It is not much to look at from the exterior, but the Church of Saint Agnes on East 43rd Street in midtown New York is one of those “hidden gems” to which we so look forward. Just a half block from Grand Central Terminal and across the street from the Chrysler building, St. Agnes’ was originally constructed to provide spiritual comfort to the Italian laborers working on Grand Central Terminal. The building was constructed between 1873 and 1877, but once the basement area was completed in 1874, it immediately was used as a chapel.
The Church of St. Agnes now is considered most famous for having played host, for half a century, to Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen’s radio and television broadcasts on behalf of the “Society for the Propogation of the Faith” (the oldest of the mission societies of the Roman Catholic Church). Featured at one time on the cover of Time Magazine (April 14, 1952), Archbishop Sheen twice won an Emmy award for “Most Outstanding Television Personality.” He was so popular, that at the height of his broadcasts, Bishop Sheen was receiving 8500 fan letters per week and his show had an estimated 30 million viewers per week (the Archdiocese of New York had a hard time meeting the demand for tickets to his broadcasts). On October 7, 1980, Mayor Edward L. Koch designated the portion of East 43rd Street around the church as “Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen Place.” For local New Yorkers, this is known as the “...busiest pedestrian street in the World.”
A devestrating Fire in 1992 destroyed most of St. Agnes’s Church. It was eventually rebuilt by 1998. Today, the Church is under the pastoral care of Opus Dei - not the distorted version in Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” but rather a Roman Catholic institution devoted to the “Work of God.” This is only the second such parish church in the United States administered by Opus Dei (the first being St. Mary’s of the Angels in Chicago).
To think that we almost passed up visiting this hidden gem because of its plain exterior. We were so glad that we decided to explore it.