Blessed Trinity Parish holds celebration to commemorate blessing of bell tower
The three bells in the newly erected tower at St. Albert the Great Church in Baldwin were the original bells from nearby St. Wendelin Church, which was built in 1897.
Bishop David Zubik of the Pittsburgh Catholic Diocese was on hand to bless the bell tower Tuesday morning before it was lifted outside the church.
"It's nice to know that these bells will be ringing in this community again, since they've been doing that since 1897," said Rev. Stephen Kresak, pastor of St. Albert the Great Church. "The people that have heard them all those years will now hear them again, and even more people now on the other side of the hill will hear them, so it's nice to have them back."
After 127 years, St. Wendelin Church closed its doors and was subsequently demolished in June 2024. But Kresak said the parish wanted to preserve certain items from the church that were important, not only to the parishioners, but to the community as well.
The three bells from the bell tower were among the items removed, as well as an altar and a number of statues.
The bells were then placed on a flatbed truck and shipped to Cincinnati to the Verdin Company, which repairs and restores bells for churches, universities and community organizations across the country.
"They clean them, polish them really good, and if they need re-tuned, they would re-tune them," said Kresak.
The once black-colored bells are now fully restored with a fresh gold shine and retrofitted with new ringers that are operated by an automated computer system. That program allows the bells to ring either on a timer or remotely, even through an app on a smartphone, and they were ringing again by the afternoon.
"It's a good sign of hope," Kresak said. "This is a reminder that it's just a church building. When we can save pieces from our past — kind of like we do when our parents and grandparents move on — we all have something that we cherish from them that we hold onto. It was really exciting for the parish to be able to see that something this significant is being saved, and that the whole community can share in that."
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