Hey Padre, What Color D’Ya Want the Eye to Be?

John Grange is dead: a Catholic priest, long a pastor in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, who celebrated — in every sense — Mott Haven’s transformation from an Irish Catholic neighborhood to a Puerto Rican Catholic, and then a Dominican Catholic, and then a Mexican Catholic one. Thus did St. Jerome’s parish become San Geronimo.

I once spent an afternoon with Father Grange while on the hunt for successors to Dorothy Day. We ate Entenmann’s cookies out of the box in the cavernous rectory of San Geronimo, whose furniture hadn’t been altered since Cardinal Spellman’s time, even as the church itself was renovated, the better to make the congregants welcome. He waxed eloquent about the people of the neighborhood. But he didn’t tell me the story (told in his obituary) of his own artful way of rendering the changes he had seen there:

One feature of the renovation that Father Grange was most proud of was the repainting of the God’s eye in the vaulted ceiling from blue, as the primarily Irish congregation that built the church had imagined it, to brown, as the Mexican woman who cooked for him told him it should be.

• 18 October 2013