Two or three years back, in Danville, a Pennsylvania town of about four thousand people, a semi-truck driver tried to avoid traffic on Bloom Road. He took a back way, past the Dunkin’ Donuts. But the left turn back toward Bloom was too sharp. The truck couldn’t make it. It went off the road, hitting an old stone archway and knocking down a sign that read “St. Cyril Academy: Education & Spiritual Center.” It was not the first time this had happened.
Interactions between the worlds on either side of the archway are rarely so dramatic, though. Their relationship has entailed more than a century of humble service and devoted worship, though now, apart from the odd truck accident, it risks fading into Danville’s history.
Through that archway and up the hill is the home of the Sisters of Saints Cyril and Methodius. The order started about an hour’s drive from Danville, at Saint Joseph’s parish in Hazleton, in 1903. The pastor there, Father Matthew Jankola, asked for volunteers to help educate the children of the local Slovak immigrant community. Three young women, all named Mary, took him up on it. Six years later, Pope Pius X granted them canonical approbation as the first sisters of a new order, charged with ministering to America’s Slovak immigrants, caring for the elderly and infirm, and promoting Christian unity.
By 1918 the order was big enough to need a new home. One of the three Marys, now Mother Emmanuel, found a good candidate in Danville, an iron production hub on the Susquehanna that had attracted a “great number of members of the Catholic church, with their families,” as one chronicler of the town noted in 1881. The owner of the town’s iron furnace had built his family a faux Tuscan villa up in the Pennsylvania woods, only for it to sit unoccupied as his descendants died or moved to Europe. The sisters bought the mansion, along with the surrounding acreage, for forty thousand dollars and named it Villa Sacred Heart. It has been their motherhouse ever since.
These days when you ascend the driveway, you can’t see the villa. It’s hidden behind what the sisters built, over several decades and with the help of donations from the Slovak American community they served, after they purchased the property: Saint Cyril Academy. The gray stone wings of Saint Cyril are only two stories tall, but they stretch far on either side of a narrow bell tower, obscuring not only Villa Sacred Heart but Maria Hall, a retirement home for religious that the sisters also built on the grounds. Today there are some two dozen sisters still active, and Maria Hall has capacity for three dozen.
The tower is one of two Danville landmarks visible all the way along Bloom Road. Looking out from the academy’s small front parking area, you can see the other: the sprawling hospital system that has been the area’s biggest employer since the iron works shut down. Danville is not as it was in 1918; as in countless other Pennsylvania towns, health care has replaced heavy industry. Even the sisters’ work has moved in this direction. In addition to Maria Hall, they run a retirement community and nursing home down the road. The academy, which opened as a girls’ boarding school in 1922, closed in 1999, though part of the building now houses a small preschool and kindergarten, founded in the 1970s. But while Saint Cyril hasn’t had any new additions in decades, the hospital is ever expanding. Its construction cranes rival the bell tower as the tallest structures in town.
The parking area under the bell tower only ever has two or three cars at a time. Parishioners from Danville’s Catholic church, another Saint Joseph’s, come here for perpetual adoration. Despite the building’s large front façade, the space shrinks rapidly the moment visitors step inside. Through the big creaky front doors, across a dim vestibule with a low wooden ceiling (painted with beautiful Art Nouveau symbols of the four evangelists), and down the short hall to the left is the adoration chapel. It holds ten or perhaps fifteen people, if you squeeze.
There’s more activity to be found on the other side of Saint Cyril, around the west wing, which houses the preschool. Here, from the main parking lot, more of the complex becomes visible: the villa, Maria Hall, the library, a few outbuildings and offices. This side also has a glass-enclosed vestibule jutting out of the stone exterior of the main building. It looks as though it was borrowed from the hospital on the opposing hill. This is the entrance for pilgrims and other visitors.
Enter those glass doors. One of the sisters, from a small office up a short flight of stairs, will buzz you in. Walk up the stairs. Say hello. Then bear left, past the wooden carving of the order’s crest, the portrait of the three Marys, and the larger-than-life paintings of Saints Cyril and Methodius, and step through the last door. This is the chapel the sisters built into the back of the academy in 1939, large enough that on its fiftieth anniversary Pope John Paul II designated it a minor basilica.
