There was a time in Hyde Park when one building held nearly everything a parish needed.
It stood along Kutztown Road, built of rough-textured brick with contrasting trim, seventy-eight feet long and fifty-seven feet wide. Its architecture was described as English Norman, but the families who gathered there probably did not need an architectural term for it. To them, it was simply Holy Guardian Angels—the place where they worshiped, where their children learned, and where the life of the parish unfolded from one floor to another.
The social hall was below, large enough for 350 people. The church auditorium, with room for 450, occupied another part of the building. Above it was the school floor, containing four classrooms. It was not a church with a school somewhere nearby. It was a true combination church and school, carefully designed so that prayer, education, and community life could share one roof.
For the Italian immigrant families who had settled in Temple during the early 1920s, that roof represented the end of a long wait.
Their nearest Italian Catholic parish was Holy Rosary in Reading, about five miles away. Five miles may not sound far now, but with limited transportation it could separate a family from regular Mass and from the familiar language, customs, and devotions that made a church feel like home.
The men of the community first asked the Archbishop of Philadelphia for a church in Temple. Their request was denied because the Catholic population was considered too small. So they asked a more determined question: Could they build one themselves?
Permission came in 1925.
Around Domenic Tomasini’s grocery store in Temple, plans began to take shape. Tomasini, the project trustee, worked with Settimio DeSantis, James Giamotti, and Samuel Savini. Before long, their conversations became lumber, brick, labor, and sacrifice. A small chapel dedicated to St. Anthony arose at Eighth and Columbia avenues and was completed in 1926.
St. Anthony’s R.C. Chapel, Eighth and Columbia Avenues, Temple, PA.
Priests came from St. Joseph Hospital, from the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart in Hyde Park, and from Holy Rosary. Yet without a full-time pastor, the people still did not have the permanent parish they desired.
That changed in November 1929, when the Archdiocese announced the formation of Holy Guardian Angels Parish. The Rev. Frederick F. Lanshe became its first pastor and celebrated his first Mass at St. Anthony’s Chapel on November 23.
A parishioner, Emma Herbst, donated a house at 3120 Kutztown Road for Father Lanshe’s residence. The house also served as another chapel. But the parish was already looking toward something larger—a permanent building in which its future could grow.
One summer Sunday, an altar stood beneath the open sky in Gethsemane Cemetery along Kutztown Road. Hundreds gathered for a field Mass to support the church. Passing motorists could see the service from the road, and many more people listened over WRAW. It was the first Mass ever broadcast in Reading. The Latin prayers traveled beyond the cemetery and into homes across the area, carrying the sound of a young parish announcing that it was here to stay.
The following year, the parish obtained land at the southwest corner of the cemetery. On June 7, 1931, parishioners gathered for the groundbreaking of a new $30,000 building. G. C. Freeman served as architect, and Fink Construction Company of Reading received the general contract.
Father Lanshe wanted it to be a memorial church. Donors came forward for the main altar, two side altars, eight windows, and seven Stations of the Cross. Each gift placed a family’s devotion into the building itself.
When the combination church and school was dedicated on November 8, 1931, the parish finally entered the home it had imagined for years. Cardinal Dennis Dougherty, Archbishop of Philadelphia, presided at the solemn high Mass, and the Rev. Msgr. John J. Bonner delivered the sermon.
Holy Guardian Angels Combination Church/School on left
But the building’s most remarkable quality was not visible from the road. It was the way an ordinary day moved through it.
On Sunday, families entered for Mass. Parents guided children into the 450-seat church auditorium. Light fell through the donated windows. The main altar and side altars stood as visible reminders of the people who had helped build the place. Prayers rose from families who remembered when even a small chapel had seemed difficult to obtain.
During the week, another sound filled the building: children’s footsteps heading toward the school floor.
The parish had grown large enough to open its school in 1933. The Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart staffed it, with Sister M. Amabilis serving as principal. A grade was added in each of the next three years. In 1936, Holy Guardian Angels held its first eighth-grade graduation.
Imagine those early pupils arriving with books under their arms and climbing toward one of the four classrooms. Below them was the church where their families attended Mass. Farther down was the social hall where parishioners gathered. The entire structure must have seemed alive around them.
