Tom Klopp (left), Matt Klopp of G.A. Fuchs Church Supply and Caroline Dunleavy, president of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul’s St. Thomas Moore Conference stand amid the store’s new Catholic Art Gallery. (Tim Keenan, Special to The Michigan Catholic)When the dust settled after a busy day at the store, the more than 100-year-old church supply company presented approximately $1,000 to the society.
“We’ll put that money to use helping needy people in Oakland County but mostly in Pontiac,” said Caroline Dunleavy, president of St. Thomas More’s St. Vincent de Paul organization. “In 1991, we chose to help families, mostly women and children, in Pontiac because there aren’t enough churches in Pontiac to help all the needs that exist there.”
According to Dunleavy, her conference helps people going through evictions, and those who have past-due rent and past-due utilities such as water bills. It also helps with bus tickets and other means of transportation. The group recently conducted a bike drive for the homeless and collected about 90 bikes. A couple of parishioners volunteered to fix the bikes that need repairs.
While the art sale benefitting St. Vincent de Paul was a one-weekend event, Fuchs’ Catholic Art Gallery is a permanent fixture at the store, for which management has high expectations.
“I’m hoping that we bring awareness to Catholic art,” said Fuchs’ manager, Matt Klopp. “There really is no other religious art gallery anywhere in the area, so there is a need for people who want this type of art for their homes and churches.”
Tom Klopp, owner of both G.A. Fuchs Church Supply and A. Mateja Church Supply in Garden City, has loftier goals for the art gallery. “We want to interest younger people in putting religious art into their homes so they can enhance their family life with it,” he said.
“Before, we had a lot of the popular saints like St. Joseph, St. Francis and St. Anthony,” the elder Klopp said, referring to the art on sale at the store before the art gallery was created. “Now we have more of the saints you don’t normally see, like St. Jerome and St. Gregory the Great, St. Catherine of Sienna and the other Doctors of the Church.”
In addition to images of saints, the gallery features close to 150 framed images and about 30 sculptures of popes and biblical scenes from both the Old and New Testaments. Pieces include Russian Orthodox iconography and hand-painted Italian porcelain.
Prices at Fuchs’ new Catholic Art Gallery, which takes up nearly one whole side of the large retail operation, range from $62.95 for a small lithograph to $4,995 for an original oil-on-canvas painting of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.
“As we started bringing the art in, we thought, 'Hey, there are a lot of treasures here and people aren’t seeing it,'” Tom Klopp said. “I hadn’t seen half of these pieces of art myself.”
Fuchs plans another, pre-Christmas, art sale benefitting St. Vincent de Paul on Dec. 6.
Tim Keenan is a freelance writer based in Farmington Hills.
