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“What happened to the bells of St Lawrence?” — Michael Rapoza
Suzanne Sullivan’s memory of the last bells at St. Lawrence Martyr Church in New Bedford has faded. Perhaps she heard them in the 1990s, she said, when the original array of 14 bells had already begun falling silent one by one.
The bells tolling the hours, and the noontime Angelus devotion, had once been a life constant, said Sullivan. The Fairhaven resident was baptized at St. Lawrence, and grew up a couple miles away.
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Will she hear them again?
She is 77 now, seven years into an effort to resurrect the bells that has itself gone quiet. She considers reviving the dormant campaign, short almost $200,000, but how?
“I was a lot younger,” she said, when she first mounted a crusade to keep the bells in town. “I had a lot more energy than I do now … Most of the people working with me kind of faded away.”
The bells, dating from the 1800s, are stored in Cincinnati, Ohio; a donated fund sits in a credit union in New Bedford; unresolved questions hang in the air. Where to go from here?
Seven years have passed since the mid-November day in 2017 when Sullivan walked past the gray stone church on County Street and saw the crane and a crew outside. One by one, the weathered green bells were being lowered from the tower onto a truck.
She happened to know a member of the crane crew, who told her that the church had sold the bells. They were on their way to the crane company yard in Fairhaven, then to the Verdin Company, the country’s oldest and largest bell-maker, based in Cincinnati.
It was stunning news, she said. There had been no church announcement.
As a St. Lawrence parishioner in the early 2010s, Sullivan led a four-year church campaign that raised some $300,000 to restore the bells and the ringer mechanism in the bell tower, their home since 1888.
Despite that effort, the Diocese of Fall River and the St. Lawrence pastor decided not to pursue the repair.
“It was not financially feasible for the parish to restore the bells” at the time, in part because the church was in the midst of repairing the bell tower, John Kearns, a diocesan spokesman said in a recent email to the Light.
The bells by then had not been working for some time. The pastor at the time, Father Robert Powell, had received an estimate of nearly $140,000 to get the bells back into working order. After taking a survey of parishioners, and consulting with the pastoral council and the finance council, St. Lawrence decided to sell the bells, Kearns said.
Sullivan meant to block the sale. In days she brought a lawsuit in Bristol County Superior Court against the diocese.
Court records show that she sued to stop the deal and charge the diocese with “misappropriation of over $300,000 in funds specifically raised to repair the bell tower and refurbish the bells at Saint Lawrence Church.”
Sullivan said she has no idea how those funds were eventually used. In published reports at the time, Powell said most of the money was used to repair the church building.
It soon became clear that the suit was moot. The bells had already been sold. The case was dismissed in January 2018.
Before that, though, Sullivan talked to the people at the Verdin Company. They agreed to sell back the bells. The bill for the 14 bronze bells, weighing between 3,000 and 125 pounds each, and moving them to storage in Ohio, would be $75,000.
Verdin gave Sullivan until the end of December 2017 to close the sale, about a month away.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, what are we going to do here?’” said Sullivan, a retired elementary school teacher. “We were begging [for] money. It was ridiculous. What do you do in a month?”
No time to establish a nonprofit organization. No time to plan fundraising events or publish campaign materials. Sullivan had time for calls, emails, and working the contacts she had.
“I just had time to throw the money in the bank,” she said.
A couple dozen people gave $1,000 each, she recalled.
“They looked at this as something really important for the city,” Sullivan said.
Come the end of December 2017, she was $25,000 short. Verdin gave her another month, and she made the deadline.
“They’re very kind, very compassionate,” Sullivan said of Verdin’s owners.
“Suzanne called us quite upset,” recalled Jeff Lewis, Verdin’s eastern manager. “She’s been incredibly emotionally attached to these bells.”
The sale went through, with Sullivan listed as the owner — because somebody had to be. The bells went into a warehouse in Ohio.
Sullivan turned to the question of how to give them a new home in the city. She did rounds of media interviews trying to muster support for the project.
The New Bedford Park Board of Commissioners in 2019 approved a plan for a bell tower in Clasky Common Park, just a few blocks northeast of St. Lawrence. Verdin in 2021 estimated that putting up the 34-foot structure and installing the restored bells and the ringer mechanism would cost $244,000, Lewis said.
For the tower project, Sullivan had more time to get organized. She set up a nonprofit, Save the Bells. She has sold 145 bricks that would be set into the tower base at $100 each. She has raised about $105,000.
In 2021, Sullivan applied for a Community Preservation Act grant of more than $200,000 for the project, but a city committee turned the proposal down.
“I was devastated,” she said. “I just had the wind blown out of my sails.”
The two campaigns — first for $75,000 to buy the bells, the second to build the tower — have collected donations from more than 600 people, some contributing as much as $25,000 and as little as $5. Sullivan figures she’s written more than 300 “thank-you” notes.
The effort is still short. How short remains to be seen.
Lewis said Verdin is preparing a new inflation-adjusted estimate, but it looks like the project could jump to about $280,000.
Sullivan is not quite sure how to proceed. She feels obligated to all the people who have helped. Even if she wanted to sell the bells and return the money, how would she do that?
She said she wrote to all five at-large city councilors for help in August, but received no replies.
Perhaps a consultant could take over the project, she said. She wants to see it through. She’d like to hear that music again, and pay tribute to “the people that struggled to put those [bells] up … They’ve been part of the city since 1888. I think they’re very important.”
Email reporter Arthur Hirsch at ahirsch@newbedfordlight.org.
For whom does the bell toll? It tolls for thee. Quixotic tilting at windmills.
Each of us is but a part of the whole. We need each other.
That’s what John Donne meant when he wrote:
“Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.”
Cut a deal with Verdin. Scale back the project to keep 5 bells – 4 to ring a westminster chime and 1 to toll the hr. let Verdin have the other 9 Bells . (some of those bigger bells were too big and too loud to be anywhere but 175 feet in the air) A smaller tower with fewer bells would still be a great memorial.
I agree… some bells is better than none.
Somehow I’m focusing on the “misappropriation of over $300,000 of funds” by the wonderful diocese! We know that the child abuse settlements for the diocese were nothing close to that! For an institution dedicated for good and for the salvation of its minions, it surely resembles more of a “la cosa nostra” when it counts!