[PHOTO] St. Mary's Byzantine Catholic Church, New York City

In the East Village neighbourhood of Manhattan, at 246 E 15th St, stands St. Mary’s Byzantine Catholic Church.



This mural reminded me of the like mural of Toronto's Byzantine Slovak Cathedral of the Nativity of the Mother of God, photographed by me in 2009, and for good reason: the two churches both belong to the Eastern Rite of Roman Catholicism. The Tumblr Slavs of New York traces the origins of this church to the same emigrations of Ruthenes, an ethnic category that I described in 2005 as an abortive East Slavic nation now most often apparently a subdivision of the Ukrainians.

St. Mary’s location is no accident - it serves a sizable Slavic community in the East Village alongside the Carpatho-Russian Orthodox parishes of St. Nicholas (10th/Avenue A) and St. Mary’s (7th/Avenue A), the Ukrainian Catholic Church of St. George (7th/3rd), the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of All Saints (11th/3rd), the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of Holy Virgin Protection (2nd/2nd) and the Polish Roman Catholic Church of St. Stanislaus (7th/1st).

St. Mary’s parish dates to 1912, the heyday of Carpatho-Rusyn immigration to the United States. The parish first used a former Welsh Presbyterian church building at 255 East 13th Street. The present building was designed in 1959, by the Rev. Cajetan J.B. Baumann, who was a Franciscan friar in addition to being an architect. He designed a range of religious buildings both in New York and elsewhere.

According to the New York Times, this was the first all-glass church in the country, with a design that “emulates temples of early Christianity in Greece.” The estimated cost in 1958 was nearly a million dollars.

David W. Dunlop’s From Abyssinia to Zion: A Guide to Manhattan’s Places of Worship describes St. Mary’s as “[t]he most startling of the four houses of worship around Stuyvesant Square” and “a Modernist jewel box,” noting the “tower of glistening metal strands that reach up flame-like, whipped and wrapped around the bell.” The tower is a 50-feet tall stainless steel Modernist impression of a bell tower, which contains the bell from the parish’s original 13th Street home.

The New York Architecture blog goes into detail about the theology of Eastern, or Byzantine, Catholicism.

[LINK] Four links on the 2011 Canadian census report on changing families

Truncated as Canada's 2011 census may have been by the decision of the Conservative federal government to drop the voluntary long-form component of the census, the national survey still produces interesting data. Today, as reported in Statistics Canada's The Daily, the big news is that the census charted the continued diversification of family forms across Canada.

Census data show that married couples declined as a proportion of all census families between 2006 and 2011. Nevertheless, they still formed the predominant family structure in Canada, accounting for two-thirds of all families.

In contrast, the proportion of common-law couples and lone-parent families both increased. For the first time, common-law couples outnumbered lone-parent families in 2011.

The number of same-sex married couples nearly tripled between 2006 and 2011, reflecting the first full five-year period for which same-sex marriage has been legal across the country.

The 2011 Census of Population counted stepfamilies for the first time. They represented about one in eight couple families with children.

Census data also show the evolving living arrangements of children within Canadian families. About two-thirds of children aged 14 and under lived with married parents in 2011, while an increasing share lived with common-law parents.

For the first time, the census counted the number of children in stepfamilies and foster children. Data showed 1 out of every 10 children aged 14 and under in private households lived in a stepfamily in 2011. Foster children aged 14 and under represented 0.5% of children in this age group in private households.

The Canadian Press article Census shows new face of the Canadian family, hosted at CBC, highlights shrinking family size and particularly the number of children in any given household.

Married couples are in a long-term decline, single parenting has risen persistently, and families have gradually shrunk. The average family was 3.9 people in 1961, when the baby boom was in full swing. Now, it's 2.9.

"We do see more complexity and definitely more diversity in families," said Statistics Canada demographer Anne Milan.

