Diary: Finding the right church in the Big Apple

I had never lived in New York City before I moved to Manhattan in 2018. It was daunting to come as a fully formed adult with a 14-year-old child in tow. We came for one reason: my French son had won a scholarship to a prestigious, old-world boys’ school founded by a Rockefeller in 1888. 

Since he was born in Paris in 2004 to a French father, I had longed for my son to have some of the American get-up-and-go spirit. But equally, as an Italian who spent her entire adult life in London and Paris, I was terrified of the myth of neurotic New York tiger mums and dads. The emphasis on money, greed and endless ambition wasn’t my thing. My life in Paris had been quiet and serene but also – to be brutally honest – boring. I was ready for some of that New York City action as well. 

And so, Luca and I left our lovely family home in Paris and arrived at JFK in August 2018 with our cat in a box and two pieces of luggage each. I thought we would be in New York for a year, long enough for him to read books in English, learn to write essays American-style and absorb some US spirit. We took an overpriced, boxy apartment overlooking Lenox Hill Hospital on East 77th Street, within walking distance of Luca’s school. We bought secondhand furniture, pots and pans and took furniture left out for the trashman and painted it, brought it home.

On 76th Street and Lexington Avenue, I spied a lovely neoclassical church, and I wearily climbed the stairs to St Jean Baptiste. Escaping into churches when I felt lost and lonely was something I had done my entire life. In Sarajevo during the war, I would often creep out of the bullet-smashed Holiday Inn, dodge snipers and make it to the cathedral where I would sit in the gloom with people praying desperately for their lives. In my years in Africa, I always found a church, sometimes outdoors or in a field.

I am a believer in lighting candles, kneeling and opening one’s heart to God. Some say yoga is the trick, others say retail therapy and Amazon – for me, quiet churches have always soothed me when I most need to regain my balance. My London church was Pottery Lane. 

In 1995, my beloved father died and I spent many hours in the back pew, weeping, praying, and coming to terms with death and mourning. I loved that church. When my two brothers died within two years, and I was bereft, I practically had my own pew at Saint-Sulpice in Paris but also the “Church of Miracles” on Rue du Bac. 

I began to have a New York City routine: wake early, make breakfast, greet our funny and helpful Albanian super attendant who was sweeping the sidewalk, then walk Luca 20 blocks to school. If I was quick, I could make it back for 8am Mass at Saint Jean, which had been a French church once. I felt instantly at home.

The Mass was surprisingly full for so early – many of the nurses from Lenox Hill, many Filipinos and Latina workers, a few homeless people in the back. It was a short Mass, and I would get home and be at my desk writing by 9am. Those quiet, reflective moments somehow set me up for the day – the way an early-morning swim in the ocean resets your entire body. 

At the height of Covid, in 2020, we moved downtown to the Bowery, a strange mix of ultra-rich and flashy financiers and desperately poor homeless folk. We landed on East 4th Street in the 1970s-era loft of a famous feminist who died a few years back. My new church is Our Lady of Pompeii, an Italian church, just off Sixth Avenue. 

My son was baptised at the snooty but lovely Saint-Roch in Paris and had his first communion at my favourite church of all time, Saint-Sulpice, but his father (raised Roman Catholic like me, but a self-proclaimed agnostic) insisted Luca must find his own way to God, so I never dragged him to church on Sundays the way my parents had forced me. Instead, I told him to always go when he needed to go and talk to God. And I always told him that, like me, he had special Guardian Angels on each shoulder. 

So last week, after the Yale acceptance letter arrived, we walked down freezing Bleecker Street to the Italian church. We knelt and lit candles, prayed with thanks and gratitude. Then we joined hands and walked to John’s of Bleecker Street, the best pizza in New York City. For the first time, I looked around and thought that I would actually miss New York when I eventually do leave and go back home – wherever that is. 

Janine di Giovanni’s The Vanishing: The Twilight of Christianity in the Middle East is out now, published by Bloomsbury

This article first appeared in the February 2022 issue of the Catholic Herald. Subscribe today.