Catholic church in Fresno’s Chinatown is like no other in the U.S. Here’s why
On a quiet street in Fresno’s Chinatown, a one-of-a-kind Catholic church that once served Chinese laborers and families remains rooted in community and tradition.
St. Genevieve Catholic Church, which sits on a one-block square at Tulare and C Streets, is said to be one of the smallest parishes in the world — as well as the only Catholic church in North America that has a distinctly Chinese design.
“It’s the only church of its kind on the Western Hemisphere, built for the Chinese by the Chinese in the architecture of the Chinese,” said Richard Fritas, a subdeacon and Franciscan brother.
Entering the church — a brick building with red and green trim and architecture reminiscent of a pagoda — there are intricate lanterns adorned with dragons, jade and red tassels. The Stations of the Cross carvings on the walls depict the events of Jesus’s crucifixion and burial and others with Chinese features. Statues behind the altar, imported from Taiwan, also portray the Virgin Mary and Joseph with Asian features. The color red, which is associated with happiness, prosperity and celebration in Chinese culture, is prominent throughout the house of worship.
Five percent of Chinese American adults identify as Catholic as of 2023, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.
Edwin Lee, 79, is one of them.
Lee, one of St. Genevieve’s longest-attending congregants, grew up a mile west of the church near Edison High School. When he was a child, nuns from the church, Sister Stephanie and Sister Josefa, would come pick up the Chinese children on Sunday morning for catechism, he said.
“They used to come in the station wagon,” he said. “We’re all piled up in the station wagon, 10 of us, and they’d bring us down over here.”
He later moved to north Fresno and got married in St. Anthony’s church near Maroa and Bullard Avenues. But he decided to return to St. Genevieve’s in 1978 so his kids could grow up in the same church he experienced. Though his kids have grown up and moved to southern California, Lee and his wife, Rena, remain involved in projects like fundraisers to help maintain the church.
Lee said he likes the strong sense of camaraderie at the small church. But the main reason he still attends to keep in touch with his past.
“We gotta come back to our roots,” he said.
Catholic church’s long history in Chinatown
Gena Lew Gong, a professor of Asian American studies at Fresno City College and Fresno State, organizes walking tours in Chinatown for her students. They often gather in the basement of St. Genevieve’s for meetings.
The church’s history is intertwined with Fresno’s Chinatown, she said.
Opened during the Great Depression in 1938, the church was built after a group of local Catholic nuns started doing charity work in the Chinatown community.
Gong said Fresno’s Chinese community was well-established in the 1870s, even before the city was incorporated in 1885. At one point, she said, the city’s 200 Chinese residents made up one-third of the city’s 600 total residents.
“They were the ones making the bricks that were used to make the first city hall and build the first buildings in downtown Fresno,” she said. The Chinese also came to work in mining and railroad construction, according to city archives.
Due to the segregation and discrimination, Chinese residents were forced to live west of the train tracks. As a result, Chinatown was an underserved community, Gong said. The racist practice of redlining in Fresno also cornered Mexican, Japanese, Armenian, and Italian immigrants as well as Blacks onto the west side.
“That’s kind of why these nuns who were there decided they needed to do something,” Gong said. The nuns provided free food, after-school programs and other services to the community. Gong said she thinks the Chinese families were grateful to have something to occupy their kids, especially because they couldn’t go to regular schools because of segregation.
“I think that sort of gave the Catholic Church an ‘in’ with Chinese community, and caused many of them to actually convert to Catholicism,” she said. (Gong also grew up Catholic in Los Angeles attending a church which served the Japanese Catholic community in the Little Tokyo neighborhood.)
St. Genevieve’s, Gong said, “is a window in time.” For example, she said, the Cantonese language has been dying off ever since Mandarin became the official language of China after the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s-70s.
“The fact that they still have their prayer books and their songs in Cantonese feels like a little time warp,” she said.
Over the years, St. Genevieve’s has hosted a number of community events that featured Chinese-inspired dance, food, decor and themes.
Last weekend, the church held a Autumn Moon Fundraiser at the Imperial Garden Chinese restaurant on Blackstone Avenue to help raise funds to paint the church’s exterior.
Fresno Bee archives show the church held dances for the community with Chinese decor and hosted ceremonies for a Chinese Girl Scout troop.
In August 1939, the church welcomed Rev. Paul Yu-Pin, bishop of the Nankin (Nanjing) Catholic Churches in eastern China, as well as a special envoy of the Chinese government to America, according to The Fresno Bee archives. (Yu-Pin went on to become a cardinal.)
Cardinal Roger Mahony, retired archbishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles who has been widely criticized for his handling of sexual abuse of minors by clergy, served at St. Genevieve’s from 1964-68, according to the Diocese of Fresno.
Today, the church is on Fresno’s local register of historic resources.
Fresno Chinatown church feels ‘like an expansion of family’
Many Chinese parishioners have either moved away or passed on. Some elderly members are no longer able climb up the stairs to enter the church.
Rev. Victor Dinh, the pastor at St. Genevieve’s, estimated about one quarter of the attendees are still Chinese American, another quarter are Anglo American and the remaining half are Hispanic or Latino.
An image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, widely revered by Mexicans and Latinos, can be seen above the church doors while exiting — a sign of the changing demographics.
But St. Genevieve’s Catholic Church still embraces its cultural legacy.
During a Sunday mass in late October, the choir led a chant of “Holy, Holy, Holy” in Cantonese, and prayer books with phonetic transcriptions helped non-native speakers sing along.
Fresno resident Claire Hamoy said the 10:30 a.m. Sunday mass start time was selected to accommodate the late-night schedules of Chinese restaurateurs who worked until midnight or one o’clock in the morning.
“A 10:30 mass back in the day was great,” she said. “But it’s never, ever changed. It’s been 10:30 ever since.”
Hamoy, a “lover of different cultures,” started attending St. Genevieve’s in 1991. She was touched by the sense of community and the then-bilingual mass celebration (today the mass is only in English).
“When I walked in this parish, there was just something very special here. I like the very small community. I like that everyone knows your name,” she said.
Though the church is small, she and others said that sense of connection is still strong today.
“We expanded our family,” Hamoy said of what it felt like to join St. Genevieve’s. “And I think that’s what a church should be, like an expansion of your family.”
This story was originally published November 17, 2024 at 5:30 AM.