The air is different inside the basilica. The Pennsylvania humidity disappears at the threshold, and so does even the slightest draft. In the still air, every breath and every step echoes. It’s tough to be in here during summertime, thus the big circular fans installed on the walls and in the choir loft. The architects, a trio of brothers from Philadelphia, designed the place in their late father’s preferred Romanesque style, with high, thick marble arches framing the space and amplifying every sound. Romanesque was, by 1939, a few decades too late to be fashionable, but there’s enough simplicity and verticality here for the design to be plausibly modern.
Because the entrance to the visitors’ center brings one in through the side of the basilica, it takes a few paces before the altar comes into view. It’s a simple table made of yellowish marble, with insets of an Alpha and Omega and a Chi Rho intertwined with a vine and grapes on the front. It sits under a blue-and-white baldachin that bears the order’s motto, Adveniat Regnum Tuum. Apart from some mosaics—Saints Cyril and Methodius behind the altar and the Stations of the Cross, with text in Slovak, around the sides—the walls are mostly bare. The floor and the ceiling bear only simple geometric patterns.
But you don’t notice any of that; you notice the windows. The basilica has six major windows, or rather sets of windows, with additional rose windows around the altar and above the choir loft. Each set consists of three long vertical lancets topped by two diamond-shaped rose medallion windows. These windows are the pride of Saint Cyril’s. Every last one is kaleidoscopic, saturated with deep blues and reds especially, but they cast a soft, even light throughout the basilica. It takes a moment to recognize, through the sheer amount of color, that they are filled with figures, scenes, and symbols, with details so fine and so high up that you’d have to ask the sisters for a tour of them.
In anticipation of the chapel’s construction, the sisters conducted extensive research to determine everything they wanted the windows to depict. “The iconography planned by the sisters was a distinct challenge,” the stained-glass artist they hired later wrote. “The subject matter is probably entirely different from that of any other windows in the world. Scenes starting with practically the earliest known history and continuing down to the present day seem to require windows designed in the earliest principles of stained glass but expressed in a completely fresh and original manner.”
The windows, as the sisters intended, tell the story of the place and the people. One set each (those nearest the altar) are dedicated to Our Lord and Our Lady, and the rest throughout the church display the history of the Church in Slovakia, the lives of Saints Cyril and Methodius, and the history and patrons of the order. These gather together, for example, Saint Anthony, to whom the sisters entrusted their finances; Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, their guide in care for the poor and sick; and various Slovak saints and devotional writers, including several as recent as the nineteenth century. Other lancets depict sisters at work in the kitchen and the classroom, and Slovak American laborers in the mines.
Distant and recent past move back and forth into each other. Saints, popes, and scenes from the life of Christ mingle with miners and schoolchildren. Even as the order’s ministry changes, as the sisters age, as land gets sold off to the hospital system to pay for (among other things) the occasional repairs to the sign down the hill, the light shines through these windows—these saints and patrons in Heaven and on Earth, these works of mercy, this divine and human history—all the same.
✥ ✥ ✥
On October 3, 2020, I drove under the archway with the sign that reads “St. Cyril Academy: Education & Spiritual Center,” my girlfriend in the passenger seat, a ring box pinned under my sweater. We parked below the bell tower and stepped out of the car. She, having deduced by then why I had brought her to the beautiful old building where she had gone to preschool, mercifully offered me a hug. I, too aware of the ring box tucked under my sweater (where else does one hide a cube of that size on one’s person?), squirmed away and suggested we walk around.
Saint Cyril was, due to the ages of many of the sisters, the one place in town where restrictions imposed during the pandemic remained in fullest effect. The adoration chapel was frequently closed; to enter, you had to key in a code. Rumor had it that some local teens had snuck in to climb the bell tower recently, so the sisters were not so pleased to receive visitors those days. The problem was, that October day, they were also out taking a walk on the grounds.
I had no solid plan, but I knew we had to avoid the sisters. We tried going left, toward Maria Hall. There they were. We tried going right, toward Villa Sacred Heart. There they were again. We went around the back, passing the preschool and a crumbling gazebo that has been there since the place belonged to the long-forgotten iron tycoon, and down the hill, to a cemetery I hadn’t known was there. A weathered statue of Saint Joseph holding the infant Jesus keeps watch over the rows of tombstones. Here are buried the three Marys and Father Jankola and the sisters who researched the stained-glass windows and taught in the boarding school and staffed the nursing homes.
Out of places to go, I suggested we approach the statue and say a prayer. She obliged. I went down on one knee. I do not remember exactly what I said next, but “I love you” and “Will you marry me?” must have been part of it. I do remember that she said yes.
And I remember that, turning to look with Saint Joseph over the tombstones, she added, “They prayed for me.”
