As a kid, I was a parishioner at St. Anselm Church in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, named for an 11th-Century bishop originally from Burgundy in what is now Italy, but immigrated to England and became the Archbishop of Canterbury, and office that still exists but is now part of the Church of England. I never suspected there were other St. Anselm churches around, but I encountered the Bronx version while slouching around Melrose one day. It came as quite the surprise when I found it on Tinton Avenue north of East 152nd Street near the John Adams Houses. It’s a beautiful brick church with colorful terra cotta tile accents built in a Byzantine style in 1918, supposedly inspired by the the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey. The parish predates the Bay Ridge St. Anselm parish by about three decades, and is officially the Church of St. Anselm and St. Roch after two parishes merged.
Passersby may be perplexed by the letters UIOGD above the front entrance. As you might expect with a Catholic church, in which services were said in Latin until the mid-1960s, that the letters stand for something in that language: Ut In Omnibus Glorificetur Dei, which means “That In All Things May God be Glorified.” This is a church saying that goes back centuries and can be found somewhere on a good many Catholic church buildings if you look for it.
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1/19/23