slowly choking the
town. Over the next twenty-some
years, all but five of its citizens up and
left. The government flattened most of
the homes and storefronts before the
fire could. Today, where generations
of miners once raised families, there
are only a few stretches of sidewalks to
nowhere. More than 56 years later, the
fire is still smoldering belowground.
But thanks to an accident of geol-
ogy, the church was spared from the
flames and the bulldozers. Its sky-blue
dome still pokes up above the trees,
and its pews fill with parishioners on
Sundays.
“There are many different kindsof miracles,” says the church’s priest,
Father Michael Hutsko. “The flash-of-
lightning kind, the sick person who’s
suddenly healed after praying are easy
to identify. But there’s the other, not-
so-evident miracles that take place,
that perhaps you don’t even realize
until you arrive at a certain place and
say, ‘I was praying for this,’ and you
realize that God’s hand is in it.”W
hen Centralia was settled,
in the 1840s, the miracle of
this rugged stretch of Appa-
lachia was the coal itself. Back then,
anthracite coal—jet-black, rock hard,
and clean burning—was the most
powerful fuel known. Its discovery in
northeast Pennsylvania triggered a
gold rush of sorts. Immigrant work-
ers poured in, and Poles, Hungarians,
Czechs, and Ukrainians filled boom-
ing mining towns such as Centralia.
Built in 1911, Assumption was one
of many Ukrainian Catholic churches
founded in the region. Centralia’s
immigrants could worship within its
simple wood frame and hand-laid
stone walls just as they had for cen-
turies back home. They sang in their
native tongue. They celebrated the
distinctive Ukrainian Catholic Mass.
They prayed beneath its three-bar
crosses.
Evelyn Mushalko, an Assump-
tion parishioner born in Centralia
in 1944, remembers a town of soda
fountains and penny candy stores;
a town where fathers worked hardThe last church standing in Centralia60 dec 2018 )jan 2019 | rd.com
courtesy father john m. fields