Building Inspector Details Condemnation of St. Thomas Church Sanctuary

One of the oldest churches in downtown Zanesville has been condemned until repairs can be made.

The sanctuary at St. Thomas Aquinas on Fifth St. was shut down prior to Ash Wednesday services. The Chief Building Official at the Mid-East Ohio Building Dept. says the public was in imminent danger due to the conditions overhead inside the church.

“Yes. Absolutely, or I wouldn’t have taken the steps I did, especially based on the timing of it. So, I got the email, looked at the pictures, decided what the course of action would be and I wanted to talk to the church face to face. So, I actually walked down to have a discussion with them and it was a long walk. It’s not an easy thing to say ‘I don’t think your church is safe and you have to empty it’,” says Jason Baughman, P.E.

We visited St. Thomas Aquinas, but local church leaders declined to comment on this today.

“They were disappointed. I went down there before I had the opportunity to write orders; it takes a little while to go through the process of writing orders. So, I went down there, explained my concern, told them why I felt the way I did. I said ‘I’m going to write orders but I don’t have them in front of you now’. They were going to have a mass before I was going to be able to get orders to them. They made the decision to not invite people into the church, so they handled it, again, the way you’d hope that someone would,” Baughman adds.

In a statement from the Director of Communications at the Catholic Diocese of Columbus, they say “[I]n the interim, Masses and other Church activities will be relocated to the adjacent St. Thomas Activity Center; weekday Masses will be held in the Chapel.”