St. Peter’s relationship with Notre Dame d’Altagrace, our twin parish in Haiti, began with a plea from a desperate priest.

On a visit to Haiti in 2007, Peter Sloan, a St. Peter’s parishioner, met Fr. Anton Marie Claret, then pastor of Notre Dame, who extracted from him a promise to ask St. Peter’s for help. On its own, Fr. Claret said, Notre Dame is “too poor to even attract a twin parish in the U.S.” Peter took the request to Fr. Bill Byrne, at the time our brand-new pastor. It took some soul-searching, but by 2009 St. Peter’s and Notre Dame were officially twin parishes – a relationship that has become, says Fr. Gary Studniewski, our current pastor, “one of the jewels of our social-justice ministry.”

Notre Dame d’Altagrace was founded in 2003 in a desperately poor slum called Fort St. Michel, just outside Cap Haitien on the north coast of Haiti. It is situated on low-lying terrain, where flooding is a persistent problem. The church is a large yellow building – literally and figuratively the bright spot in the neighborhood – that regularly fills its 600 seats at Sunday Mass. The parish operates a school, Foyer Notre Dame, adjacent to the church.

St. Peter’s has supported its twin parish faithfully over the years – first and foremost, in prayer. But parishioners and school parents have been generous in other ways as well. Fr. Gary reports that in the last few years, St. Peter’s has contributed $35,000 -$40,000 a year to Notre Dame. The lion’s share of that has come from the annual St. Peter School auction, which always includes an appeal for tuition assistance and school operations for Notre Dame. In addition, through special collections and the annual St. Nicholas Club at Christmas, parishioners have supported special projects such as a vehicle for the parish, solar panels to bring electricity to the church and school, and a converted shipping container (known as “Docs in a Box”) that provides space for a medical clinic.

Another part of St. Peter’s Haiti ministry since 2011 has been the monthly fair-trade coffee sales, offering among other things coffee grown in Haiti -- “a great way to connect our coffee sales to the broader needs of the Haitian people,” says Beth Martin, who organizes the sales. Before the pandemic forced the operation online (via the parish website), the sales raised roughly $2,000 a year for Notre Dame.

Finally, and perhaps most dramatically, each year St. Peter’s helps support a mission to Notre Dame, ferrying medical and other crucial supplies, bringing volunteers to help in the clinic, and generally fostering the friendship between our two parishes. Archangel Airborne, a nonprofit that carries out humanitarian missions in various parts of the world, is our invaluable partner in those trips. Peter Sloan, the parishioner who instigated our twinning relationship with Notre Dame, is president of Archangel Airborne and pilots one of the planes that make the trip. Over the years other parishioners have gone to Haiti with Peter, some more than once: former pastor Msgr. Kevin Hart; Karen Clay, principal of St. Peter School; Sheila Samaddar, a dentist, and Annie Quast, a nurse practitioner, who have seen patients in the clinic; and others.

Fr. Gary, with Peter and Annie, recently returned from the latest trip to Notre Dame. While there, he said, he came to see that their relationship with us is the thing Notre Dame parishioners value most. “They believe they have an extended family in Christ at St. Peter’s.”

Our parish mission is to be a “tangible manifestation of Christ,” Peter observed. “Nowhere is that manifestation more tangible than at Notre Dame d’Altagrace.”

Notre Dame church, a bright spot in the neighborhood. Next door, the school undergoes expansion. Photo from about 2014.

In March, Fr. Gary concelebrated Mass with Notre Dame’s pastor, Fr. Calixte Belnave.