CORPUS CHRISTI CHURCH

1906-1981

Telephone (212) 666-9350

Historical and artistic introduction

Corpus Christi parish was formed in 1906, soon after Columbia University moved uptown to Morningside Heights. In 1935 the first church was replaced on the same site by the present building, by Wilfred Edwards Anthony, who had already designed Saint Catherine of Sienna Church on East 68th Street (1931) in a medievalizing and Arts-and-Crafts style. Here the very different Colonial Revival mode connoted not only cultural assimilation but also national solidarity during the Great Depression. In The Seven-Storey Mountain (1948) Thomas Merton, who became a Catholic here, remarks on the new building's "Oratorian character ... though with a sort of American colonial tinge of simplicity."

Interesting features of the church include architectural relics a stone from the 5th-century Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome, set into the wall of the narthex or vestibule, and fragments of the original 13th-century stained glass of Reims cathedral(bombed in World War 1) worked into the apse windows. As to paintings the 15th-century Florentine pulpit cross, quite restored yet still remarkable in design, carries a Christological pelican motif (according to legend the pelican nourished its young on its own blood); the saints on its stem may be Gregory and Benedict. The colorful altarpiece in the chapel of the reserved Sacrament is probably a modern synthesis based on two works by Lorenzo Monaco.

The chandeliers which grace both the nave and the sanctuary were made in Bohemia (Czech Republic), while the silver altar candlesticks are Belgian.