PIQUA — Plans were slowly falling into place for repairs to begin on the damaged cross atop the iconic St. Martin’s Catholic Church steeple in Piqua.
“We had plans,” noted Shelia Lampe, who serves on a church advisory committee. “But God has plans, too.”
An overnight wind storm blew the metal 6-foot cross from atop the steeple, where it crash landed a few feet from the front doors.
Lampe and husband Don surveyed the damage Tuesday morning.
The fallen cross likely will not change plans to fix the steeple, the Lampes said. It likely would have needed to be replaced altogether, anyway.
But with the copper globe, which served as a support for the fallen cross hanging precariously from the top of the 135-foot steeple, the damaged roof does have an added sense of urgency.
That should be repaired in short order, Don Lampe noted.
In fact, the church advisory committee had been working persistently with area contractors to find one capable of fixing the damaged steeple.
The steeple was damaged in December when torrential thunderstorms cracked the copper globe, and caused the cross to lean noticeably.
As a wooden post connecting the tin cross to the globe continued to crack, that lean became more noticeable in recent weeks.
“We’d been checking it quite a bit, and even talked about it (Monday) night,” Shelia Lampe said.
Coincidentally, one work crew was slated to be at the church last week, but was unable to do so because of a medical emergency, the Lampes said.
“It’s just been one thing after another,” Shelia Lampe said.
The first order of business will be to safely remove the copper ball, which apparently still is being partially supported by a rope from inside the steeple.
“And then we need to get it waterproofed,” Don Lampe added.
Several damaged shingles along the steeple need to be replaced, and a restoration company will be on site to determine costs for tuck-pointing teh brick surface.
“We used to do that every 20 years or so, but we really haven’t done that since the church closed,” Shelia Lampe said.
The tuck-pointing will likely depend on how expensive repairs can be, and how much can be raised locally.
Regardless, a fund-raising drive is almost certainly in the offing to pay for repairs.
That’s because the Catholic Diocese — which owns the building — dropped the property insurance for the church after they declared St. Martin’s an oratory instead of a full-service church years ago.