Two or three years back, in Danville, a Pennsylvania town of about four thousand people, a semi-truck driver tried to avoid traffic on Bloom Road. He took a back way, past the Dunkin’ Donuts. But the left turn back toward Bloom was too sharp. The truck couldn’t make it. It went off the road, hitting an old stone archway and knocking down a sign that read “St. Cyril Academy: Education & Spiritual Center.” It was not the first time this had happened.
Interactions between the worlds on either side of the archway are rarely so dramatic, though. Their relationship has entailed more than a century of humble service and devoted worship, though now, apart from the odd truck accident, it risks fading into Danville’s history.
Through that archway and up the hill is the home of the Sisters of Saints Cyril and Methodius. The order started about an hour’s drive from Danville, at Saint Joseph’s parish in Hazleton, in 1903. The pastor there, Father Matthew Jankola, asked for volunteers to help educate the children of the local Slovak immigrant community. Three young women, all named Mary, took him up on it. Six years later, Pope Pius X granted them canonical approbation as the first sisters of a new order, charged with ministering to America’s Slovak immigrants, caring for the elderly and infirm, and promoting Christian unity.
By 1918 the order was big enough to need a new home. One of the three Marys, now Mother Emmanuel, found a good candidate in Danville, an iron production hub on the Susquehanna that had attracted a “great number of members of the Catholic church, with their families,” as one chronicler of the town noted in 1881. The owner of the town’s iron furnace had built his family a faux Tuscan villa up in the Pennsylvania woods, only for it to sit unoccupied as his descendants died or moved to Europe. The sisters bought the mansion, along with the surrounding acreage, for forty thousand dollars and named it Villa Sacred Heart. It has been their motherhouse ever since.
These days when you ascend the driveway, you can’t see the villa. It’s hidden behind what the sisters built, over several decades and with the help of donations from the Slovak American community they served, after they purchased the property: Saint Cyril Academy. The gray stone wings of Saint Cyril are only two stories tall, but they stretch far on either side of a narrow bell tower, obscuring not only Villa Sacred Heart but Maria Hall, a retirement home for religious that the sisters also built on the grounds. Today there are some two dozen sisters still active, and Maria Hall has capacity for three dozen.
The tower is one of two Danville landmarks visible all the way along Bloom Road. Looking out from the academy’s small front parking area, you can see the other: the sprawling hospital system that has been the area’s biggest employer since the iron works shut down. Danville is not as it was in 1918; as in countless other Pennsylvania towns, health care has replaced heavy industry. Even the sisters’ work has moved in this direction. In addition to Maria Hall, they run a retirement community and nursing home down the road. The academy, which opened as a girls’ boarding school in 1922, closed in 1999, though part of the building now houses a small preschool and kindergarten, founded in the 1970s. But while Saint Cyril hasn’t had any new additions in decades, the hospital is ever expanding. Its construction cranes rival the bell tower as the tallest structures in town.
The parking area under the bell tower only ever has two or three cars at a time. Parishioners from Danville’s Catholic church, another Saint Joseph’s, come here for perpetual adoration. Despite the building’s large front façade, the space shrinks rapidly the moment visitors step inside. Through the big creaky front doors, across a dim vestibule with a low wooden ceiling (painted with beautiful Art Nouveau symbols of the four evangelists), and down the short hall to the left is the adoration chapel. It holds ten or perhaps fifteen people, if you squeeze.
There’s more activity to be found on the other side of Saint Cyril, around the west wing, which houses the preschool. Here, from the main parking lot, more of the complex becomes visible: the villa, Maria Hall, the library, a few outbuildings and offices. This side also has a glass-enclosed vestibule jutting out of the stone exterior of the main building. It looks as though it was borrowed from the hospital on the opposing hill. This is the entrance for pilgrims and other visitors.
Enter those glass doors. One of the sisters, from a small office up a short flight of stairs, will buzz you in. Walk up the stairs. Say hello. Then bear left, past the wooden carving of the order’s crest, the portrait of the three Marys, and the larger-than-life paintings of Saints Cyril and Methodius, and step through the last door. This is the chapel the sisters built into the back of the academy in 1939, large enough that on its fiftieth anniversary Pope John Paul II designated it a minor basilica.
