A Catholic landmark in a peculiar location made by an extraordinary woman with a message of hope
TRUST — Trust, N.C., is a blink of a town between Asheville and the Tennessee state line. Trust, where the elevation is higher than the population, is located just north of Luck in Madison County.
This little hamlet would go largely unnoticed were it not for “power couple” Beverly and Bill Barutio. It is a wonder how in a decade, from 1985 to 1995, two people could accomplish so much in their community while being retired. While Bill ran the town as mayor, he and his wife built a canning company, general store, restaurant, school, zoo, and a Catholic church, and battled cancer. Of all these accomplishments, the latter two bear the purpose of this article.
After a late stage diagnosis of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 1981, Beverly prayed to St. Jude: “If I make it, someday I will build a chapel.” After 10 years with the cancer in remission, that promise began to “pull” on Beverly.
“I am a miracle. I would sit on the steps in prayer and it was like I kept hearing God whispering like in ‘The Field of Dreams,’ saying, ‘Build it and they will come’.”
As promised, two years later, in 1992, the 12-by-18-foot chapel was designed and constructed on the property as a place for “rest, reflection and refuge” for “all of God’s people.”
Ten years later Beverly lost her battle with cancer, but with her passing she has left a legacy of hope, Trust and Luck within the walls of the beautiful chapel she and her husband constructed and named “St. Jude’s Little Chapel of Hope.”
Even though her husband Bill no longer lives on the property, the chapel remains unharmed, leaving a footprint and legacy of love and faith. When it was completed, Beverly noted, “God takes care of His own and this is all His. I built it for His children. He will provide security.”
The Little Chapel is still standing and being “taken care of.” There are no locks on the 150-year-old doors that had been special ordered from Europe and chosen by Beverly. There are no cracks on the stained glass windows, also hand-picked from Europe and picked up in Atlanta by Beverly. And there are no tears in the red felt lining of the unique miniature kneelers next to the carved wooden angels standing watch at the little altar.
Since the chapel’s opening in 1992, thousands of pilgrimage to this quiet site have shed their burdens in the form of written prayers and sacrificial items on the altar.
The altar features a Bible and a crucifix. But over the years many other unexpected items such as curled up dollar bills, wrinkled letters with tear-stained ink, photos of loved ones, burnt candles, favorite pieces of jewelry, prayer cards, and random objects of affection have appeared there as well.
People come looking for miracles, guidance and love, and they leave surpassing Beverly’s thought of “If just one person comes and finds a moment’s peace it has done what it is supposed to do.”
Because of the little chapel’s open-door policy, couples have also flocked to it as an inexpensive, beautiful place to take their wedding vows.
Among them were Sylvia and John Barnes from Gastonia, who made a road trip through Madison County early in their relationship and happened upon St. Jude’s after getting a little lost on N.C. Hwy. 63. Smiling, Sylvia says, “We fell in love with this place the instant we saw it. When we walked through the doors, John and I just looked at each other and said, ‘This is where we are getting married.’ Ten years later and here we are!”
Whether searching for the impossible, needing some hope, wanting to tie the knot or just passing by, pass by Luck and stop in Trust to experience the peace and beauty that Beverly Barutio created at St. Jude’s Little Chapel.
— Lisa Geraci, Correspondent
VATICAN CITY — The Vatican is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Congregation for Eastern Churches, an office that supports the Eastern Catholic churches and strives to ensure that the universal Catholic Church treasures its diversity, including in liturgy, spirituality and even canon law.
Coincidentally established five months before the Russian Revolution, the congregation continually has had to face the real persecution and threatened existence of some of the Eastern churches it was founded to fortify.
Until 1989-’90, many of the Byzantine Catholic churches – including, notably, the Ukrainian Catholic Church, the largest of all the Eastern churches – were either outlawed or severely repressed by the communist governments of Eastern Europe, said Archbishop Cyril Vasil, a member of the Slovak Catholic Church and secretary of the congregation.
No sooner had the Soviet bloc disintegrated and once-persecuted churches begun to flourish, then the first Gulf War broke out. And then there was the invasion of Iraq. And the turmoil of the Arab Spring across North Africa. Then the war in Syria. And Israeli-Palestinian tensions continue. The Chaldean, Syriac Catholic, Coptic Catholic, Melkite and Maronite churches have paid a high price.
“In all of this, the Eastern churches suffer the most because they find themselves crushed in the struggle between bigger powers, both local and global,” Archbishop Vasil said in mid-August. Even those conflicts that are not taking direct aim at Christians in the Middle East make life extremely difficult for them, and so many decide to seek a more peaceful life for themselves and their families outside the region.
One impact of the “exodus,” he said, is the greater globalization of the Catholic Church. While 100 years ago, when the Congregation for Eastern Churches was established, only a few Eastern churches had eparchies – dioceses – outside their traditional homelands, today they can be found in Australia, North and South America and scattered across Western Europe.
“In Sweden today, a third of the Christians are Chaldeans or Armenians,” he added. “In Belgium and Holland, where Catholicism has suffered a decline, communities are reborn with the arrival of new Christians, which is a reminder of the importance of immigrants bringing their faith with them.”
In countries like Italy, where thousands of Ukrainians and Romanians have come to work, they add ritual diversity to the expressions of Catholicism already found there, he said.
The growing movement of people around the globe means that part of the congregation’s job is to work with the Latin-rite bishops and dioceses, “sensitizing church public opinion” to the existence, heritage, needs and gifts of the Eastern Catholics moving into their communities, the archbishop said. Where an Eastern Catholic hierarchy has not been established, the local Latin-rite bishop has a responsibility “to accept, welcome and give respectful support to the Eastern Catholics” as their communities grow and become more stable.
The idea, Archbishop Vasil said, is to help the local Latin-rite bishop seriously ask himself, “How can I help them free themselves of me and get their own bishop?”
Although it has only 26 employees – counting the prefect, Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, and the receptionist – the Congregation for Eastern Churches works with 23 Eastern Catholic churches and communities, fulfilling the same tasks that for Latin-rite Catholics fall to the congregations for bishops, clergy, religious, divine worship and education.
The congregation’s approach in some areas is different than its Latin-rite counterparts because it follows the Eastern Catholic traditions and the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches. For instance, some of the Eastern churches ordain married men to the priesthood.
But the congregation’s primary concern is the survival of the Eastern Catholic churches, which is an issue not only in places where Eastern Catholics are threatened with death or driven from their homelands by war.
Archbishop Vasil said others risk losing their Eastern Catholic identity through assimilation.
Some of the blame, at least before the Second Vatican Council, lies with the Vatican and the Latin-rite hierarchy and religious orders, who, for decades encouraged Eastern Catholics to be more like their Latin-rite brothers and sisters.
Vatican II urged a recovery of the Eastern Catholic traditions, liturgy and spirituality. But, especially for Eastern Catholics living far from their churches’ homelands, uprooting vestiges of the “Latinization” can prove difficult, Archbishop Vasil said.
Especially for Eastern Christians whose ancestors immigrated two or three or four generations ago, the archbishop said, maintaining their specific identity as Chaldean, Ruthenian or Syro-Malabar Catholics is a challenge.
“The greatest danger in the coming years is extinction,” Archbishop Vasil said. “We don’t know what history has in store for us, but we must make sure we have done everything possible to avoid this danger.”
— Cindy Wooden, Catholic News Service