A child could begin the morning with prayer, spend the day over spelling and arithmetic, and later hear chairs being arranged downstairs for a parish event. The Sisters taught lessons above the same sacred space where the children knelt with their parents on Sunday. Faith was not in one building and schoolwork in another. The two were stacked together, floor upon floor, in the center of parish life.
The social hall had its own memories. It was the room built for crowds, conversation, parish organizations, celebrations, and all the practical work required to keep a young congregation moving forward. Tables could be arranged, chairs folded and unfolded, and plans debated by people whose names might never appear in formal histories. The hall was where neighbors became volunteers and volunteers became friends.
Holy Guardian Angels Boy Scouts in Basement Social Hall
Holy Guardian Angels Boy Scouts in Basement Social Hall
For children, it may have been the mysterious downstairs world from which music, voices, or the movement of furniture drifted upward. For adults, it was where another collection was taken, another supper served, another activity organized, and another generation encouraged.
The building endured because the parish kept asking more of it.
Between 1956 and 1964, four classrooms were added to the rear, and basement classrooms were removed. The HGA Women’s Club, established in 1956, supported both school and church, buying school supplies and purchasing church items—including the organ. Their work represented a familiar parish tradition: when something was needed, people found a way to provide it.
In 1960, the parish celebrated one of its own when the Rev. E. Michael Camilli, newly ordained in Rome, offered his first Mass at Holy Guardian Angels. A boy of the parish had grown up, answered a vocation, and returned to the altar. The old combination building had become part of a circle extending from Hyde Park to Rome and home again.
By then, however, Holy Guardian Angels had outgrown the church auditorium that once seemed so spacious. A new $700,000 Colonial-style church, designed by Reading architect Paul U. Koch, was completed on additional land in 1963. It seated 700 people. C. H. Schlegel and Son served as general contractor.
Holy Guardian Angels R.C. Church
When the congregation moved into the new church, the original combination building entered a second life. The church space that had witnessed baptisms, first Communions, weddings, funerals, and Sunday Masses was converted to school use. The whole old building now belonged to education.
Yet its first purpose was never entirely erased. Former pupils could still remember which rooms had once been part of the church. Adults could stand in a school corridor and recall where the altar had been. Even after the space changed, memory preserved the earlier floor plan.
The parish continued adapting the old structure. Boosters and parishioners renovated the school hall in the mid-1970s. Kindergarten opened in 1981. Philip J. Fromuth became the school’s first lay principal in 1984. The old building received its final expansion in 1985, when an addition was constructed at the front.
By then, generations had passed through its doors. Children who once sat in its classrooms returned as parents. Some came back as grandparents and pointed toward a window, a doorway, or a section of wall.
“That was my classroom.”
“The church used to be in there.”
“We had our programs downstairs.”
Memory does not preserve a building like a blueprint. It saves the details that mattered to a child: the shine of a hallway floor, the voice of a favorite teacher, the smell of lunch packed in waxed paper, the sound of rain against a classroom window, or the relief of hearing the final bell. It remembers where friends waited and where a Sister stood when the room suddenly became quiet.
In 1998 and 1999, parishioners made the difficult decision to construct a new school on the site. A capital campaign began for the $6 million project. Schlegel, the contractor that had built the new church in 1963, returned for the education center. Ground was broken in 2000, and the new building was completed in 2001.
Holy Guardian Angels R.C. School
Then came the farewell.
In June 2001, after a decommissioning ceremony, the old church and school were demolished.
It had been seventy years since the dedication. For three decades it had been both church and school; for nearly four more, it had served entirely as a school. Its rooms had changed, additions had altered its shape, and generations had left their invisible marks upon it.
A demolition crew could remove brick, windows, stairways, and floors. It could not remove the building from the people who had known it.
They could still see the combination church-school as it once stood. They could still enter the church auditorium and look toward the altar donated by parishioners. They could still hear children climbing to four classrooms above. They could still imagine a gathering of 350 people in the social hall below, talking and laughing after some long parish occasion.
Most of all, they could remember what the building meant.
It was the answer to immigrant families who had been told their numbers were too small. It was the result of men planning in a Temple grocery store and asking permission to build for themselves. It was the home of a parish that began in a little chapel, worshiped in a donated house, and then raised a permanent church and school through determination and sacrifice.
For those who knew it, the old building was never merely the place where the church used to be or the school that was torn down.
It was the building that held a parish.
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