The air is different inside the basilica. The Pennsylvania humidity disappears at the threshold, and so does even the slightest draft. In the still air, every breath and every step echoes. It’s tough to be in here during summertime, thus the big circular fans installed on the walls and in the choir loft. The architects, a trio of brothers from Philadelphia, designed the place in their late father’s preferred Romanesque style, with high, thick marble arches framing the space and amplifying every sound. Romanesque was, by 1939, a few decades too late to be fashionable, but there’s enough simplicity and verticality here for the design to be plausibly modern.
Because the entrance to the visitors’ center brings one in through the side of the basilica, it takes a few paces before the altar comes into view. It’s a simple table made of yellowish marble, with insets of an Alpha and Omega and a Chi Rho intertwined with a vine and grapes on the front. It sits under a blue-and-white baldachin that bears the order’s motto, Adveniat Regnum Tuum. Apart from some mosaics—Saints Cyril and Methodius behind the altar and the Stations of the Cross, with text in Slovak, around the sides—the walls are mostly bare. The floor and the ceiling bear only simple geometric patterns.
But you don’t notice any of that; you notice the windows. The basilica has six major windows, or rather sets of windows, with additional rose windows around the altar and above the choir loft. Each set consists of three long vertical lancets topped by two diamond-shaped rose medallion windows. These windows are the pride of Saint Cyril’s. Every last one is kaleidoscopic, saturated with deep blues and reds especially, but they cast a soft, even light throughout the basilica. It takes a moment to recognize, through the sheer amount of color, that they are filled with figures, scenes, and symbols, with details so fine and so high up that you’d have to ask the sisters for a tour of them.
In anticipation of the chapel’s construction, the sisters conducted extensive research to determine everything they wanted the windows to depict. “The iconography planned by the sisters was a distinct challenge,” the stained-glass artist they hired later wrote. “The subject matter is probably entirely different from that of any other windows in the world. Scenes starting with practically the earliest known history and continuing down to the present day seem to require windows designed in the earliest principles of stained glass but expressed in a completely fresh and original manner.”
The windows, as the sisters intended, tell the story of the place and the people. One set each (those nearest the altar) are dedicated to Our Lord and Our Lady, and the rest throughout the church display the history of the Church in Slovakia, the lives of Saints Cyril and Methodius, and the history and patrons of the order. These gather together, for example, Saint Anthony, to whom the sisters entrusted their finances; Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, their guide in care for the poor and sick; and various Slovak saints and devotional writers, including several as recent as the nineteenth century. Other lancets depict sisters at work in the kitchen and the classroom, and Slovak American laborers in the mines.
Distant and recent past move back and forth into each other. Saints, popes, and scenes from the life of Christ mingle with miners and schoolchildren. Even as the order’s ministry changes, as the sisters age, as land gets sold off to the hospital system to pay for (among other things) the occasional repairs to the sign down the hill, the light shines through these windows—these saints and patrons in Heaven and on Earth, these works of mercy, this divine and human history—all the same.
✥ ✥ ✥
On October 3, 2020, I drove under the archway with the sign that reads “St. Cyril Academy: Education & Spiritual Center,” my girlfriend in the passenger seat, a ring box pinned under my sweater. We parked below the bell tower and stepped out of the car. She, having deduced by then why I had brought her to the beautiful old building where she had gone to preschool, mercifully offered me a hug. I, too aware of the ring box tucked under my sweater (where else does one hide a cube of that size on one’s person?), squirmed away and suggested we walk around.
Saint Cyril was, due to the ages of many of the sisters, the one place in town where restrictions imposed during the pandemic remained in fullest effect. The adoration chapel was frequently closed; to enter, you had to key in a code. Rumor had it that some local teens had snuck in to climb the bell tower recently, so the sisters were not so pleased to receive visitors those days. The problem was, that October day, they were also out taking a walk on the grounds.
I had no solid plan, but I knew we had to avoid the sisters. We tried going left, toward Maria Hall. There they were. We tried going right, toward Villa Sacred Heart. There they were again. We went around the back, passing the preschool and a crumbling gazebo that has been there since the place belonged to the long-forgotten iron tycoon, and down the hill, to a cemetery I hadn’t known was there. A weathered statue of Saint Joseph holding the infant Jesus keeps watch over the rows of tombstones. Here are buried the three Marys and Father Jankola and the sisters who researched the stained-glass windows and taught in the boarding school and staffed the nursing homes.
Out of places to go, I suggested we approach the statue and say a prayer. She obliged. I went down on one knee. I do not remember exactly what I said next, but “I love you” and “Will you marry me?” must have been part of it. I do remember that she said yes.
And I remember that, turning to look with Saint Joseph over the tombstones, she added, “They prayed for me.”
