I was thinking about going to see my sister for a few days. Frederick, MD is halfway on the two hour journey to her home. We've met in Frederick before and walked the Cross Creek path which is lovely and level. So I was looking at restaurants in the area where we might stop after hiking and before going back to her place.
This is what I found. What happened to Visitation Academy and convent? It's been turned into a bar and restaurant. Is that the remnant of a high altar? Are those Communion rails repurposed to separate the bar area from the restaurant?
Indeed yes. I looked up the history of Wye House Tavern and discovered a number of articles detailing the "transformation" from the sacred to the secular. This is from a September 2025 article in Baltimore Magazine:
On a sunny Easter day, people in their Sunday best sit at an altar, with its richly colored stained glass, white marble angels, and Italian oil painting of Mary and Joseph presenting young Jesus to St. Simeon. Beneath the cathedral ceiling, with its pipe organ on the top floor and flickering candelabras on the first, everyone is gathered for a kind of kinship.
But this is dinner service, not a church service, inside Frederick’s Wye Oak Tavern, a deconsecrated church converted into a modern American tavern from brothers Bryan and Michael Voltaggio. The church was once part of the Visitation Academy, a former convent and Catholic girls’ school now transformed into the Visitation Hotel Frederick, which opened last December.
What a desecration! Why didn't they remove and destroy the altar where Jesus Body and Blood was offered to God on high. Or why didn't they rescue the angels and the altar and donate them to a poor rural Church or an impoverished mission? How could they allow that high altar to become the booze repository for the banquet hall replacing the altar of sacrifice for the atonement of sin?
Here's the obvious answer: that wouldn't correspond with the goal of the NO Church to desacralize everything including the sacred Mass. This grieved my heart. I could no more go to this bar/restaurant than I could go to a porn movie. The picture offers a visible metaphor about the crisis in the Church. It is liturgical porn and I hate it.
The archdiocese of Baltimore has been a mess for decades. My dad almost left the church over Bishop Borders appearing on a Sunday talk show with Jesuit Fr. Robert Drinan, a pro-abortion member of Congress at the time. Thankfully, Daddy calmed down and remained faithful to the end, but I certainly understand his moment of anger!
I'm angry too. We have been robbed by so many bad popes and bishops. They have murdered innocence with their sex abuse of children. They have robbed the faithful and sold our churches to pay their legal expenses. They have defrauded parents who send their children to Catholic schools only to have them scandalized and lose the faith. They have lied to us and distorted doctrine. There aren't enough millstone's on the earth to give them what they deserve. This is where righteous anger comes in. Anyone who isn't angry about these things needs a reality check.
Tolerance of sin can be a sin, even a grievous sin. The Bible is filled with examples. The high priest Eli, while verbally admonishing his corrupt sons, Hophni and Phinehas allowed them to continue as priests. He showed more concern for his wicked sons than for God. They were guilty of stealing the temple offerings and engaging in sexual immorality. The Lord judged Eli harshly, ending the priesthood for his family. His two sons were killed in battle against the Philistines and when Eli heard the news, he fell and broke his neck. And that ended his line.
St. Paul also warns about tolerance of sin in his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 5:
1IT is absolutely heard, that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as the like is not among the heathens; that one should have his father's wife. 2And you are puffed up; and have not rather mourned, that he might be taken away from among you, that hath done this deed....
Know you not that a little leaven corrupteth the whole lump ? 7Purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new paste, as you are unleavened. For Christ our pasch is sacrificed. 8Therefore let us feast, not with the old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
Two of my favorite quotes from Fulton Sheen are on tolerance:
America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance - it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded.
Modern man has so long preached a doctrine of false tolerance; he has so long believed that right and wrong were only differences in a point of view, that now when evil works itself out in practice he is paralyzed to do anything against it.
Let's not be confused, but defend the truth and never let a false tolerance make us tolerate evil as a principle even when we tolerate the individual out of charity, because, as a third Sheen quotes points out, "Broadmindedness, when it means indifference to right and wrong, eventually ends in a hatred of what is right."
Saying, "I love you, but what you are doing is wrong and it's sinful," is an act of charity. Too many today put human respect before the truth. Sad days we live in, but God put us here at this time for a reason. If we put God first and strive to do His will in all things we can be sure that all will be well.
May Jesus Christ be praised.
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