St. Stephen Magyar Church

In the late 1890s, a group of Hungarian immigrants living in the Monongahela River valley wrote to the editor of a Hungarian-language newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio, hoping he would help them press for a church of their own in McKeesport. ² He took up the cause. Speaking to a Hungarian audience near McKeesport in November 1897, he argued that the valley needed a Catholic church, and he closed his remarks by putting $25 toward one.

Once the immigrants had raised $650, they wrote, again with the editor’s help, to the Bishop of Kassa, Hungary, and asked him to send a pastor. ^{2 3} The man who made the crossing was Rev. Kalman Kovats, a priest who had also worked as a professor and edited a political newspaper at home. He reached McKeesport on August 12, 1899, and was taken in by the Janos Szajbert family.

The first service came eight days later, on August 20, the feast day of St. Stephen, in the basement of the school at nearby St. Peter Catholic Church. ^{2 3} The parish counted 23 families at its founding, along with 817 adults scattered across 31 communities in the river valley. It grew quickly enough that a permanent building became the obvious next step.

On April 3, 1900, the parish bought property at Beacon Street and East Park Way for $2,500. ² Ground was broken for a two-story brick and stone church on July 26, and the cornerstone was laid that September 9. The finished building cost $45,000 and was dedicated before a crowd of 4,000 on August 25, 1901. Its patron was the first Christian king of Hungary.

The interior carried the old country with it. The wooden altar was cut from trees grown in Hungary ⁴ and given by the bishop of Kassa. Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary bequeathed a painting of St. Stephen, ³ and Andrew Carnegie supplied the organ. ⁴

Growth and Decline

Four nuns arrived from Hungary in 1912 to teach the children religion and their parents’ language. ² A grade school followed in 1931, built partly from materials salvaged out of a nearby school that was shutting down.

By the Second World War the parish had roughly 300 families on its rolls, and Mass was often standing room only. ² What followed was McKeesport’s story as much as the church’s. As the National Tube Works cut back and then closed altogether, the congregation thinned out with it. The school shut its doors in 1967 for want of students.

St. Stephen’s merged with St. Pius V Parish in 1994 and was slated to close. ² Rev. Stephen Kato, then marking his fiftieth year as a priest, asked Pittsburgh Bishop Donald Wuerl whether the church might stay open for as long as he was able to say Mass there. Wuerl agreed, and it did.

Kato died in April 2002. ^{2 6} The final Mass was celebrated on July 7 of that year, with Wuerl at the altar.

In 103 years, St. Stephen had only four pastors: ¹

• Rev. Kalman Kovats (August 12, 1899 – May 1927)
• Rev. John Rethy (May 1927 – July 1946)
• Rev. Raymond Novak (December 1946 – June 1962)
• Rev. Stephen Kato (June 1962 – April 2002)

Abandonment

In January 2007, a limited-liability corporation owned by Raffaello Follieri bought the church for $60,000. ^{1 5} Follieri’s ties to the Vatican had allowed him to acquire hundreds of closed churches across the United States, and he intended to convert this one to some new use. No work was ever done. The purchases turned out to be part of a money laundering scheme, and Follieri went to federal prison. The building sat empty and rapidly deteriorated. ⁷

In June 2020, the McKeesport City Council approved a $77,900 demolition contract with Lutterman Excavating, paid for out of the Allegheny County Community Infrastructure and Tourism Fund. ⁷ The former parish school next door is still in use by Pro Wrestling Express for matches, with the parking lot used for parking, with some spaces leased to employees of nearby UPMC McKeesport Hospital.