For the first time, Statistics Canada says there are more people living alone in Canada than there are couples with children. One-person households now make up 27.6 per cent of all homes, a three-fold increase since 1961 that is especially notable in Quebec.

Meanwhile, couples with children have continued their decline, down to 26.5 per cent of all households, from 28.5 per cent in 2006.

Just 10 years ago, couples with children under 24 years old made up 43.6 per cent of all families (not including one-person households) — by far the most typical kind of family.

Now, parents with children make up just 39.2 per cent of families, and a rising proportion of those parents are not officially married. The number of common-law couples surged almost 14 per cent between 2006 and 2011.

The Vancouver Sun, in Teresa Smith and Misty Harris' "Census: Gay couples are embracing marriage", reports on the growing popularity of same-sex marriage.

While the number of opposite-sex couples who took the leap into matrimony grew by only three per cent since the last census, the number of same-sex couples tying the knot jumped by somewhere between 121 and 181 per cent over the same period, from about 7,500 in 2006 to as high as 21,000 in 2011.

A glitch in the data-gathering makes it difficult to pin down the exact size of the increase. Census manager Marc Hamel said an automatic algorithm may have accidentally overestimated the number of same-sex married unions across the country by as many as 4,500 couples. So the increase may be from 7,500 to 16,500, rather than to 21,000.

Either way, same-sex unions are the fastest-growing group of married couples over the last five years. 2006 was the first time same-sex marriages were measured in this country. Still, same-sex unions make up 0.8 per cent of all couples in Canada.

Equal-rights activist Kevin Bourassa and his husband Joe Varnell were the first same-sex couple in the world to be married. Since their January 2001 wedding — which was immediately challenged in an Ontario court — Bourassa and Varnell have been travelling the world to argue, not for more marriage, but for the right for same-sex couples to choose to marry. “These numbers tell me that our community is still responding to the relatively recent availability of marriage,” said Bourassa. “There seems to have been a pent-up demand.”

The 2006 census followed on the heels of Canada’s Civil Marriage Act, which had legalized same-sex marriage across the country in July 2005. Some provincial and territorial courts had already ruled that banning same-sex marriage was unconstitutional, beginning with Ontario and British Columbia in 2003. This may explain the higher number of same-sex marriages in those two provinces as of 2011 — 8,370 in Ontario, and 3,445 in B.C. — along with Quebec, with 3,655 couples.

In 2006, only 16 per cent of same-sex couples had married. By 2011, the share had jumped as high as 32 per cent.

And in Metro, Steve Rennie's Canadian Press article "Boomerang blues: Canadian nests not so empty" reports on the large proportion of 20-somethings who live with their parents.

It’s the home-game grudge match of the 21st century: the baby boomers versus the boomerang kids. And the kids, it seems, are winning.

Canada’s nests aren’t quite as empty as they’re supposed to be, data from the 2011 census shows. Some 42.3 per cent of young adults aged 20-29 are living with their parents, down slightly from 42.5 per cent in 2006 — but still well above the level of 26.9 per cent in 1981.

Christina Newberry was one of them — twice. First, when she was 21, newly graduated from university and trying to find her way in the world. Then again, eight years later, she came back to get her bearings in the middle of a divorce.

“My parents house became a place to sort of take a chance to regroup and figure out what was next,” said Newberry, a Vancouver-based author and freelance writer who’s built a franchise as an expert on adult children living in the parental home.

“It wasn’t even a financial issue, because by then I had a good job and could take care of my own bills. It was more just needing to figure out what to do next.”

While many young adults in their early 20s stay at home while in college or university — or move back in after graduation, mainly due to lack of money — those closer to 30 who opt to return tend to do so for different reasons, Newberry said.

Young adults in their late 20s tend to move home after a traumatic moment in their lives, such as the breakup of a relationship or the loss of a job. They don’t linger as long as their early-20s counterparts — usually just long enough to get back on their feet.

Radio reports have suggested that, in much of the Toronto area, a majority of 20-somethings live with their parents.