Catherina on high

Catherina weighs 3,000 pounds, glows with a silvery-bronze luster and sings with a loud, booming voice that after nearly two years is once again ringing over Spokane’s rooftops.

She is the bell in the east tower of St. Aloysius Roman Catholic Church, 330 E. Boone Ave.

Named after donor Henry Ferdinand Brockman’s wife, Catherina is polished up and hanging again atop a narrow, winding staircase in an area church maintenance worker Mike Walters affectionately calls “Quasimodo-land.”

But there’s no Quasimodo pulling ropes to ring the bell here. The bronze beauty, complete with new clapper, is operated by a state-of-the-art controller donated by a parishioner, part of the tower renovation and upgrade. The bell had been hanging in the tower since Brockman, a retired lumberman, donated it to the church for Christmas of 1913. It sat on railroad ties that were not nailed to a wooden floor that was covered with tin. Parishioners were called to Mass when the bell was rung using ropes.

Problems started when the bell was refitted for electricity in 1947, Walters said. Holes drilled through the floor to accommodate the wires also let in rain and snow that began to rot the floor even though the tin was covered with a rubber surface. Walters heard stories of what happens when a bell that weighs a ton and a half crashes through the floor of its tower. He said that once a bell starts to fall, it doesn’t stop until it hits the dirt.

“We thought that was very impractical,” he joked.

The bell was turned off in Jan. 2005. Last October, a crane plucked it from the tower to be stored in a parishioner’s heated garage while the tower was fixed.

The project was paid for by donations from L & M Truck Sales, which donated the 35-ton crane and made some replacement parts. Tim Welsh, longtime church member and president of Garco Construction, donated the use of an ironworker and materials.

Garco’s Doug Wise estimated that he and his crew of three worked about 40 hours on the project to install new steel beams, pour concrete and remove and replace the bell.

Concrete was pumped through a hose directly into the tower by Champion Concrete Pumping. Money that was left over from donations for a new meeting room in the parish center was used for the tower project with the knowledge of the parishioners, Walters said.

The reinstalled bell had its official debut on Christmas Day and is rung 15 minutes before Mass, with the exception of early morning services. It’s also rung for weddings and before Angelus prayers at noon and 6 p.m.

The new controls make it possible to ring the bell on the hour of every day, but out of respect for the neighbors, the church has decided not to.

The tradition of the church bells harkens to a time when most people didn’t own clocks or watches.

Walters interprets the chiming of the bells with a little more awe than that.

“The church bell is a call to prayer, for people to step into a deeper mystery,” Walters said.