Real-Life Stories Of Hope

This holiday season, we’d like to share these stories—these gifts—of wonder, faith, and eternal life

- Bill Hangley Jr.

The Church That Wouldn’t Burn

THE CHURCH SHOULDN’T be there, but every Sunday, parishioner John Mayernick goes anyway. He opens the door that shouldn’t be standing, walks past the pews that should have burned, and mounts the stairs to the balcony that should have been razed. As sunlight pours through the stained glass windows and gleams off the gilt-trimmed icons, he grabs three ropes and rings the bells as Mass begins and the congregation sings the hymns no one thought they’d hear again.

This is the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary church in Centralia, 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 geology, 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 kinds of 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.”